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Video Games > ESPN Video Games > Item 45
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ESPN's Two Minute Drill
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  Windows, Macintosh
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ESRB Rating:
Everyone
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Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
If you've not yet experienced the innovative joy that is 2-MINUTE DRILL you're missing the future of television game shows. "Hip" and "literate" aren't usually words that can be written of game shows, but Kenny Mayne makes it happen with an ease that lets the likes of Bob Barker and Regis Philbin know that it might be just as well that they're closer to retirement than not. Too bad the programmers of this game have never seen the show. They'd enjoy it. Of course, they may not want to. Actually viewing the work their television colleagues have done would make them realize just how much work they have to do. So much easier, I guess, to just use code so old, it makes Strom Thurmond look like an 18-year-old snowboarder. One of the key elements of 2-MINUTE DRILL is that's it's not a multiple choice game. On TV, you have to wait for the complete question to be asked and then must give the answer without the benefit of multiple choices. This could be achieved on the computer using increasingly accurate speech recognition engines, but the attitude of the ESPN software department seems to be one of complacent acceptance. It's easy enough to see their rationale: not everyone will have microphones for their computers, and voice recognition is imperfect, anyway. Better to take the path of least resistance and offer up a traditional multiple choice format. It might not be the same experience as the show, they might have reasoned, but at least everyone will be able to play. True enough, but if in so doing you fundamentally change the game, why bother? Likewise, the decision to use typed answers in the final round guts the intent of show. Here the challenge isn't just to be right, but to be able to spell quickly as well. Since the answers usually revolve around people's names, you can be frequently "wrong" for no good reason. Also, one of the beauties of the final round (or "Question of Great Significance" for the picky among us) is that it's usually a tightly-focused field of study. On TV, it's often something as obscure as "the Liverpool FA Cup run of 1998" or "Georgetown postseason basketball in 1982", or even "the 1932 Summer Olympics". Here, not even the slightest gesture has been made towards specificity. Instead, you choose from one of five sports and then questions roll in. If you fail any of the questions, the game immediately ends--without even telling you what the right answer was. If that weren't enough, the game suffers from bad writing. Where Kenny Mayne's dry and often original wit makes the television show something for even non-sports-fans to appreciate, here he's almost a self-parody. What's worse, he's barely present. He might've recorded a total of ten minutes' worth of material--hardly what he does in a single televised outing. Equally disappointing is the failure to do anything imaginative (or expensive) with the panel itself. Where actual sports personalities dominate the panel on TV, here ESPN staffers are substituted. To be sure, ESPN's wallets were kept fuller with this decision, but the game loses a lot in the translation. By far, though, the most annoying thing about this game is that it has no real depth. It suffers from the same lack of questions that plagued the initial version of WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?. Within a matter of an hour, you're likely to start to see questions recur, and within a week of moderate play, you'll find you're getting by less on your knowledge of sports than your memory of the right answer. All in all, then, there's really not a whole lot to root for in this game's stadium. It simply is what it is: an attempt to quickly cash in on televised success. As such, it not only fails to be a good game in its own right, it serves to cheapen the parent product on which it's based.
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ESPN's Two Minute Drill
Available from Amazon
Price: $2.57
Updated on 11-29-2008.
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