Thanks taking a look at Time Troopers. As you mentioned, DVD games are relatively new and rare, and we're a new company dedicated to making great ones - so your opinions (and even criticisms) are appreciated. We would, however, like to respond to several points - providing some additional information and challenging a few of your conclusions.

Overall the DVD's ubiquity and excellent video quality make it appealing. However, given these are "dumb" devices, (limited memory or processing power) it also comes with some big challenges to provide an interactive game experience.

Many board games will be enhanced with a DVD. But we believe that only we have successfully put the entire game (scoring, scoreboard, questions, video clips) on the DVD. Parents love that there are no game parts to lose and that the game is truly "lean back and have fun."

Given DVD limitations, we believe Dynamic Leveling is an impressive accomplishment. More importantly, it is an essential capability to make the game fun for the whole family. Making the process transparent to the players is critical to making the game easy and fun.

You correctly point out that "games can take well over an hour when played in full," and in our formal research (with several families in different cities), both parents and kids told us that this was actually a positive, primarily because they found the game to be challenging and enjoyable. It's also important to remember that we've included a timed-play option so the game can always be played in just 10, 20 or 30 minutes.

Regarding the pause button, while your idea of enabling it is a good one, there were technical trade-offs that required that we disable it. The good news is that you can leave the game and not miss any questions if you take a break. The game will wait patiently for you to return - although you might want to turn the sound down :-)

The duplicate questions you saw so early in your first game are somewhat surprising, as they are truly presented at random. With over 1,650 questions, most families will be able to enjoy many, many games with few if any repeats. We've also found that younger players often benefit from repetition and/or reinforcement in the learning process. The questions were developed and tested by The Princeton Review, who worked to make them both interesting and age appropriate.

We are sorry that Agent Wormhold sent you back five consecutive spaces with his video fate cards. He can be a rough taskmaster, but we're surprised he would be quite that nasty. Seriously, fate cards are delivered randomly, just as questions are, and you're the first person we know of who's had that experience. But we'll double check the program code just to make sure something is not awry.

Ending the game in a tie clearly isn't the ultimate outcome, and we'll most likely incorporate your suggestion of a tie-breaker into our next title. There are, however, three different versions of the victory video and not just one.

Your observation that "this game has its heart in the right place," is really the one that is most important to us. Our mission is to produce family-friendly and fun entertainment products. There just aren't that many good alternatives for games that adults and children can play together - especially that they can both enjoy while avoiding violent content or other questionable material. We've found that families who play Time Troopers have had an overwhelmingly positive response to it. And we gladly offer a 30-day money-back guarantee in case anyone is unsatisfied for any reason.

We really appreciate your time in reviewing the game, and the comments you've made that can help us improve both Time Troopers and our future releases.

- Kurt Buecheler
- CEO / The b EQUAL Company