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"[Game] Truth Or Lies (Xbox 360,PS3,Wii)"

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This thread has been linked to the game 'Truth or Lies'.
Wed 19/01/11 at 20:08
Regular
"I like turtles"
Posts: 5,368
Truth Or Lies is basically a video game version of Truth Or Dare, where a number of players (minimum of 2 and a maximum of 8) get asked a variety of random questions, they then have to speak the answer into a microphone. The console will then ‘analyze’ the answer and decide if that person is either telling the truth or indeed spinning a big fat lie. I was extremely dubious as to how this was going to work in practice but for a very small amount of money decided to give it a go.

Before you begin you will need to calibrate the games ‘analyzer’, this is done by answering a series of questions. When prompted you need to first tell the truth and then when requested tell a lie. This needs to be done for every player, I found this sequence to be slightly time consuming but once this has been done you can then save your players so they can skip this feature the next time they play the game. As it’s a party game and many players will be probably only be playing this once, you can delete any of these saved players if they are unlikely to be required in the future.

The first thing to strike me when the game loaded up were the graphics, they are extremely bland. The players avatars lack any real kind of definition and the vibrant colours that you would expect to find on a fun party game of this kind seem strangely absent here. This really looks like a game that you would have expected to have been playing about 10 years ago. The commentator’s voice is annoying and cheesey but for a game of this kind I can forgive that. From a technical viewpoint I have to say that the game is a pretty lacklustre affair.

The game apparently has around 3000 questions and these are divided into 5 different categories (Kids, Teens, Adults, Couples and Families) .Points are awarded for truthful answers, whoever answers the most questions truthfully wins the game. Sounds easy enough doesn’t it? , well it would be if the damn thing had any idea whatsoever whether you were lying or not! Seriously, the games ‘analyzer’ is completely useless, I have tried talking, singing, screaming, shouting and even rapping the answers and the end result seems to be the same? It likes to create the illusion that it knows what it’s doing but this is really just a cheap gimmick. As you speak into the microphone a bar fills up, when this is full the game pauses while it ‘analyzes’ your answer, the commentator then announces the result in the style of a game show host. As technical fails go this is a pretty serious flaw as it means that there is no skill required whatsoever to play this game. Is it not the whole idea of the game to tell the truth or at least to try and trick the game into thinking that you are telling the truth? If that is the case then the fact it really has no idea means the game is fundamentally broken in my opinion. But this major flaw does lead to some moments in party gaming that could only be described as comedy gold. One question I received was ‘’Have you ever been fooled by a transsexual?’’, I answered the question truthfully ‘’No I have not’’. The game paused for a second before the cheesey host shouted out ‘’That was a lie’’. The people I was playing with were still laughing 10 minutes later and I’m still getting comments like ‘’You kept that one quiet!’’. The game also has a feature called ‘hot seat’, this works exactly the same as the main game only in this mode the players get to set the questions themselves. You can ask anything you like, which can lead to some very awkward moments indeed, but again this can also be quite amusing. There is always the function to skip a question if you get asked something you really would rather not have to answer, there are 3 skips allowed per player during any single game. But for all of its technical flaws I can pretty much guarantee when you get to play Truth Or Lies with a group of friends you will have a lot of fun on it. It’s just not exactly the type of fun that I would imagine its developer had really intended.

The game is designed to be played using any USB microphone (on all formats). I played the game on the Xbox 360 and was very surprised to find out that the official Microsoft wireless microphones (from the karaoke game Lips) did not appear to be supported, neither was the microphone from the official Xbox Live headset. I managed to play the game using the microphone supplied with the game Rock Band and this worked fine. My point is that unless you own a game from that series or a USB microphone from a PC then it is quite possible that you will not be able to play this game as it does not come with any supplied hardware. I would have expected it work with any microphone and found its lack of support for other types of official microphone surprising to be honest.

I previously mentioned that Truth Or Lies required no skill whatsoever and sadly that goes for the games achievements as well. Entering your name gets you some gamerpoints, answering a question truthfully gets you some more as does telling a lie. Within 15 minutes of playing this game I had amassed around half of the games achievements and honestly have no idea how I got them. While this may be of interest to ‘achievement hunters’ after playing this game you really do not feel like you have actually achieved a damn thing.

Overall Truth Or Lies may well be a bit of harmless and cheesey fun and as mentioned it is pretty much guaranteed to liven up even the dullest party. I paid Ł3 for it brand new and can honestly say that I have easily had my moneys worth of fun on it. However, at the Ł30 - Ł40 price tag (which the game actually cost when it was originally released a few months back) it would have been perhaps the worst value for money game ever. It gets very tiresome and repetitive very quickly and once you work out that the game cannot (even remotely) differentiate between the truth and a lie then there really is nothing whatsoever to make you want to keep playing it. I think the game must use some kind of random hit and miss technique to be honest. I even deleted my profile and carried out the calibration test again but it did not seem to make even the slightest bit of difference. At one point we got players mixed up and a female player answered a male players question, but it was fine as the games voice analyzer did not seem to notice! I would normally comment that a game like this would have been more suited to being an Xbox Live Arcade title but it is actually available now for less than the cost of one of those! If you see this game for sale cheap and have some friends coming over then you may want to give it a try. But as an actual gaming experience goes I have to say that Truth Or Lies is pretty dire indeed.


