To prove how important a friend is, Outdoor Challenge even has a special mat that looks similar to a Dance Dance Revolution mat but is designed for simultaneous use by two people.
The folks from Namco Bandai showed me just two of Outdoor Challenge’s activities, of which there are “over a dozen.” One was a competitive game in which two player avatars stand on a platform. As logs roll across the platform each player must jump off the mat at the correct time to make their avatar jump. Get hit by a log and you get shoved towards the edge of the platform. The player who stays on the longest wins. It’s simple but fun.
I liked the cooperative game I played even more. In this one, both players control a virtual hand cart careening down a track. One player needs to pump the remote up and down to emulate the pumping of the hand cart lever while both must lean to one side or the other to handle turns and jump in the air when the cart is about to hit a gap in the track. This one was a lot of fun, although a number of times we went off the track when I was doing fine on my side. This, I suspect, will have players turning to their partner and saying, “are you paying any attention at all?”
Outdoor Life has a nice, colorful look and friendly fun-for-the-whole-family vibe to it.
From the little I’ve seen of it, Outdoor Challenge looks pretty promising. If the game turns out to be as much fun as the little bit of it I played, perhaps I’ll be able to use it to attract some new, more game-friendly friends.
