A big thank you to Adrian Simple from The Gaming Observer for lending his voice to our show today! If you want to check his content out (I listen to TGO myself every day!) go check out https://thegamingobserver.com or click this link to go enable Gaming Observer on your Amazon Echo. Here’s the transcript for today’s show.
11/15 – Fuzion Frenzy
How’s it going everybody! My name is Adrian Simple and I will be your host for today’s Video Game of the Day.
You know, back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, party games were hugely popular. The Mario Party franchise was a runaway hit with the first three Mario Party games selling around 2 million copies each and other consoles wanted in on the action too, with Sony pushing out Crash Bash and Sega releasing Sonic Shuffle. With Microsoft jumping into the console scene in 2001, they also wanted a piece of that party game pie and they made sure to have a title ready by launch day. Today’s game is Fuzion Frenzy, developed by Blitz Games and released exclusively on the Xbox in 2001.
Fuzion Frenzy is a party game similar to the aforementioned Mario Party games but with the focus placed entirely on minigames. Instead of playing through a board game with minigames occurring sporadically throughout, Fuzion Frenzy’s primary Tournament Mode has up to four players compete across 2, 4 or 6 zones, depending on how long players want the game to continue. Each of the game’s six zones has its own unique set of minigames that are randomly chosen for players to compete in. As well, each minigame gives players the chance to win orbs based on how they placed with 1st place getting 6 orbs and 4th place getting zero. After three minigames complete, players enter a final Fuzion Frenzy contest.
This final Fuzion Frenzy has each player bet with their colored orbs before the game. They then try to score the orbs by picking them up and running them to a goal post while trying to prevent other players from stealing them. The player with the most points at the end of this game wins the zone. And so, while players who performed well in the previous three minigames start with an advantage, it doesn’t mean last place can’t come back and win the zone if they perform well in this section.
Aside from the Tournament Mode, players can play a Mini-Game Frenzy which lets players pick the mini-games they want to play from the full list of 45 and tallies wins for each player. There is no strictly single-player mode although a single player can play each of the two game modes against AI.
Fuzion Frenzy received mixed reviews upon launch. The quick party-game feel was praised but many critics noted the lack of depth to the game. With only 45 minigames and two game modes to play them in, some critics felt it became stale too quickly. Still, it would go on to sell 1.2 million units over the years and received a sequel on the Xbox 360 in 2007. When Microsoft announced backwards compatibility for the Xbox One with the original Xbox, Fuzion Frenzy was one of their first compatible games, making it one of only 39 original Xbox games to still be playable on the Xbox One today.
Thank you very much for tuning in! If you’d like to hear more from me, you can visit my website thegamingobserver.com. I have a flash briefing of my own. And I would like to thank Katosepe for inviting me onto the show here today. Fuzion Frenzy is one of my favorite games as a kid so I was really happy to talk about this one. Kato will be back here tomorrow so don’t forget to check back for another Video Game of the Day.
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