This is perhaps the hardest game that I have ever had to score so I have decided to break it down as follows:

Graphics 2/10
Sound 2/10
Gameplay 1/10
Novelty/Comedy Value 9/10
Value For Money (at its current going rate of Ł3) 9/10

Overall Score (based on an average of the above) 4.6/10
There have been no replies to this thread yet.
Wed 19/01/11 at 20:08
Regular
"I like turtles"
Posts: 5,368
Truth Or Lies is basically a video game version of Truth Or Dare, where a number of players (minimum of 2 and a maximum of 8) get asked a variety of random questions, they then have to speak the answer into a microphone. The console will then ‘analyze’ the answer and decide if that person is either telling the truth or indeed spinning a big fat lie. I was extremely dubious as to how this was going to work in practice but for a very small amount of money decided to give it a go.

Before you begin you will need to calibrate the games ‘analyzer’, this is done by answering a series of questions. When prompted you need to first tell the truth and then when requested tell a lie. This needs to be done for every player, I found this sequence to be slightly time consuming but once this has been done you can then save your players so they can skip this feature the next time they play the game. As it’s a party game and many players will be probably only be playing this once, you can delete any of these saved players if they are unlikely to be required in the future.

The first thing to strike me when the game loaded up were the graphics, they are extremely bland. The players avatars lack any real kind of definition and the vibrant colours that you would expect to find on a fun party game of this kind seem strangely absent here. This really looks like a game that you would have expected to have been playing about 10 years ago. The commentator’s voice is annoying and cheesey but for a game of this kind I can forgive that. From a technical viewpoint I have to say that the game is a pretty lacklustre affair.

The game apparently has around 3000 questions and these are divided into 5 different categories (Kids, Teens, Adults, Couples and Families) .Points are awarded for truthful answers, whoever answers the most questions truthfully wins the game. Sounds easy enough doesn’t it? , well it would be if the damn thing had any idea whatsoever whether you were lying or not! Seriously, the games ‘analyzer’ is completely useless, I have tried talking, singing, screaming, shouting and even rapping the answers and the end result seems to be the same? It likes to create the illusion that it knows what it’s doing but this is really just a cheap gimmick. As you speak into the microphone a bar fills up, when this is full the game pauses while it ‘analyzes’ your answer, the commentator then announces the result in the style of a game show host. As technical fails go this is a pretty serious flaw as it means that there is no skill required whatsoever to play this game. Is it not the whole idea of the game to tell the truth or at least to try and trick the game into thinking that you are telling the truth? If that is the case then the fact it really has no idea means the game is fundamentally broken in my opinion. But this major flaw does lead to some moments in party gaming that could only be described as comedy gold. One question I received was ‘’Have you ever been fooled by a transsexual?’’, I answered the question truthfully ‘’No I have not’’. The game paused for a second before the cheesey host shouted out ‘’That was a lie’’. The people I was playing with were still laughing 10 minutes later and I’m still getting comments like ‘’You kept that one quiet!’’. The game also has a feature called ‘hot seat’, this works exactly the same as the main game only in this mode the players get to set the questions themselves. You can ask anything you like, which can lead to some very awkward moments indeed, but again this can also be quite amusing. There is always the function to skip a question if you get asked something you really would rather not have to answer, there are 3 skips allowed per player during any single game. But for all of its technical flaws I can pretty much guarantee when you get to play Truth Or Lies with a group of friends you will have a lot of fun on it. It’s just not exactly the type of fun that I would imagine its developer had really intended.

The game is designed to be played using any USB microphone (on all formats). I played the game on the Xbox 360 and was very surprised to find out that the official Microsoft wireless microphones (from the karaoke game Lips) did not appear to be supported, neither was the microphone from the official Xbox Live headset. I managed to play the game using the microphone supplied with the game Rock Band and this worked fine. My point is that unless you own a game from that series or a USB microphone from a PC then it is quite possible that you will not be able to play this game as it does not come with any supplied hardware. I would have expected it work with any microphone and found its lack of support for other types of official microphone surprising to be honest.

I previously mentioned that Truth Or Lies required no skill whatsoever and sadly that goes for the games achievements as well. Entering your name gets you some gamerpoints, answering a question truthfully gets you some more as does telling a lie. Within 15 minutes of playing this game I had amassed around half of the games achievements and honestly have no idea how I got them. While this may be of interest to ‘achievement hunters’ after playing this game you really do not feel like you have actually achieved a damn thing.

Overall Truth Or Lies may well be a bit of harmless and cheesey fun and as mentioned it is pretty much guaranteed to liven up even the dullest party. I paid Ł3 for it brand new and can honestly say that I have easily had my moneys worth of fun on it. However, at the Ł30 - Ł40 price tag (which the game actually cost when it was originally released a few months back) it would have been perhaps the worst value for money game ever. It gets very tiresome and repetitive very quickly and once you work out that the game cannot (even remotely) differentiate between the truth and a lie then there really is nothing whatsoever to make you want to keep playing it. I think the game must use some kind of random hit and miss technique to be honest. I even deleted my profile and carried out the calibration test again but it did not seem to make even the slightest bit of difference. At one point we got players mixed up and a female player answered a male players question, but it was fine as the games voice analyzer did not seem to notice! I would normally comment that a game like this would have been more suited to being an Xbox Live Arcade title but it is actually available now for less than the cost of one of those! If you see this game for sale cheap and have some friends coming over then you may want to give it a try. But as an actual gaming experience goes I have to say that Truth Or Lies is pretty dire indeed.


This is perhaps the hardest game that I have ever had to score so I have decided to break it down as follows:

Graphics 2/10
Sound 2/10
Gameplay 1/10
Novelty/Comedy Value 9/10
Value For Money (at its current going rate of Ł3) 9/10

Overall Score (based on an average of the above) 4.6/10

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