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All About Kim (continued)
On Saturday, my family and I experienced all seven of the missions (it
took six hours, including breaks and lunch), and I took copious notes about
what we saw. But I'm going to resist the temptation to list out the exact
path of each mission, for two reasons. First, as noted earlier there is
random variation at work here, and your experience may not match mine. But
more importantly, I'd rather not ruin the surprise for you. These missions
are fun, darnit all, and you deserve to experience them as they are meant to
be seen.
That said, it wouldn't be a complete review without at least a touch more
about what awaits you. My compromise position will be to explain one mission
we experienced in detail, with the understanding that the other missions
were more or less analogous and you could extrapolate the results. It so
happened that this was also our very first mission: Mexico.
Wade informs us that Dr. Drakken and Shego have stolen a rocket, and
we undertake several Operations within the larger Mission in Mexico.
Each Operation involves a quick download from the Kimmunicator (it takes
but a few seconds) and then 1-3 action triggers on our part.
We were first asked to locate the Oaxalan woodcarving gallery, and
shown an image onscreen of what to look for. Frequent visitors will
probably make a beeline to the right location for all such demands, but
there is a HELP button on the Kimmunicator which provides additional
direct hints about where to go if you can't figure it out by the picture
alone. Once there, Wade asked us a trivia question in multiple-choice
format that was easily answered if we read through the exhibit placard.
Next, we were told to locate a skeleton marionette on a wall, who
then danced for us once we triggered the event.
Then it was on to the piñatas on the ceiling, which I found hard to
locate (there are also carts with piñatas on them! Red herrings, as it
turned out). This was one of the neatest effects; you stand or sit right
below them, and trigger the event by clicking OK, and on the bellies of
the piñatas were illuminated codes that you had to key into your
Kimmunicator.
After that, the parrot off to the side of the marketplace relayed a
conversation it had overheard.
Then it was time to see a hidden compartment in the woodcarving
display become illuminated to show off a hidden schematic behind a
scrim.
Lastly, and best of all, we headed back to the bridge overlooking the
Mexican marketplace to make the volcano off in the distance (you've
drifted past this on the boat ride) erupt and then eject a rocket that
goes horribly off course and crashes. This effect does not take place in
the phone; it's projected right there on the back wall of the pavilion,
in full view of everyone else!
Finally, we are directed to return our Kimmunicator to a dropbox
hidden off to the side of the Mexico pavilion, and the mission is done.
The dropboxes are in each land,
and they are very cleverly hidden. If you spot the KP symbol, you've
just located one.
Each of the Operations came wrapped up in layers of story and character.
You'd need to page through a few videos of story development before
triggering each action. While that may sound pedantic, it's not. Whoever was
responsible for the stories knew what he was doing, because the stories
unfold briskly, neither too fast nor too slowly, and remain engrossing. Each
country pavilion has its own villain with a plot to wreak havoc, and our
versatile Kimmunicator supposedly does different things to the environment
as waypoints in the larger task of stopping the villain. The cartoons have
not only the look, but also the hokey plot lines of Saturday morning
cartoons, but that's somehow fitting for the experience rather than
off-putting.
We had several reactions to our first encounter with the Adventure, most
of them variations on the theme of utter, surprised delight. First and
foremost, it struck us as incredibly geeky fun to be able to manipulate or
interact with the environment with a cell phone! (Am I too old to be excited
that we made the volcano erupt?) The interactivity is no accident. WDI has
been grasping at interactivity and random variation for more than a decade
now (witness the variations in ride experience with the Indiana Jones
Adventure, for instance), and the future has long been said to be somehow
related to personalizing the user experience. This isn't fully personalized
(as noted before, it's a linear story, just with a few modules removed from
each re-telling), but it sure as heck is way more interactive than floating
down a cavern full of mechanical pirates.
We were quick to realize that this game finally explained the presence of
the parrot in the Mexico marketplace, which we had noticed many months ago,
but had thought it had no apparent purpose (the same would prove to be true
for the old-style camera in France and the golf-ball-washer in the UK). That
said, for every element we had noticed in the park during the past months,
there were many more that we did not notice. And trust me when I say that we
are in Epcot every week or two. If we didn't pick up on the changes, it's
very unlikely that other visitors would either. The "footprint" of the new
adventure is small indeed, and likely won't bother visitors who are
interested in other pursuits.
Hey… some of those figures in the Germany
train set turn into red-eyed zombies!
