Apps Upside Your Head: Gameshow Adventure

By | April 29, 2016
4 Comments

Question-RoundAndroid only (right now),
Google Play Store link,
Free to demo, full game unlock £3.50

And so to an app that was off my radar but asked to try out, promising to be an amalgamation of various different formats in one app.

In Gameshow Adventure you are tasked with climbing pyramids (Aztec, Egypt, Vegas), each one with fifteen rooms and in each room a game. These are multi-choice quizzes (with varying rules regarding payoffs), conundrums (anagrams), catchphrases, a bonus wheel, various puzzles and the last room is basically Deal or No Deal for big points. At various points up the pyramid you can go to a shop to spend your winnings on extra lives, passes or to even play an arcade-y game to earn more money. And there’s a bonus game you can play between rooms.

The app certainly looks and sounds great with its crisp graphics and fun sound effects. However the writing needs a bit of work – it rather bombards you with the rules at the start (there are quite a lot of mechanics in play here although they make sense when you start playing) and the various messages could probably do with a snappier edit, especially considering it’s pitched internationally. The questions aren’t greatly interesting to be honest (they’re also designed for international play) and sometimes a bit vague (“which country has the most radio stations?”). The other rounds play well, there seems to be a reasonable amount of variety in the puzzle rounds although nothing massively original (pelmanism, tower of hanoi, Simon etc).

The “gambling” games are arcadey-skill games some of which inspired by arcade classics through the prism of the Going Live phone-in game. These are fine in the main although the game of Frogger I played seemed to have a four minute time limit which is a bit much. A run through a pyramid will take you about 20-25 minutes provided you don’t crash out and lose all your lives.

You can play multiplayer pass and play and everyone gets the same questions and challenges for fairness. It keeps stats and leaderboards.

This would make for a pretty good quiz machine with a few tweaks, it certainly looks and sounds the part. As it is £3.50 for the full game unlock feels a bit steep in the current app climate. However the first pyramid is entirely free to play (with adverts in the shops) and I do think once you know what you’re doing it’s quite fun – I did shell out in the end.

Pick Pockets

By | April 28, 2016
10 Comments

This is quite interesting because we hadn’t heard of it before (was it a broadcast pilot?) But from 1988 and Tyne Tees-land here’s Pick Pockets, in which a bowtied Tom O’ Connor hosts a snooker-based quiz, not unlike a proto-Big Break.

 

With thanks to Gordon Donaldson for alerting us to the existence of this.

The Crystal Maze Live Experience Experienced

By | April 26, 2016
19 Comments

I was very cynical when news of this first broke – great, some posh hipsters are going to piss all over my childhood. The good news is that that initial opinion is very much unwarranted. However you do need to go into this on the understanding that it’s an interactive theatrical adaptation of the TV show rather than a straight redo.

With that in mind I’m going to put the rest under a cut. If you don’t want to be spoiled then don’t click under the cut. I won’t be revealing *everything* to keep some surprises, but I wouldn’t be able to give proper criticism without some spoilers so on your own head be it.

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The Old Code

By | April 22, 2016
16 Comments

So this week has been all about The Code on BBC1.

But longer term readers may remember Endemol were getting very excited about their own show called The Code way back in the mists of time (April 2012 in fact) which was even piloted with Andrew Castle, mixing questions, Deal or No Deal style luck and light Mastermind-esque code breaking.

It didn’t go anywhere obviously. But there was an online game you can play (you can’t any more by the looks of things). Here with a video made in 2012 is Bother’s Bar commenter Keshihead “doing” a playthrough:

OFCOMedy

By | April 21, 2016
4 Comments

I noticed something whilst watching The Almost Impossible Gameshow yesterday, a show currently going out at 9pm on ITV2. They bleeped out the swearing for the first part of the show and left it untouched for the rest. I wondered if this was a stylistic thing. Swearing’s not something I’m offended by particularly, I think there’s a time and a place but if that time and place isn’t after suddenly falling down a slippery hill then I don’t know what it is, and as an immediate expression of honesty it’s difficult to beat.

Nope, it sounds like ITV and C4 work with a 9:15pm “fuck” watershed, the most ridiculous thing I think I’ve ever heard.

Twitter suggests that it’s because of Section 1.6 of the OFCOM Broadcasting Code:

1.6 The transition to more adult material must not be unduly abrupt at the watershed (in the case of television) or after the time when children are particularly likely to be listening (in the case of radio). For television, the strongest material should appear later in the schedule.

I thought the idea was that if you started a show before the 9pm watershed you couldn’t suddenly change tack as soon as 9pm came round – you know what you’re expecting. It sounds like this is not quite the case. I remain baffled by the idea of inconsistency during the same show. How is this protecting if they’re just going to be shocked later if they keep watching?

A few people have bought up that C5 got into trouble for excessive swearing on Big Brother immediately after the 9pm watershed, that was in 2011. On Celebrity Big Brother this year they were broadcasting what’s considered a much ruder word barely after 9pm (I remember remarking if it was the earliest in the evening it had been broadcast on television) and nobody seemed especially bothered.

Although as one wag puts it: