The popular television game show Family Feud has made the leap to the computer screen with live-action sequences of host Louie Anderson incorporated into the game and 1500+ "surveys" to play. This is one television game show that has a hard time transferring to the computer screen in many ways, yet is really quite entertaining nonetheless.
The basic idea of the game is as follows: Two "families" play against each other, starting with one member from each family facing off at the buzzers. Each round starts with a statement like "We’ve surveyed 100 people. The top 5 answers are on the board. Name something that…". Questions can be silly, but part of the fun is that you must try to come up with answers that you’d expect 100 Americans would answer.
Designing your custom family is a truly hilarious, if short-lived, pastime. Families will have a blast attempting to generate computer-animated characters that best resemble their human counterparts. Players select from a large selection of hairstyles and colors, eyebrows, eyes, noses, faces, body types, and clothing to create their character. The program offers an "import a face" option that is really quite tricky to use, though of no fault of the program itself. The digital photo you use should be as head-on and clear as possible, but even then the results are, at best, strange looking. Still, the whole process managed to generate lots of laughs.
Creating characters is a time-consuming process, as each new character’s animations must be generated. However, it is fun to do, and there are loads of pre-generated characters available to choose from once the novelty of creating your own wears thin. Admittedly, testers were tickled using the random generator that resulted in some crazy combinations, often with gender mixes.
A hampering problem of this game show-to-CD-ROM rendition is due to the nature of the game itself. While I was initially impressed with the program’s ability to overcome some of the nuances of the answers when I typed in "dog" and though the official answer was "pets", it accepted my answer anyway, later I was disappointed when I answered "employer" and I got a strike, and then discovered that one of the answers was, in fact, "boss".
Another factor at issue is the survey results themselves. The "survey says" some mighty odd things at times!
This program is great for a few laughs when a group of non-computer "contestants" play the game. If nobody takes the game too seriously, there shouldn’t be much of a problem. Testers found it funny when they made entirely off-the-wall responses only because they couldn’t think of something clever to say in the given time, and the audience’s standard "Good answer!" sequence ran nonetheless. As well, creating custom "families" was a blast, though time-consuming. Players were even allowed to select two adjectives from a long list to describe their family. So, it was possible, for example, to create a family such as the Smith family from Montreal, Quebec who was officially introduced as "superficial, but most of the time hip".
In short, Hasbro did a good job recreating Family Feud on the computer, but the nature of the game itself creates a flawed experience. If you can easily get past these shortcomings, the truth is, the game is really quite entertaining when a group of people (such as a family) plays the game.
