Today's (other) demos...
Dragon's Lair: This sucks in so many ways. I don't think it's a good Kinect game--the movement cues are very tiring and often times you have cues that don't play well... for example, if the game says "jump left" and then "jump left" again, you basically need to jump left, return to neutral, and jump left again, but often times the timing window between the cues isn't really wide enough to get back to neutral. I also had a fairly tough time getting it to recognize stuff at all. The menu cursor is very good though. You can play the game without Kinect, but that's a little bit of an afterthought. You need to boot the game, use Kinect to go through a menu, select "controller", and then use your controller to start up the gameplay. With a controller, you have only movement and sword cues, not rope cues. The game doesn't tell you what button to press on the sword cue. No problem, you say, you can push start and select "How to Play"--no, you can't, you need to quit out of the game to watch the help video. They could have fixed this by just replacing the sword icon with an A button icon. The timing window is way too tight on a controller. About 2 minutes into the demo you're on an elevator which descends, and it took me 11 tries to hit a single button cue that I knew was coming. The demo version lasts 3 minutes. Also this game makes almost no sense, I forgot how every scene is just piled on one after the other with no pauses, downtime, relaxing scenes, or often transitions. Dirk is just being accosted on all sides, randomly ducking through holes into rooms not apparently connected to the room he was just in. Is this because the demo airs scenes out of order or because that's how the game is? Seems like a bit of both.
Sensible World of Soccer: This is an adorable little animated soccer game. I didn't get much out of it besides that, since it's pretty simple and is more of a reflex-oriented thing... probably more in common with foozball in that it's mostly about sort of twitch sensitivity than really strategic play based on the demo, not sure if there are more formations or lineups you can do stuff with in the full version. I remember playing this at a friend's house and it had a mode where you could make the AI play against itself, which was awesome, but it was like having your own little televised soccer match. I also remember there being a lot of teams and players, but again in the demo that's not really evident.
Trine 2: It's a puzzle platformer based around physics and having three different characters just like the last game. Just like the last game, both the platforming and the combat are a bit clunky and the bloom is a little heavy and the physics elements are a little iffy. I do think they've improved it, though, because all of those elements frustrated me a little less than before. The fairytale presentation is nice. I had sort of written this off because I didn't much like Trine but now I think I'd give it another go for $3.75-5.
Is it decent? Would it be worth it if local multi was an option?
Dollar Dash:
I didn't feel like I was robbed of my time. I played the tutorial and then three online games--two games on the same map and one on a separate map. I left 10 minutes of my 30 minutes unused. The third game I played, I had 2 players and 2 bots at the start (joining players take over for a bot and vice versa) and found that the moderate level bots were trying but not winning. I didn't try local multi.
The game is a little bit manic, but I like that different levels encourage different tactics. For example the road intersection level, you can only bank your cash for around 10 seconds of every minute, so stocking up is no problem, the trick is avoiding having players kick the crap out of you on the way to the drop-off point. But in the bank level, you can bank whenever, but you need to get past security guards to get there. So that's neat.
Many of the weapon spawns appear as random question marks, and I found that played into a fairly big luck factor. The difference between hitting an enemy with a single snowball (peel off $100 worth of cash) versus knocking him the hell out is huge. I find it a little annoying that you have to use all of a current item before getting your next item, so if you have for example the cactus weapon and the superior rocket weapon drops, you'll have to stand on the drop and just wail away your cactus ammo before picking up the rocket.
There seemed to be a ton of unlockables and many of them seemed to materially impact your chance to win. For example, most of the cash drops I made I had pretty near a full sack, and many times I had a full sack. There's an upgrade in the shop to have a larger sack. I don't see any way that couldn't lead to a significant advantage. Everyone I was playing with were low level, so it was hard to say what the impact would have been.
It's got a cute visual presentation and a ton of unlockable visual stuff if you're into character customization.
It's definitely not the best game I've ever played, but if there was a steady online community I think I'd be willing to buy it. I will say one thing--having this as an option has definitely made me less inclined to buy Monaco day one, because I really like the presentation here and while the games don't have a 100% overlap, I think they probably scratch similar itches. Of course, Monaco could easily empty this game out entirely or vice versa, so ultimately I think you'd choose based on which one has active players.