Hunt and Peck

Dec 2
2006

Yesterday I stumbled across this poster visually depicting the names of bands. I thought it would be fun to play the game for a while, so I set out to find the game online, which I was sure must exist in interactive form. It was much harder to find than I thought. The Virgin Digital site only has static wallpaper images to download and no links to the actual game. I finally found the actual game on Heavy.com. I found out that the game is actually just the same still image. The Heavy version has a magnifying glass and a form where you can fill in your answers and submit them to some kind of sweepstakes. But I don’t want to enter the sweepstakes, I just want to kill some time guessing band names. Since the game is just this big picture there’s no way to know which ones you’re getting right (is it ‘Pavement’ or ‘The Streets’, ‘Gorillaz’ or ‘The Monkees’?).
The game could be so much better with so little effort.

Case in point, this fantastic M&Ms game I got hooked on for an entire afternoon a couple weeks ago; 50 Dark Movies.
Same basic idea, but you’re finding names of ‘dark’ movies instead of bands. The M&Ms one is so much better though because they’ve added a very simple interactive system. If you think you know one of the movies, you click on that section of the picture and a little text box pops up where you can type in your guess. If you’re right, the box turns green and that portion of the picture dims. It’s a great way to let you know if you’ve got the right answer and also to let you easily see which ones are already complete. You can even save your game and come back to it later.

I didn’t think this kind of ‘Hunt and Peck’ game would be so fun, but I found it really addicting. It appeals to people’s love of trivia, and adds the challenge of solving little visual puzzles.