xbox live indie game reviews

Amazing Wizard is not a game. It's a gimmick, and it's not even a particularly entertaining gimmick. Supposedly, you type in a question and it magically answers your question. In reality, all the questions start with the same characters, so while you're "secretly" typing the answer it appears onscreen as if you're typing in the question.

"Amazingly," when you ask your question (that you just typed in the answer for), the XBox magically tells you the answer to your question. That's it. That's all there is to it. A three year old might be fooled by this, but anyone with higher mental capacity than my puppy (who LOVED Dokee and the Musical Rain) is going to see right through the charade. Alternatively, you could take your XBox to some far-flung region of the world where cynicism isn't baked into the culture and technology still has an air of "magic," but there a lot cooler things you could demo that travel a heck of a lot better.

There's one background screen (repeated throughout), one mildly creepy song which plays on the main menu, and a couple of really long, scrolling instruction screens. All the menus and even the gradients in the popups are straight out of the tutorials on the XNA site. This game is a joke--don't waste your points.