Review:
Hasbro's Family Game Night DS Review

Many years ago, before television, people sat around playing board games together as a way to bond and hang out together. Then TV came along and suddenly they had something else to do – and this didn’t involve anybody talking to each other or any of that useless nonsense, so it was very much appreciated. However, families began to notice that they’d stopped communicating with each other and so the term “family game night” was born, a night where all fun stops and you sit around for hours on the floor rolling dice and pretending to be interested in anything happening on the board. Then games came along and almost killed off the family game night for good, because what actually happened is that it just replaced the old way of doing things with other, more fun, ways of doing them. Why move plastic pieces around on a board when you can pretend to bowl? Why, indeed, would you ever bother playing a board game again?

Here to remind us all of a dark past we thought was left behind in the abyss of time is Hasbro’s Family Game Night, a mixture of gentle nostalgia and prolonged torture to all five senses.

The set up is devastatingly simple. You select one of three classic board games (and another game everybody with a brain should loathe) and then you play it. That’s it. That’s everything. That’s the whole shebang, right there.

You spend the entire game under the unwavering – and frankly terrifying – gaze of the unblinking and monstrous-looking Mr. Potato Head, who looks as round and curved as a jagged piece of broken glass. Every game you play, he’s there keeping score. Always watching you. Always smiling. Never blinking. He’s a nightmare image hovering just above your line of sight.