How many widgets can you make with the new Widget 1001?
Finally, after months of promises and delays, the new Widget 1001 is here. Was it worth the wait? To die-hard Widget 1000 aficionados, I’m sure it was. For the rest of us, it could have spent more time in beta.
For all of its advertised popularity, the biggest complaint by far was the length of time it took to replicate. If I spend hundreds of dollars on something that is supposed to recreate itself dozens of times, I don’t want to have to wait weeks or even days for that to happen. Most teens want instant gratification and they want to build their army of widgets to fight their friends’ widget army now! Everyone knows that if you snooze you lose.
So what does the Widget 1001 do?
It takes about 20% longer to replicate and you never know what size the new widget is going to be. Obviously, I want them to be as big as the original at least. Mini’s don’t do it for me and sometimes the big ones (Monsters) have short pods (legs?) in the front where they’re useless in hand to hand combat. Surely these aren’t the “improvements” we’ve been waiting for almost a year-and-a-half.
Granted, the fact that any machine can replicate / reproduce / recreate itself to any degree, should take it out of the category of toydom and sell for a lot more, but that’s how they are marketing it – as a toy for teens. Maybe that’s because it’s still an imperfect process and they can’t sell it otherwise until it’s been perfected. Well, my teens still want what daddy paid for. And so does daddy.
On the plus side for the 1001 …
all of the widgets that are replicated in the same size are also the same color so that you can herd them together in squadrons that are readily identifiable. The originals are blue, the minis are red, the standards are green, and the monsters are yellow. (We’re talking size here.) And to avoid further confusion, each team has a predetermined logo using an app that comes with the widget. The logos consist of things like stars, asterisks, lightning bolts, etc. and each team is branded with the same logo.
Starting with 4 widgets (to get ahead of the replication curve found in the Widget 1000), I found that mobility is still an issue. The monster pods tend to overwhelm the mini pods but the weight of the monster pods makes them extremely slow. Puh-leese! Can’t anything in the widget world proceed at a decent pace?
Finally, there’s the app. Designed to control a maximum of 24 widgets, I found that I could control only up to 20. Once I got beyond 20, speed, mobility and accuracy degraded for all of them simultaneously.
Needless to say, the phrase “good things come to those who wait”, doesn’t really apply here. I don’t appreciate being charged full price to be your beta tester. Thankfully I’m just a reviewer and didn’t pay a cent for this experience. You folks shouldn’t have to either.
Grade: D-