It St Patrick Kielty’s Day! The one day of the year where everyone goes into a pub and reminisces over Last Chance Lottery, and what might have been if only ABC had shown the six episodes of Deal or No Deal they filmed before binning it and letting NBC have the hugely successful format.
In other news, everybody wants to point out the story about French Milgram experiment dressed up as a game show Le Jeu de la Mort. I would be quite interested in seeing this. Will people play along with unreasonable things for TV? Evidently yes.
Interestingly there was a game on Aussie Mole that played off of a similar idea – one contestant was taken away and secretly taught to act as if pain. They were then pretendly wired up to a device that could give electric shocks. The rest of the team were given a twenty question quiz – to win the cash for the task they just had to get to the end of the twenty questions, but every time they gave a wrong answer, an electric shock apparently increasing in intensity each time would pretend to be administrated to the contestant who they could see on a screen. To earn a free pass to the next episode, he had to convince the rest of the team (who held the power) to stop the game. What followed was very interesting – several of the team were happy to stop about halfway through but others were vocally not so, apparently twigging that doing it for real just wouldn’t be allowed.
In other news, Escape From Scorpion Island is getting two more series.
Right, seen this now thanks to one enterprising punter. What do I think?
Guy Fieri’s quite good – more restrained and authoritative than I imagined he would be.
I quite like the “60 Second Circle”, or rather the lights that surround it acting as a clock. I’m also rather fond of the large surround screen above the audience, especially when it seems to show THE APOCALYPSE just before each game starts.
The biggest beef I’ve got with it is that, on the whole, the games are rather dull and I was bored about halfway through the first episode. They’ve been given some quite cute names (each game is introduced by a ‘blueprint’, with a cold VAL-alike explaining the rules) but the fact is that watching someone pull tissues out of a box, or try and nod so that a pedometer attached to his head gets to 125 isn’t all that entertaining, especially when you have no real idea as to how well they’re doing (man nods his head for one minute on prime time telly, find out how many he managed as a big reveal, which surely defeats the point of a beat the clock set-up).
There is a money tree in effect ($1k, £2.5k, $5k, $10k, $10k, big jump to $50k safety level, $75k, $125k, $250k, $500k, $1m) and contestants are given three lives to play with. But they must decide whether to go onto the next game blind of what the game actually is (no winners this time on Takeshi’s Castle). For some reason the contestant is still asked after the $50k if they want to play on or not, even though there’s no real decision to be made. The games post $50k are noticably tougher than the early ones.
That is not to say all the games were rubbish (I was quite enamoured with the “throw beanbags to turn the push lights out, being careful not to turn them back on” game, and a game where a contestant must sort twenty face down playing cards into five piles of Aces through 10s on five different podiums three metres away from the central table only holding one card at a time, leading to all sorts of amusing confusion as to which pile was started where). The best games could easily be adapted into something a bit bigger and more interestingly Crystal Maze/Boyard-esque I think.
And this is where The Cube has Minute by the groin really. Not only is The Cube very stylish with the way it handles fairly banal ideas, it’s only when you stop to think hard about it you realise that actually it is fairly difficult to emulate many of The Cube‘s challenges in your front room. In that sense, it has an aspiration factor I hadn’t really thought about until this evening. One or two Minute games were basically from The Cube but in miniature and not very tense or exciting (look up Candy Elevator, for example).
Minute doesn’t really rip-off The Cube‘s presentation style as much as I was expecting – it has a slow-mo camera (the ‘Power-Cam’) but that’s used for replays after the event, the games are shown straight with none of the camera wizardry. Interestingly they sometimes cut to ads partway through a challenge rather than just before it starts, although by ‘interestingly’ I mean ‘annoyingly’.
In conclusion then, not really worth getting excited about, and almost certainly different enough not to infringe copyright.
Edit: I just wanted to mention that The Cube‘s games are “tangible but abstract”, which doesn’t really add anything but does increase my chance of winning a Pulitzer.
Something that I forgot to mention in the recording review but something the official tweet seemed to re-emphasise is that they’re making quite a thing about it being recorded at Pinewood Studios (Vernon mentions it in his intro). Are they angling to film international versions here if it’s a hit?
He’s out, but they’re not revealing the location yet so you can keep playing. Apparently he’s not been made aware of the location yet either and will make a decision about the immediate future of the competition when he’s a bit more mentally together. Which seems reasonable.
So so long, Man in Box. Interesting idea, something not quite right in the execution.
Just before I start, I’m disappointed that last night’s Minute to Win It is currently nowhere to be “found”. Sort it out, America!
Also I can’t read the lyrics to our Eurovision entry (“You bring the sunshine, I’ll bring the good times!”) without adding “…and I’ll get to Scotland befoooorrre you!” in my mind. I largely suspect this is just me now but you’ll all be doing it by May.
Also also, it’s the last night of Man in Boxthis evening, the thing that literally nobody’s talking about. I am interested in what happens tomorrow with the reveal, though.
Anyway, you might remember me doing a post before this year’s Krypton Factor attempting to lay to rest the idea that the general knowledge round is rather unfairly weighted and came to the conclusion that although it might look like that sometimes, generally speaking the numbers suggested otherwise – it gives the impression that anyone can win (and that is, in fact, the point), but the person leading going into it still usually wins.
That was based on KF 2009 numbers, where the show was five rounds and the GK round was 70 seconds. This year there were only four rounds and the length of the GK round had increased to 90 seconds. Now is it properly game changing?
Here are the numbers, numbers in brackets are the scores at the end of the round. The first heat ended in a tie, I’m not including the result of that for statistical purposes.
Averaging (mean) scores on a like-for-like basis (all the best scores, all the second best scores and so on) reveal the averages for the round to be 9.3, 6, 2.9 and (hilariously) -0.6. Rather closer to the traditional round scores than last time. Total of averages is 17.6, so still below the amount given in other rounds. On three occasions a player scores more than the 10 points on offer in other rounds.
More interestingly, the leader going into the round only wins five out of the ten shows. The average lead going into the round is 5.2. The lead of the five players who go into the round as the leader averages at 7.2 (this includes two rather large outliers of 10 and 16), but leads of people who don’t go on to win is only 3.2 which seems an entirely reasonable turnover.
The most interesting result is the one for the final in which loads of points are scored, but if you were to convert the performances into 10, 6, 4 and 2 would still give broadly the same result (in fact Pete and James would tie on 24 points each).
What does this all prove? Beats me, only that the current system used is more ‘alright’ than ‘not alright,’ and this year’s series had me feeling rather bored which definitely wasn’t the case last year. So let’s instead look at the New Zealand 1990 KF final and possibly the dullest Mental Agility round I can recall seeing. Your ten seconds of concentration starts… now!
