One of the issues I had with Carnival Games: Monkey See, Monkey Do was the performance of the Kinect sensor in that game. It resulted in solid potential being a bit squandered. Still, it was only a matter of time before the overall success of the Carnival Games series would attract other entrants, and just such a thing is happening with Carnival Island, which was on display in Sony’s booth at E3 and utilizes Move controls. My question, though, after getting hands on with the game, is whether the folks at 2K and Cat Daddy Games will be more upset over the fact that this is essentially taking their idea and running with it, or that they appear to be doing it much better.
The name isn’t the only thing similar. You collect tickets. There are a lot of similar minigames, and that was just in the demo build we looked at (basketball shooting, a Skee-ball game, and ring toss). What is different is the control mechanism, which uses Move vs. Kinect. What this should do is provide a higher level of precision, and that bears out here. To make the comparison, I tried the three similar minigames above. In all three cases, the results of actions were much more consistent with the actions performed using the Move control, particularly with the Skee-ball type game and the ring toss. Basketball shoot was still a bit off for whatever reason, but the actions were at least consistent, and the second time around I did significantly better with some practice, something I can’t say for the Carnival Games versions unfortunately.
Carnival Island in action.
Another major difference is that there will be a metagame with Carnival Island. Carnival Island itself is a barren, greyscale place that lost its colour. As you play games and accumulate tickets, you will be able to buy items which bring colour back to the park. This story mode should add some deployability to the game as a whole. Of course, only being able to use the Move controller will limit the kinds of minigames that will be offered, and we saw nowhere close to a complete list, so it’ll be interesting to see if they can keep the experience fresh and avoid repetition with the limited options. We were told that all minigames will have multiplayer options, and there will also be variants of each.
Overall, the Move control worked pretty well in all the games we tried. There were some glitches here and there, but overall we came away impressed with what we saw initially out of Carnival Island and are intrigued to see what the finished product looks like and if it can overtake the incumbent in the carnival space.
