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.
• I also think that by and large the games would be fun to have a go at (NBC have the whole list up, in fact you can watch all the blueprints on there). The problem is that they aren’t much fun to actually watch.
• 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.