Quite often Edwin and I will sit in his apartment and play Xbox 360 game demos for the duration of an evening. Retail release, XBLA, indie games, whatever. One night I noticed that he had Hasbro Family Game Night in his game library, and that it didn’t say “demo” or “trial” anywhere. So I booted it up.
As it turned out, Hasbro Family Game Night is free, but you only get about two and a half minutes to play any given game before you’re prompted to shell out about ten bucks to unlock the game. Buying them all is a terrible idea, since you can get the disc version with all the games for as low as $20 on eBay (Incidentally, that copy is being sold by a user named “pnpgames.” Hmmmm).
Anyway, after screwing around with the trial of Jenga for an entire evening, Edwin finally decided to bite the bullet and unlock the full version of Jenga. You actually get two Jenga games when you make the purchase, but that’s besides the point. We didn’t want to play Jenga. We were out to break Jenga.
Mr. Potato Head stands on the table next to your Jenga tower, oohing and aahing as you play. He’s kind of an ass, so I was very excited when I noticed that knocking the tower over in Potato’s direction would send him flying off the table. Our goal then was to knock him off repeatedly. It was fun, but wore out once we realized that if you jiggle the blocks around just so, you can cause physically impossible things to happen with the Jenga tower. After spending some time creating ca-razy configurations, we decided it was time to move the tower.
The physics in video game Jenga aren’t exactly how they should be, and you can manage to drag the tower along by moving blocks the right way. We set a goal of dragging the tower over to the potato, and then to pull it off the edge of the table. If you’re feeling generous, Edwin managed to accomplish both feats, and I have video evidence; behold the best Xbox Jenga related videos on YouTube! Or, one of them. I can’t figure out how to embed the playlist.
Also the Potato Head glitch was pretty cool. Guess QA didn’t really take much time to screw around with the game. Live and learn, guys.