Look, don’t ask me why there are four Monopoly games on Xbox 360. I don’t know. Nor do I understand why Monopoly (2008, EA) was a full retail release— on a disc, with 1000 Gamerscore —in an era where most board game adaptations were migrating to the much more logical downloadable format.
EA Monopoly is one of those games where you have to wonder if the people who made it ever played it themselves— surely not, right?
Because if they had, they’d have realized that the music is really grating, and given you an option to turn it off (you can’t.)
They’d have realized that making you watch a slow animation of Mr. Moneybags playing with his scepter and saying one of five or six lines of canned dialogue every time you go to do a trade was annoying, and given you some way to mitigate it (they didn’t.)
Maybe they’d have even realized that a game like this really needs a game speed option, so that people who play it more than once or twice can skip through the agonizingly long animations (no such option exists.)
This is the type of game that sells a ton of copies but that nobody really has fond memories of playing. Moms saw it in the bargain bin at K-Mart and figured it would be a good birthday gift. Maybe kid you even saw a used copy in GameStop and figured it would be fun to play Monopoly by yourself.
But much like physical games of Monopoly, you realize 2/3 through that your eyes were bigger than your stomach and this game kinda sucks and you wish you’d played Scrabble (or Halo Wars) instead.
I don’t see many used copies of this floating around, and if you want my hypothesis, they were all traded into GameStop at one point or another and either shipped to a warehouse, where they still sit, or destroyed in one of the company’s many used game dumpster exoduses. Because who would buy this pile of shit?
Haha. Hi.
I have the 360 autism. I like achievements, I like 360 boxes, I like playing my 360 even when what I’m playing isn’t very good. And the other night after a cluster headache made me shut off the Black Ops 6 beta a little early, I found myself sitting here not really knowing what I wanted to do, but knowing it needed to be low stakes.
So I turned to my stack of recently acquired 360 games, and Monopoly just called to me. An hour later, after a game against the AI, I ended up playing multiplayer with @hootOS and our friend Raz, along with a single AI controlled player.
That’s a fun thing about this one— because it allows for pass-and-play with a single controller, it’s rather trivial to play over the internet! As long as one person has an Xbox and a capture card, they can control everyone’s moves, so all the other players have to do is watch the Discord stream and tell the host what they want to do on their turn.
I like this because it continually facilitates discussion of the game— where a traditional online multiplayer version might not show everyone what each player is doing during their turn. Barring any misclicks on other players’ turns (sorry Raz!) it’s not any more stress on the host, either— I actually prefer this as it means I’m not sitting there doing nothing for 75% of the game.
And despite the many QoL issues, this is a decent enough way to play Monopoly. We had a tightly competitive game that ended in a fierce tug of war between Raz and me, ultimately decided by a roll that cost me all of my money at just the wrong moment.
Monopoly is the sort of game that I like better digitally just because it does all the banking and math and rules lawyering for you. We had a good time, and while Monopoly is always long, it didn’t take as long as it would have IRL or in Tabletop Sim— even with the long animations and bad UI.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wanna play more of it. If only it had Here & Now as a downloadable board…
