A few weeks ago, 1 vs 100 was released onto Xbox Live Primetime in the UK, only 8 months after it was supposed to be released as part of the New Xbox Experience. Yes, I realise that it’s been out in America and Canada for ages now, but it’s recent here and I feel I have the right to whine about it. See, I was really looking forward to it and was rather disappointed when I found out that once you scrape away all the hype and shiny effects you’re left with a great big ball of mediocrity.

For those of you who have never seen the show, the basic concept of 1 vs 100 is as follows. The One must answer questions correctly until all one hundred members of The Mob have got a question wrong, at which point The One wins. Alternatively, if the One gets a question wrong, everyone in The Mob who hasn’t got a question wrong yet wins. Simple, right?

The One wins a round. Not pictured: You, ever.

It is this game which forms the 1 vs 100 Live shows, which air on Friday and Saturday nights. Microsoft boasts that they can accommodate up to two hundred thousand players in a game. Wait? Two hundred thousand players? In a game that only uses one hundred and one? That’s bound to leave an awful lot of people sitting around doing nothing, right? Wrong. Anyone who isn’t The One or part of The Mob joins The Crowd, a group who can best be described as “about as important as whether or not you leave the oven on when the Rapture occurs”. Apparently, if you play and do well in the Extended Play sessions which run throughout the week, you’re more likely to be chosen to be one of the one hundred and one people that matter during a Live show, but it’s still ludicrously unlikely. I’d go into a detail about Extended Play, but really, it’s just answering questions. Thirty seven questions, to be precise, which is a very stupid number of questions, simply because prime numbers are stupid numbers for anything.

Once the game starts proper, everyone is given the same question, and six seconds to answer it. The Crowd are trying to answer correctly as quickly as possible, so that they get more points. The reason they’re doing this is that the top three scoring players of a round win an Xbox Live Arcade game of Microsoft’s choosing. The first show I was in, it was Worms. The next week it was Braid. These do not have an equivalent value. Oh sure, they might be worth about the same in real money, but if you try to tell me that Worms is on the same level as Braid, you deserve to be kicked in the face with a huge boot with “my opinion is more valid than yours” written on it. That’s like giving away a holiday voucher one week and a car the next, or thousand dollars cash one week, and a thousand dollars of copper wire the next.

There is an inherent problem with this system. The high scores for each game are pretty much the highest scores it’s possible to get, and in order to get scores that high, you have to answer the questions faster than it’s physically possible to read them. Therefore, the best strategy is to just pick an answer at random and start mashing the button as soon as the question comes up on the screen. This annoys me, and here’s why. If I wanted to win a prize simply for being lucky, I’d play the god damn lottery. Sure, it’s a little more expensive, but at least I don’t have to give myself wanker’s cramp from jabbing at the fucking ticket when they pick a number.

Another flaw in the system is caused by a combination of four separate factors. Now stay with me on this because it’s going to take a minute for me to explain them all. The first factor is that the game attempts to place all the players into groups of four for the purposes of “socialising”. You can talk to the people in the same group as you, but why you would ever want to is something I’ll never be able to understand. You can also press Y repeatedly to make your avatar do something utterly ridiculous that only these four people can see. This is called “amping”, and I’m fairly certain that, outside of this game, the word has no meaning whatsoever. The various “amps” include jumping a very small height, dancing, pointing at things and bitchslapping. That’s right. Your avatar can convey all the emotions that it’s possible for for a gangster rapper to feel, so hooray for that.

The second factor (yes that was just one) is that the possible answers for a question are revealed one by one, presumably for the benefit of the people who have panic attacks when presented with more than three words at the one time (i.e. most of Xbox Live). The third is that you are encouraged to answer questions as quickly as possible (by that whole points system I talked about), and the fourth is that you can see exactly when a player in your room answers a question. The problem with this is, if the first answer is revealed, and someone you’re playing with goes for it immediately, it’s sort of obvious what the correct answer is. At this point, it stops being a quiz and starts being a simple game of Follow the Leader, which is a very easy and horrifyingly boring game.

Of course, this Crowd stuff is just a minor distraction from the big proper game. The One’s answering questions and knocking out members of the The Mob and, at seemingly random times, is offered the opportunity to leave the game with whatever prize he’s managed to earn at this point (which could be anywhere between 160 and 6000 Microsoft points), or to continue playing to attempt to increase the prize. He’s asked “The Money or the Mob?” which is a bit confusing really considering that there’s no money involved whatsoever. If The One keeps playing and messes up, the remaining Mob members win an XBLA game, and possibly some Microsoft points depending on how many of them there are left.

In order to make life just a bit easier for The One, he has three Helps. Trust the Crowd, Trust the Mob and Trust the Brain. The first two lock him into the most popular answer of The Mob or The Crowd, which is reasonable enough. Trust the Brain, however, locks The One into the answer chosen by the player, Mob or Crowd, who is performing the best that round. Sounds good in theory, but then you remember that the best player of the round is the guy who’s jabbing at random buttons and realise that the only way trusting this guy is better than just jabbing a random button yourself is that if that guy manages to screw it all up for you, you at least have some nameless faceless jerk you can blame and bitch about to all your friends while they laugh at you because you didn’t know what colour the sky was.

Still, if, and it’s a very big if, The One manages to knock out all the Mob members, they win 10,000 Microsoft points. But that’s not all, oh no! They also win whatever the week’s big prize is. In the penultimate week, it’s a holiday voucher. The week after that, it’s a car. Presumably, this is to raise the stakes for the explosive season finale, but you can only be the One once per season, and it seems rather completely unfair for the unlucky folks that get picked to be The One now.

So, as a game then, it’s not great, but the purpose of Xbox Live Primetime is to fuse gaming and television together. On the next page, we’ll see how good it is at emulating a TV experience.

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