What lies behind the green doors of the FABLED Bother’s Bar Game Night Advent Calendar? GAMES! That’s what, and on Saturday night a panel of seven real life people will take on an audience of potentially billions to try and become the Bother’s Bar Festive Game Night Champion.
We will as ever be playing the best of the Jackbox Party Packs (spoiler: we’re starting with Guesspionage), there’s always room for the audience member with the fastest finger to play on behalf of Team Audience, and the audience have a very important role to play in judging the answers and playing along. So get your second screens out and join us! Point your browsers to www.jackbox.tv and enter the room code to join in LIVE. There may be a small delay when watching the Youtube stream, so keep an eye on your phone to see the questions and an eye on the stream for the results!
Hey everyone, don’t forget it’s Bother’s Bar’s Festive Game Night on Saturday. Join us live from 9pm for fun, games AND PRIZES! (There are no prizes).
Because I’m so bored I want to cry I thought I’d go through recent top searches that have led to Bother’s Bar and collect the answers in one place, like a sort of trivia thing:
Eurovision algorithm This is largely irrelevant now because they changed the way it works, but the idea was to use the jury votes from a dress rehearsal the night before to determine the order the votes are revealed to try and make the night as exciting as possible. We wrote about it – with graphs! right here.
How do they remove the coins on Tipping Point?
Easy. Ben stalls for time whilst a man runs on and removes them. This is edited down.
Where is the Taskmaster House?
It’s in Chiswick and you used to be able to find it online, although the Foxton’s link from this post doesn’t work any more. Very poor insulation rating though, so perhaps don’t move in until the Spring.
Medieval Mario Party Raven returns, although it’s not clear why it was ever axed in the first place, with a new slightly speedier tournament over three weeks rather than four and also, you cannot not notice, a new Raven in the form of River City‘s Aisha Toussant. Time will tell if she can make the role of guide and mentor her own but if the clips we’ve seen are anything to go by the style and intonation are practically identical to James Mackenzie’s to a spooky degree. Mackenzie also turns up to pass the mantle on, presumably as fan service.
We will have to wait and see to see if the concessions to modernism work well – by the sounds of it the lives system has gone (although gold rings will continue to keep score), as has The Way of the Warrior, each group is only four people and every three days a winner is found to go through to the final.
Will it be fair to judge this as someone in his mid-30s? Perhaps I will need to ask my nephew for his opinion. We should still be able to remark on the quality of the games and production though. So if you end up watching it, let us know what you think.
Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas! Join us next Saturday night 9pm until around half eleven for another Bother’s Bar Game Night. What will be behind the doors of the Bother’s Bar Advent Calender? GAMES and INTERACTIVITY that’s what! Join in as my panel and audience battle it out to win the night, and we’ll be showcasing another exciting Arbitrary Final.
Most of the panel slots are taken but there may still be room so if you want to be a panellist get in touch. We’re especially interested in new blood this time round to join the BB streaming family, so if you’ve watched it before and it looked like fun please hit me up. Otherwise I shall look forward to seeing you all next week.
Last night we took a look at It’s Quiz Time, the new quiz from Snap Finger Click made up of some of the developers from Buzz on the Playstation. Buzz was great fun, does this stack up?
The video is a intended to recreate the experience of people sitting in a room whilst actually being on the Internet, so it’s 5FPS over Google Hangouts so lag isn’t an issue. The game features proper streaming options which I haven’t explored.
There’s about five minutes of set-up here, about an hour of gameplay followed by about ten minutes of discussion. I’m joined by TV’s David Bodycombe (a bit late), TV’s Michael Harmstone, Alex Richards and Bother’s Bar stream debutantes Dave Tipping and live from New York Mathew Palmieri.
Here are the key takeaways, I think:
There is a lot of faff in setting up, everyone needs to download the app, then it asks for a name, then Salli the host asks everyone individually if she’s pronouncing your name correctly, then it wants to know how you would prefer to be referred to, then it wants a selfie or avatar selection and then it wants your year of birth and then it’s time to go home. It’s a bit onerous. Now I get that it’s not something you would need to do on subsequent playings, but the nature of party games like is that many tend to get played once with the same people, it’s quite possible you’ll lose everyone’s interest before you start playing.
I get why they’ve done it, it knows who you are and remembers you. Hopefully this means it remembers the questions you’ve faced and won’t give them to you again.
This can’t be escaped: the questions are pretty lousy. They’re certainly factual, but they’re really not interesting – real pub quiz machine stuff. It feels a bit like the AI nature of the host gives the questions an AI nature also, like they’ve just downloaded a load of data off of Wikipedia you can make comparisons with and hoped for the best.
The rounds vary, none especially original, many that go on a bit too long. It felt a shame that in round two having picked science as a category we got five entire boards on astronomy. We had no idea how the scoring on Best Friends Forever is worked out. It’s telling that the round we had most fun with, Describe Me, was probably the least quiz like (it’s Talkabout/Slimste Mens).
It’s annoying that the answers don’t show on your phone, just the letter buttons. Jackbox can do this and that’s on a website, come on. One of the best things about the Buzz buzzers was their tactility, I could position my finger and quickly feel my way to the correct response, this is much more difficult on a touch screen, I constantly have to shift my eyes from one to the other.
Also having to hold the phone horizontally is quite difficult for the length of time the game demands.
Basically the game doesn’t have the creativity and sense of fun that Buzz had, nor does it have its well crafted questions. The AI idea is not enough to sell on its own, and whilst it boasts almost 30,000 questions (with more to come) you won’t derive a huge amount of entertainment from them.
On the basis of one playthrough I find it difficult to recommend, but it’s early days and might get better. It’s £15.99 on Steam and also out on PS4 and XBox One.
Short notice but if anyone is free tonight (Friday) around tennish I want to do a Hangout playthrough of It’s Quiz Time, the new quiz game from the people behind Playstation’s Buzz! series.
I’ll be going into it completely blind so anything can happen. You won’t need a copy (although there is an It’s Quiz Time app you will probably need to download) just a mobile and a microphone for chat and opinions. It will not be livestreamed but it will be viewable over the weekend as content. You may be asked to take a selfie.
If you’re free and interested let me know on Twitter.
Saturday 9pm,