The dork that I am - MagiQuest UI Issues

The family went to the Great Wolf Lodge up in Traverse City, MI. It was a lot of fun....the kids just loved it. They have a new game called MagiQuest you can play in the hotel. You get magic wands which I believe are you using IR (same thing as your remote control on the TV) to open treasure chests (and activate other stuff) and the wand identifies itself with an RF (the tags that make security at stores beep) tag.

So on to the interaction issues...

The Wand
When you first start the quest or adventure on this game, you have to use a touch screen. You must have your wand at the screen so it identifies you. First problem I noticed is that all the screens, treasures and other fun stuff that the wand activates didn't give the kids any que on where to wave their wand. You can see damage on a lot of the treasures from kids wacking them and kids waving them around in the hallway upset because it wasn't working. First thing they might want to do is indicate where you need to wave your wand.

The Touch Screen
The touch screens are full of video, menus and different areas to read to understand your quest or adventure. There are touch screens all around the building for the kids to see how they are progressing and to get clues. I really thought these screens were fun and pretty intuitive for the kids. The only problem was when you start a quest, it asks you to confirm by popping up a window asking you to select "yes" or "no". Well, the problem is the selections don't look like buttons. You can also see the background fully lit with buttons below the popup. Your brain keeps wanting to push the big yellow button under the popup.

Some of the clues were sometimes hard to see if they were active or selected. We looked from time to time to see our progress and remember what things we had to find on the quest. The two shades of color they picked to determine if you had completed or not completed that task was sometimes hard to see. Perhaps I'm color blind?

Overall
I thought this was a very cool game for the kids. We got tons of exercise walking up and down the stairs from the different halls of the hotel. The kids get to keep the wands and they thought it was the best thing ever. Even I got a little to carried away and got them up at midnight to sneak around the building to complete tasks. They ended up finishing all the quests and adventures. Wish I could be a kid again!