US started its new season yesterday and one of the new “things” is an old “thing” – Wheel of Fortune has a new arrangement of Changing Keys, one of its old – and most remembered – themes (coincidentally written by the show’s creator Merv Griffin).
So I ask you viewers: what’s the best rearrangement of an established theme?
Ant and Dec announced Limitless Win earlier this week, promising the world’s first limitless jackpot and a never ending money ladder.
RED. RAG. TO. A. BULL.
With expectations set for BIG MONEY, I’m giving YOU the chance to win some big money of your own – £7.99, the equivalent of buying 2 Unlimited’s No Limits album on iTunes.
To win, all you must do is guess what the MEAN average prize for the first five eps of Limitless Win will be, and then as a tie-break, what you reckon the highest amount of money in play on the table will be. If that still can’t break the tie, the winner will be picked at random from those eligible.
As we don’t know the complete format of the show yet, there are a few things to take into account:
Great stuff. My decisions are final and just one entry per person, I reserve the right to disqualify anyone I choose who I suspect of cheating. You must get your entries in by 23:59pm (UK) 17th September 2021 (that’s this coming Friday), the show records next month for 2022 broadcast so it will be a while before this all resolves. I’ll come back next Saturday with the range and average of your responses though.
How do you enter? You can’t now, the compo’s closed. Look out for the results next year!
Watched the C4 Black to Front Countdown special today hosted by Sir Trevor MacDonald and he was brilliant at it, like he’d been doing it for years. In fact he’s one of those names where you wonder if he’d ever been in the running before because you think about it as an idea and it takes no time at all to come to the conclusion “yeah that sounds right.” He’d probably have made a brilliant full time host for it around a decade ago, but seeing as we had a question mark over Anne Robinson taking the job at 76 this would be an even more difficult square to circle. You wouldn’t think it by watching though.
I cannot claim to be a Countdown aficionado but found this to be an extremely fun episode, with some great solves by Dr Anne-Marie Imafridon on numbers games that looked like they should have been easy but aren’t.
Who Dares Wins, The People Versus, Pointless, Pasaparabla, Boom! 100% (sort of)! Tout Le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place! Jeopardy! etc.
This is the new title for Fortune Favours the Brave, presumably.
Yesterday a new Jackbox game premiered ahead of the “fall” release of Jackbox Party Pack 8, and this is the one likely to be most interesting to Bother’s Bar readers, The Wheel of Enormous Proportions, as it’s the most quiz formatty.
In each round you’re asked three questions, usually Wipeout-esque but there’s normally one in each set that switches things up. Answering correctly earns you points, but doing best on each question earns you extra slices on the Wheel. After each set of three, in secret you put your slices on the twenty-segmented wheel and it’s spun a few times. Each time the Wheel spins your name, you win the increasing pot (although if you share your slice with someone else the points are split). Continue with rounds of questioning and spins until someone reaches a point threshold – at that point any time they earn more points on the Wheel (and only then) they get to spin the Winner’s Wheel, a twelve segmented wheel, some of which have their name on, the others are skulls. Spin your name and you win the game, spin a skull and you go back to the main game and await getting spun in again. Each go on the Winner’s Wheel there are more win spaces and fewer skulls.
There are some extra fillips, but that’s basically the format.
So based on a single playing of the game, what do I think? I absolutely dig the presentation and music. The game has lots of interesting and fun ideas but… I think it might have a pacing issue. Basically, each question takes about 90 seconds to resolve and there are three in a batch, then there a few minutes of wheel spinning and then back to questions. Because you can only win on the Wheel, it’s very possible that people will get near/past the threshold towards the end of round two and then… it’s about another five minutes before anyone gets the chance to resolve the game, and indeed crossing the threshold earning points in the quiz is irrelevant really. Not sure what the solution is really, perhaps turning the third round into alternating question/spin/question/spin which brings up its own set of issues.
TL;DR – good ideas but probably an iteration away from greatness, although luckily Jackbox tend to make sequels of games with potential, so look out for a better version of this in the Jackbox Party Pack 11.
So. Recently-ish I’ve been “getting into” the latest Call of Duty (Cold War) on XBox which is not something I thought I’d be saying, and having spent a fair bit of time getting shot in multiplayer (my Kill Elim/Death ratio is not great, but I’m wicked at objective capturing) recently I’ve been getting into the latest Zombie mode, and apparently getting into it in a big way, as I’ve just dropped *mumble* quids on the several-years-old Black Ops 3 (Christ, and supposedly it’s Nintendo that holds value) and its suite of zombie stuff. For the uninitiated, you and your team must try and survive increasingly difficult waves of zombies, using the earned credits to make your gun more powerful and buying perks and that, but if shooting things wasn’t fun enough, where the interest for me lies is that most of the maps made have some sort of light-puzzling task-based narrative quest which you can totally ignore if you want but come with their own rewards if you can see them through to the end, which you have to do whilst taking on the horde.
I sort of hate myself for it, but I’m in now.
I feel like there ought to have been a zombie episode of Ed Hall paintball-em-up X-Fire, but I don’t think there is as far as I know.