Xtractaurs – Great idea?
So my son recently picked up the “starter kit” and one extra figure of Xtractaurs with a Christmas gift card.
The concept is pretty neat. You take this “DNA Xtractor” (and yes that is a stereo 3.5 mm male connector at the end of the device);
And you insert it into one of these (fancy stand in the pictures not included):
To load it into here:
So it is the fusion of real world toys with an online community/game environment. Pretty cool huh? Well that is until you actually try to do it. There are two parts to getting this to work. Installing the Xtractor and then creating an account on the web site. So, first up was installing the device. The starter kit comes with an installation disk.
Since my son’s netbook has no drive, i put it in the desktop and shared it up. Running the install from a remote machine did not go well. I then copied the contents of the disk to the netbook, not expecting it to really work, and it didn’t. But then all of a sudden it did, long enough to get into the web site, set up an account and then not work again, lousing up the link between his account and the local gear. At this point I was wishing it was a thick app and not just a web site. So until I can straighten out the netbook (they won’t give you the install file online, getting it on the disk proves you bought it) I set it up on my desktop. Marginally less problems, at least the device install goes a bit smoother, and we are finally in. We get one dino in, and then on the second, poof. Mystically it stops working again. Close out, relogin, restart nothing is working until I finally switch browsers to IE. Then it started working again, mostly.
From that point on he played for a while, making gesalts out of the dinos he had and battling them agains other players and the baddies of the game. He had a fair amount of fun, but it didn’t hold him long and in the last 1.5 weeks he hasn’t even mentioned it. For reference, he started playing Wizard 101 about 4 months ago and continues to play every week.
In conclusion this is a neat concept, with shaky implementation, questionable tech choices, shoddy driver coding and shoddier web app construction. Still it didn’t come with a virus installed on the disk so it wasn’t the worst experience out there. And there was a small amount of fun factor that salvaged it. All in all I give it a 2 out of 10 dino tracks. The headache vs. fun factor was way above my tolerance level, and I am somewhat technically competent. I can only imagine the headaches this has caused the “I know where the power button is, and points to the surge protector” types. Yes – that was not politically correct of me. Live with it. 😉
Xtractaurs – Thumbs DOWN. 2/10 dino tracks
