Last time Cisco came out with a game to market their routers, I pretended to knock off Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation. This time I’m not going to do that because my fake British accent from Australia stinks.

I will however talk about Cisco’s new Cisco Edge Quest 2 game – designed to market the ASR 9000, as the original Cisco Edge Quest promoted the ASR 1000. CEQ2 is a much better game than its predecessor. In the new game, you go around collecting packets (green squares) on 5 different tracks. You avoid network disruptions (red) and collect speed-ups (blue). If you pick up damaged packets (purple), and have 10 seconds to repair them (orange) otherwise you suffer a network disruption. Network disruptions lower your uptime, and if your uptime is less than 99.999 (it starts at 100.00000), you lose the game.

The mechanics are functionally similar to Audiosurf, and just as Audiosurf is a fun game to play, CEQ2 is as well. As a criticism, however, I’d have to say that CEQ2 may be more fun to play, but it’s less educational.

With the previous CEQ, it at least illustrated different technologies, like “parallel processing” within the metaphor of the game. There’s no metaphor here – it’s just a game. You can call the green squares “packets” instead of “green squares,” but they’re fundamentally without any networking context.

There are interstitial advertisements that try to talk up the ASR 9000, but they’re pretty much skippable; and people will probably skip them even on the first time through. This is mostly because the format that they take, “faux news reports,” typically doesn’t work. Even if it was working, these ads have nothing to do with the actual game itself. It seems like a really, really bad commercial, interrupting the flow of the good time you have with the game.

That said, CEQ2 is probably good for Cisco’s branding. Maybe we should look into making a game of our own someday. Hmm…