Tag: Hasbro Family Game Night: Connect Four
Connect Four Review
by admin on Feb.02, 2010, under Review
March 17, 2009 –
Electronic Arts has teamed up with toy and game maker Hasbro to bring some of your favorite childhood board games to the Xbox Live Arcade. Dubbed Family Game Night, this collection of kid-friendly classics can be downloaded to your Xbox 360 hard drive and played on your TV screen rather than your nicked-up kitchen table.
To get Family Game Night up and running, just grab the free download (236.6MB) from the Marketplace and then open it up in XBLA. Once it’s installed, you can download the individual games for 800 Microsoft Points (USD $10) each from within the Family Game Night front-end. As with all XBLA games, trial versions are also available for each title.
For our all-encompassing review of the entire interface and its collected games, head over to our overall Family Game Night review. This review focuses solely on one of the classic Hasbro board games available for download: Connect Four.
A gentleman’s game.
Five hundred years in the future, our descendants will be sitting on space stations, sipping on intergalactic juice and playing a holographic version of tic-tac-toe. The concept of trying to be the first to make a line by placing markers on a grid will never die, and some version of it will always be around. Despite its relative age, Connect Four is the most recent innovation in this field, and now it’s available on XBLA as part of Family Game Night. And guess what? It’s fun.
Unlike some of the other games in this collection that hurt the original concept by unavoidably stuffing all of the local gameplay onto one screen (Battleship, Scrabble), Connect Four doesn’t suffer at all in the digital transition. The only thing missing is the tactile satisfaction of actually sliding colored chips into a vertical grid. But EA made sure the sound effects and chip physics make it seem like the real thing.
The biggest drawback here is the price. Give me $5 and a bike and I’ll find you a copy of Connect Four at a garage sale and bring back change. But can you really put a price on something that will keep kids occupied?
Connect Four isn’t complicated, but it’s good clean fun. There’s also a timed mode and a Power Chips mode that turns some of your chips into special power-ups.
Closing Comments
Connect Four works on a very basic level, making it great for kids and people who are extremely bored. There