Last Friday I had the pleasure of being able to take part in the first installement of the  UK 1 vs 100 Beta, and I have to say that I was quite impressed with the game.

The Xbox Live version like the TV show has a single contestant going up against a Mob of 100 people in order to win prizes, though sadly in the first week of the beta there aren’t any to be had though there will be from next weekend. If you are not lucky enough to be part of the Mob or the One then you are put in the Crowd and still get to play along, though there is a much lower chance of winning prizes.

The game itself is a 1 in 3 multiple choice question and answer and a lot of the time the questions are relatively easy, though sooner or later a question will catch you out, or there will be a trick question like one where the answer was Jeremy Beadle and the first answe shown was Jeremy Beatle!, catching a lot of people (myself included) out.

In terms of the number of people playing the Beta it started off in around 65 000 but rose to over 77 000 at the end, and it was impressive how smoothly the game ran. When you start playing you are put into a party of 4 people (randomly selected or from your own party), and you get to compete with them for however long you remain in the game, and if someone drops out they are replaced in fairly short order.

The game itself ran relatively smoothly though there were a couple of pauses that were longer that I would have liked, and I could not hear the live host, a problem that was also widely reported on the Xbox forums. This is a beta however and so some problems are to be expected, and given the recent Battlefield 1943 server issues, the value of mass multiplayer betas has become clear.

The final version of 1 vs 100 will have adverts in but at the moment they where limited to a static ad for the Worms XBLA game and TV style adverts for the Xbox 360 console itself. If the ads are kept to the same length and prominence in the final version then they should not be too instrusive and may even be welcomed incase you need to take a short break at some point.

All in all if the full version lives up to the potential of the Beta, then Microsoft may have an Xbox Live Gold seller if not a system seller in 1 vs 100 on Xbox Live.

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