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Somehow this blog has become all about Disney products. Oh, right, I have a 7-year-old daughter.
My kid got Disney Infinity for Christmas, a game that is both charming and brilliantly evil in its business model: like Activision's Skylanders, it's a game with huge wads of on-disc unlockable content that you access by buying collectible tchotchkes, that go on a USB platform that is a near-field communication interface.
I have to give it to them, though: you actually get a tremendous amount of play value just from the base starter set, and much of it is as fun for grownups as for kids. Basically you get a set of three full campaigns themed after Pirates of the Caribbean, The Incredibles and Monsters University, plus a monstrously addictive Toy Box mode in which you can build nonsensical worlds out of sweet Disney IP with abandon, unlocking more and more stuff as you play on in the campaigns.
Considered that way, it's not such a bad deal, though it does push the extra content at you a bit hard at times. Probably the game's single most evil touch is that, because of the restrictions on character use in the campaigns, the three starter-set campaigns are single-player only until you buy more characters. But the Toy Box is multi-player from the start, and this is indescribably fun. (This game actually drove me to buy a second XBox controller so I could mess in the Toy Box with my kid.)
The campaigns are actually solid games in themselves, too, though not without some design glitches; they've got the "open-world" design common to most big modern games, in which you can roam more or less freely, but there are missions you gradually unlock that involve both a main story progression and a large number of side quests, loot to collect, achievements and optional hurry-up challenges. My favorite is the Pirates world, mostly because of the customizable pirate ship that is transport between the game areas and vehicle for naval combat. The amount of content in each campaign world isn't as much as in a major standalone game, but for all three put together it's comparable or more.
All this has been covered in many other reviews; I think it's a case where, as with so much that Disney produces, both admiration and resentment are legitimate responses.
What I wanted to emphasize, for people who have been sucked into this maelstrom, are a few play-value-enhancing facts that were not at all obvious to me.
( Read more... )
My kid got Disney Infinity for Christmas, a game that is both charming and brilliantly evil in its business model: like Activision's Skylanders, it's a game with huge wads of on-disc unlockable content that you access by buying collectible tchotchkes, that go on a USB platform that is a near-field communication interface.
I have to give it to them, though: you actually get a tremendous amount of play value just from the base starter set, and much of it is as fun for grownups as for kids. Basically you get a set of three full campaigns themed after Pirates of the Caribbean, The Incredibles and Monsters University, plus a monstrously addictive Toy Box mode in which you can build nonsensical worlds out of sweet Disney IP with abandon, unlocking more and more stuff as you play on in the campaigns.
Considered that way, it's not such a bad deal, though it does push the extra content at you a bit hard at times. Probably the game's single most evil touch is that, because of the restrictions on character use in the campaigns, the three starter-set campaigns are single-player only until you buy more characters. But the Toy Box is multi-player from the start, and this is indescribably fun. (This game actually drove me to buy a second XBox controller so I could mess in the Toy Box with my kid.)
The campaigns are actually solid games in themselves, too, though not without some design glitches; they've got the "open-world" design common to most big modern games, in which you can roam more or less freely, but there are missions you gradually unlock that involve both a main story progression and a large number of side quests, loot to collect, achievements and optional hurry-up challenges. My favorite is the Pirates world, mostly because of the customizable pirate ship that is transport between the game areas and vehicle for naval combat. The amount of content in each campaign world isn't as much as in a major standalone game, but for all three put together it's comparable or more.
All this has been covered in many other reviews; I think it's a case where, as with so much that Disney produces, both admiration and resentment are legitimate responses.
What I wanted to emphasize, for people who have been sucked into this maelstrom, are a few play-value-enhancing facts that were not at all obvious to me.
( Read more... )