Seattle Tests Game Betas

During a recent visit to Seattle, we had the chance to visit Toy Test. Toy Test is where gamers of all ages are able to play Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and PC games and hardware before their public releases. Although we found the Pacific Science Center, where Toy Test was located, by accident (we were actually doing a little sight-seeing and were making a beeline for the Space Needle located right beside it), a large banner announcing that PC and video games were inside had enough of a magnetic pull to drag us in.

The MC for the event, Linda Vmich (an ex-Nintendo employee now working for CBS), told us that last year's test added over 18,000 visitors to the Pacific Science Center's attendance figures. The event is run by the consumer correspondent from CBS This Morning, Herb Weisbaum, along with Ziff-Davis' Family PC magazine and Micron Electronics. Admission to the exhibit is free to all museum goers. General guidelines for playing are simple - you must be over seven years of age (there are some games that required gamers be over 13 years of age). Toy Test gives parents and older gamers a chance to take a look at the games they've been reading about and decide if they'll purchase the titles this holiday season.

The test ran from July 27 through August 16, and before it wrapped up, we had an opportunity to talk to a few of the exhibit's volunteers to find out what's hot and what's not.

Playing the games is a pretty simple process. Each gamer gets a chance to play the game for ten to 20 minutes. After each game is tested, the gamer submits a brief form checking off which game he played and ratings for its graphics, gameplay, and the game as a whole, if he would play the game again, and if he would buy it. The results of Toy Test will be announced on CBS This Morning in November (in time for Christmas wish lists to be updated). In addition, those results will be placed into a brochure available to parents to help them decide on what gifts they'd like to buy for their kids (or themselves).

Although we weren't sure how many participants had shown up to the event, a stack of forms measuring several inches in height (this from just one day's worth of testers) definitely gave a good indication of how popular the exhibit has been.

General consensus on the hottest games was a three-way tie between Tomb Raider III and Medievil on the PlayStation and Zelda and WWF War Zone on the Nintendo 64. Most of the PC titles at the exhibit had already been released, but the one game that really seemed to be attracting a fair amount of attention was Motocross Madness with the new Freestyle Pro game controller.

Lucky Seattle gamers had a chance to play the latest builds of these following games:

PC: Hoyle Classic, Curse of Monkey Island, Grand Prix Legends, Sorry, Montezuma's Return, Hoyle Board Games, Sonic R, and Motocross Madness along with new controllers Freestyle Pro and the I-Force Force Feedback steering wheel.

Nintendo 64: Rush 2: Extreme Racing, WWF War Zone, Waialae: True Golf Classics, 1080 Snowboarding, Glover, Extreme G 2, Yoshi's Story, Madden NFL 99, Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, and S.C.A.R.S.

PlayStation: Medievil, Apocalypse, A Bug's Life, RC Racer, Tomb Raider III, Wild 9s, Megaman Legends, Bomberman World, T'ai Fu, and Knockout Kings.

Don't you wish you lived in Seattle?