Partnered with Hasbro, longtime console game developer Ubisoft has gone completely over the top with its video game adaptation of the classic board game Monopoly. That’s when I pressed the reset button and went for something I knew would work. We loaded up Worms Battlegrounds to see if it would be any better, but it was full of its own control and story oddities, so fatigue and annoyance quickly set in for both of us. There was no way we’d actually play the game together. The story was a bit off, the interface clunky, and there wasn’t much room for two players to cooperate or compete.
Even after 20 minutes of tutorial-like walking through the controls, my wife didn’t feel comfortable with them, and basically wanted to hand the controller over to me – assuming we wanted to keep playing at all. How do you play? Well, the developer originally designed it to work with Xbox One’s Kinect for gesture controls, but had to retrofit D4 with an awkward on-screen cursor system when Microsoft de-bundled Kinect from the console. It took less than 30 minutes to see that D4 was a mistake. (Don’t buy them at full price through Microsoft Xbox Live Gold cards are sold at a discount here, with a current eBay deal taking a one-year membership down further.) I signed up for Xbox Live Gold, got Worms Battlegrounds for free at the same time as D4, and loaded them up. D4 normally sells for $15 on its own, so since a three-month Xbox Live Gold membership is only $20, you get three months of free downloadable software by spending five extra dollars. Microsoft published D4, and is literally giving it away as one of several Xbox Live Gold “Games With Gold” titles this month. Released earlier this year for the Xbox One, it’s a murder mystery with fully 3-D graphics and a modern storyline. On the surface, Access Games’ D4 sounded like a “can’t lose” proposition. And in retrospect, just doing that in the first place would have been a lot easier.
We wound up buying a classic board game she liked, instead. I’m sharing the story because it was a valuable learning experience, and how we handled it might help you get out of a similar jam. But for this week’s column, I decided to try something different: picking a niche, relatively unknown game that seemed on the surface to be a really good fit for my murder mystery-loving spouse, but didn’t wind up working out. Our prior Gaming For Couples articles have focused on “slam dunk” titles – games that are highly likely to appeal to both people in a couple for various reasons.
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