1 vs 100 Canadian Beta /Xbox Live Primetime impressions

Once upon a time, during what was Microsoft's E3 2008 presentation, they unveiled a very ambitious project called Xbox Live Primetime. 

They said that they would bring the excitement of live gameshows to Xbox Live where all players could participate and potentially win prizes.   It would be online, interactive and very much fun.

It's a year later almost now and the Canadian Beta started last Friday.   I attempted to play it then and was getting disconnected left and right.   I decided to hold off on forming an opinion then because They had said in the 1vs100 forum that this was an issue.

Last night was a whole other ballgame.  The thing worked and worked great!

First the experience.   The Xbox Live Primetime room will have a list of all the next shows.   Hitting the shows will give you the option to Add a reminder of when the next occurance of the game is.   The games, at least in the beta, last for 2 hours.

With 5 minutes till showtime, you get a notification popup from the Xbox saying that the game is about to start.

When you start the game, you get dropped into a lobby and matched up with a group of 3 other players.   the game seems to make an effort to match you with other players on your friends list which is a nice touch.  In this lobby before the game starts, Microsoft's Live Host will welcomes everyone, goes through some idle chatter like only a host can and then the game starts.

So at this point, the game randomly picks people out of the crowd to be the one, the 100(henceforth knows at the Mob) and the crowd.

The one can win prizes for their in-game performance ranging from 160 to 10000 Microsoft points, the Mob can share what the One loses if/when he does lose and top 3 point scorers in the crowd can win points or free arcade games.  Everyone answers the questions and seperate score is kept relating to your performance there.

After last night's 2 hours, I can sincerely say that I firmly believe that Microsoft has pulled this off masterfully.  

If the host is to be believed, at the peak of the evening, they had 16 000 people playing this concurrently.  That's amazing by any standard.

At one point I was one of the Mob.  Sadly the One was a chicken and walked away with a score of 1200 points after 3 or 4 questions.  The rest of the evening was spent in the crowd.   I'm really looking forward to playing this more.