Anticipation Review

Here’s a great party game for the NES. Anticipation takes ideas from popular shows and board games and fuses them into what ends up a very enjoyable title for almost any age. It was popular back in the day for a reason, which you’ll read all about here, but it does have one annoying issue that should be noted.

Graphically, everything they needed to do with Anticipation has been done. The ‘drawings’ during gameplay are pretty impressive for what they are because they were able to suggest depth and detail with only simple lines. The icons look cool, the board looks three-dimensional, and the colors are varied. All-around good job in this category.

The sound in Anticipation is also well implemented. Of course, it has that famous ‘Rare Ltd’ sound to it, so don’t expect anything less than good. You have perfect themes for different categories and some great sound effects. This is typical for Rare, and no exception here.

Anticipation is an interesting title and perfect example of the video board game. Basically, combine Win Lose or Draw, Pictionary, and Trivial Pursuit and this is what you get. You can have up to four players (with as many computer players as you want out of the four) and different difficulty settings. After set up, you start. The die rolls automatically and your piece then moves around the board. When it stops on a color, the game goes to a screen with a specific category to match the color. It then starts to draw a picture, and if you know what it is before anyone else, you press anything on your controller to buzz in and get two tries to guess it. After you get each of the four colors, your piece moves to the next board and whoever gets to the end and collects all the cards wins the game. Check some of it out here:

Anticipation is pretty flawless overall, it only has one problem I’m going to get to in a second. The play is fun, fluid, and pretty tense when you get to the more advanced screens. With four players it’s an absolute blast. The game progresses, first showing you dots that are drawn over, a clue, and a certain number of blanks you need to fill in to eventually no blanks and not even a clue as to what category you’re playing. This aspect makes it so the winning player has a tougher time as they go up, but the one problem here is that they can still play and win if other players are still selecting lower level cards. Thus, if you’re on the very top and someone on the bottom picks a blue one, you get it regardless of your level. Might have been better to make it so that you have to only get cards where you are, but it’s not that big of a deal.

The major problem, however, is the difficulty. Anticipation is really only playable up to the medium setting. Any more and you’re going to want to kill it. If you’re with friends, no problem, but when the computer is involved it basically guesses in two seconds on the harder settings, even when there is a single frikken line on the screen. Really, really cheap programming right there. So, if you don’t have everything memorized, which I don’t think is possible anyway, there’s no way you can win against the AI on a higher setting. However, it doesn’t really take away from the family fun element of Anticipation. Just don’t expect to master it on the higest setting, not going to happen without total memorization.

Anticipation takes ideas from other games and such, but I still think it’s an original concept and a good example of when the four-player idea worked. It’s a lot of fun in a group and is very easy to play. No complex questions as in Trivial Pursuit or the need to draw as part of the game, everything is right here for you.

Though Anticipation is not really something you may be playing alone more than once, it’s definitely one that’s fun even today with a group of people. So, I have to give it a little lower score here because it has almost no replay value for a single player. If you have a regular Anticipation party or something, then yeah, lots of replay value here, but I doubt that will happen very often. Good length, though. Each game runs roughly thirty minutes depending on how many players are involved and how good they are.

Anticipation is one of the best party games for the NES. It’s easy to get into, looks good, sounds good, and has several gameplay features that make it challenging. The only real problem is the single-player or multi-player with computer option on higher difficulty settings. It’s not worth it to play it that high, so if you have any less than four people to play don’t bother, the computer will win in about five minutes, never making a single mistake and guessing before you even blink. Really annoying, but in general it’s a great game with friends. Not something you’re going to look forward to playing alone, however.