So last night was the first 1 vs 100 beta for United States residents and I joined in to check it out. As you may or may not know, I had been quite excited for the release of the game and was really hopeful that it would be a lot of fun. I did have a lot of fun last not, but the game itself had little to do with it.

I think I built up the potential of the game in my head a lot more than I should have. When they said there was going to be a live host, I imagined it would literally be a virtual version of the gameshow. I thought it would be an actual person reading questions, giving the answers, asking the mob to lock in their answers, and then interacting with “The One”. This is not the case at all.

The game just shuffles through random questions, gives you about 4 seconds to answer them, and then you find out if the one got it right, and how many mob people got it wrong. This is accompanied by some bot bitch that just says the same 15 lines over and over again. The only time that Chris Cashman comes into play is between rounds when he just reads some random shit off of a piece of paper that has absolutely nothing to do with the game. Half way through last nights game, there were actually periods of long silence as it would seem Chris decided to take a 45 minute break so there was no commentary where he should have been talking.

But, as I mentioned, I did have fun. I hopped in the game with a listener of ChatterBox Video Game Radio and we talked shit the whole time and were constantly “amping” to make our avatars do stupid shit on screen. The session went for a bit less than 2 hours and it went by pretty quickly. I can definitaly see this as a fun game when you get some beers in you and you want to have fun asnwering some basic trivia.

In the end it feels a lot more like a 1-4 player game rather than a 101 player game as the title suggessts because of the lack of audience interaction and lack of a real host. I think once the game comes out a lot of people will be playing in hopes to win some Microsoft Points but it will get old quickly.