It also occurred to us that this project finally represents Disney's
version of an in-park game. Have you had the good fortune to play Minnie's
Moonlit Madness? That's a Disneyland Cast Member event dating back to 1990,
in which teams race around the park after hours to solve clues and win
prizes. I invented and created several variations of that same concept for
regular fans (Add-Quest, MouseAdventure, MouseAdventure Mad Scramble,
Ultimate Orlando Challenge, Gumball Rally Walt Disney World) because I was
so taken with the notion of using the parks to play games.
The Kim Possible Adventure is finally Disney's answer to an in-park game,
and it does everything you'd hope. Yes, it asks you to read signs and
isolate the "clue" that was sought, but more excitingly, your actions get to
trigger real-world reactions in the park. Boards flip around, screens light
up, and bulbs are illuminated. It's a Disney-park-gamer's dream come true! I
am in complete shock that this is free. I rank it up there with a full-scale
attraction opened by Disney.
In some ways, the functionality of the game reminded me of Pal Mickey.
Both the Kimmunicator and Pal Mickey are hyper-sensitive to their location
in the park, via sensors, and the Kimmunicator even has a few puns: "Look,
it's in Norse Code!" (the Pal Mickey is infamous for over-using puns). But
while Mickey is saccharine by necessity, due to his nice-guy image, the Kim
Possible gang is free to have a bit more of an edge when it comes to humor.
One storyline about zombies supposedly has us scan the area around us and
Wade realizes that everyone around us looks like a zombie, "as if they were
on vacation!" he declares with no elbow-in-the-ribs delivery. Martin Short
and the Canada movie, please take note. This is the proper way to be ironic
and funny at the same time about theme parks.
A small interaction here was not on our
itinerary, apparently.
Before turning to the potential problems, let me wrap up the operational
details:
Return time. Like a regular FastPass, your field pass has a time
stamped on it, and you may not return early, nor may you report to the
incorrect Field Station. It's OK to return late, at least for the
moment, but they reserve the right to crack down on that if the game
becomes popular and swamped.
Languages. Either Spanish or English are available on the screen
(and presumably also on the Kimmunicator), but I didn't check if other
languages might be possible on the device itself. I thought I overheard
one worker say something about Portuguese, but I need to follow up on
that.
Additional missions. No, you don't have to run back to
Innoventions after finishing your first mission. You can sign up for
more missions at any of the Field Stations, too. In fact, it would have
been OK to just bypass Innoventions altogether and just sign up at a
field station in the first place. I think the Innoventions locations are
there to advertise the adventure in the morning (when Future World is
open, but World Showcase is not).
Duplicate Field Passes. Since your ticket was swiped, the system
knows who you are, and like FastPass, you can't hold more than one at a
time. But there is a workaround (more on this in a second).
Wheelchair accessible. Everything takes place on the ground
floor and you could roll up to any location we were asked to visit. Only
once (at the Stave Church in Norway) did we see a place that wasn't so
obviously accessible, but the reality was that the back door was
wheelchair accessible.
It's GPS driven, not line of sight. We saw quite a few folks
told to hold up their Kimmunicators and told to "scan" an area or "send
out a signal," and most folks actually did hold up the phone, as if a
"line of sight" beam of infrared might need to be detected. This is not
actually necessary, but it showed how completely even adults bought into
the illusion.
Trying to make a hidden schematic appear, this visitor aims her cellphone.
Though still in testing, the game is well-formed and well-developed. I
tried hard to break the game in various ways, or to mess up my Kimmunicator,
but things are locked down tight. The software is good and resilient. In
this case, they really have thought of everything.
One of the things they thought of, but don't necessarily advertise, is
that you can use all the park admission tickets in your party in clever ways
to bypass the normal waiting time. The system defaults to a 30-minute delay
when you sign up for a mission, but you don't have to twiddle your thumbs
all day long if you put the other tickets to use, signing up for their own
missions, with the net result that you hold multiple Field Passes. If you
swipe Dad's park ticket, you may get a field pass that says to report to
Norway at 2:00. If you right away swipe Mom's ticket, you may get another
one that says Norway (also 2:00), or perhaps this time it will say Italy or
International Gateway. You just don't know; the system decides for
load-balancing reasons where to send you.
Because it's OK to return late, you could play Dad's ticket at 2:00 and
not report for Mom's mission until 2:45, and maybe Johnny's mission at 3:15.
Each mission can have multiple players (and multiple Kimmunicators, for that
matter), so it doesn't matter which park ticket is used for which mission.
Now, each park ticket cannot be used for more than one mission at a time, so
we ended up waiting until playing Mom's mission and then using Mom's ticket
to get yet another field pass.
We ended up holding three field passes all
day long, on a rotating basis. It felt like cheating. Yet I asked at more
than one field station if this was kosher, and was assured that it was fine.
So it looks like this is a valid workaround, at least until they crack down
on late returns. |
