"Sometimes the Anticipation of a thing is better than the thing itself once it happens"

Look at the people glowering and grinning at you from the cover of the Anticipation box. Each one has been painstakingly hand-dipped many times in a large vat of 80's-ness, and each could easily be vying to be the life of the party centered around the NES. With the exception of the girl in the lower left-hand corner mashing the controller with a playful mean face, I wouldn't trust this ragtag bunch of chumps any farther than I could throw them. Nonetheless, it is a party these happenin' 80's youngsters are attending, and in the eighth decade of the nineteenth century there came a party game before party games were even officially recognized as a genre. But looking at that box that shows everyone in patterned sweaters and thick glasses and poofy hair, you'd think Anticipation was a rollercoaster ride with nowhere to go but straight down. As it turns out, the horribly outdated box art fails to do the game justice in any respect. It is basically the outcome of a simplistic ménage à trois between Pictionary, the board games of your childhood, and connect-the-dots, and what results is a video game that stuns you by showing you that it is far more than just a sloppy in-breed of the three.

Anticipation is a board game wherein any combination of four human and computer players assemble to watch an invisible artist draw an object in one of several categories. Provided with the category the object falls into, a couple of dots, and an amount of blanks equal to the number of letters in the word or phrase, you and your friends - real or imaginary - sit around and try to guess first what the computer is drawing. What it is that the artist is rendering can be a number of things; subject matter ranges from office supplies to scientific paraphernalia to plays on words (a tricky one, that) to symbols of arithmetic. In any case, the point of guessing the drawings is to successfully identify four, with each coming from a different color category (yellow, blue, green, and a red that's more magenta than red). Upon filling all four squares next to your name with the proper colors, you move up to the next board. Simple, right?

Wrong. With four people playing at once, the suspense blankets the room like a dense fog. You're looking around at everyone else seeing if they know the answer; the beads of sweat popping out of every pore in their face tells you they don't just yet, but that they could at any moment. Watching the computer draw sucks all the fear out of you the way cornbread sucks all the moisture out of your mouth, and then it proceeds to throw it all back in your face, causing illogical guesses and hasty presses of the A button that confuse and irritate you as the game waits for you to move along with an answer. In other instances, that person sitting next to you happens upon the solution just milliseconds before you, and your press of the A button is rendered moot as their cursor glides along and selects each and every correct letter down to the last one. Their ice cream cone token is succinctly transported upward to the next board while you and your stiletto heels remain stuck in a confining position. You sit helpless, paralyzed by your own dumbfoundedness and a fierce but hidden anger that is strong enough to possess you to shove the controller up a certain appliance's cathode ray tube but not enough to risk letting a friendship slip through your fingers by injuring he/she who championed you with priceless family heirlooms turned projectiles.

The first board is tame enough, but as the struggle for ownership of the straight-line art judging crown rages on, Anticipation raises the stakes itself. Upon arriving at the second board, the artist does away with the dots on his canvas and the letter blanks at the bottom of the field. Now your penchant for quickly identifying the work in progress before its completion is all you have to rely on. God forbid you should be playing with someone who has already fully familiarized themselves with the game before you have even seen it once (or a CPU player on the Hard difficulty); ten or fifteen playthroughs will allow you to see nearly every puzzle a couple of times. One of Anticipation's biggest failings becomes evident as you see that the game is not meant for extended play or months worth of seeing if the artist has anything new up his sleeve. Simply put, he doesn't. Very few drawings inhabit each of the game's categories, and if you get served the same subject matter long enough, you'll eventually see everything the invisible Michelangelo is capable of, right angles and all. Add to the removal of blanks and dots and the fact that someone has already one-upped by knowing everything before you the tricks of the later boards, in which spaces are included that if you land on them, they will set you back an entire board. It's enough to make a guy crazy, I tells ya! But while insane, Anticipation retains a degree of primitive fun and throws out just enough of a lure to put to shame some of today's so-called party games - the later incarnations of Mario Party in particular.

The things drawn by that unseen artist aren't exactly of da Vincian quality - in fact, he's probably closer to Picasso than anyone, riding a thin weird line between concrete and abstract. That said, the object you are attempting to guess is most often what it claims it is, even more complicated objects like the control tower in the travel section. While categories are a different matter (to the point where you will frequently find yourself uttering, ''How on God's green earth does that get grouped in with office/travel/science/math/tools/whatchamacallit?''), the drawings are not too shabby for someone restricted from creating any curves whatsoever. Board design is spare and only serves the purpose intended. They all look sort of like remakes of Trivial Pursuit and Pop-a-Matic Trouble minus the flair. Everything prefers to remain dark, though not the kind of dark that lends itself to mystery and intrigue - more like the kind that lends itself to thinking that this is the seediest pool hall you've ever stepped in. Mustard browns, kelly greens, and off-reds dominate the palette for the most part, but the message is loud and clear that, like me, Anticipation doesn't need good looks to be adored by thousands.

Wishful thinking, yes, but Anticipation is a party game with a lot going for it. It's good to fill a couple of hours if you and your companions are in the mood for ignoring the dancing, the keg, and the volleyball net out in the backyard and huddling around the NES hoping for it to supply your hearty party. It requires your intense focus and a hereditary talent of sorts for these types of games, but when you walk away from it, you'll realize that the time spent with it wasn't so bad as initial reactions might declare. Though it can't really serve so well as a party game rather than a friendly lighthearted gathering of three or four people game, it still provides enough entertainment to keep the average player with a penchant for doodle-based games on his or her toes. Whether or not you are one of those average players, however, everyone should play Anticipation at least once. It will enrich your NES experience and fuel the fire for the argument that video games are nothing but toys. How about that? A toy that toys with your mind.

Ooh. Irony.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/19/03, Updated 06/19/03