I totally forgot to mention Deal or No Deal‘s Fifth Birthday of the Third Or Fourth Week of Broadcast Week this week on the Board of Excitement, so to make up for it I absolutely promise to do the Deal or No Deal app review tomorrow.
In the meantime, I have mainly been playing Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood on the XBox 360, and one of its multiplayer modes is absolutely ripe to be turned into something for TV. Basically, eight people in a crowded town, you have to try and assassinate another specific player from which you’re given a photo, meanwhile someone else is trying to assassinate you. More points given for the more subtle you act in killing someone off, points off for killing a wrong person. Good fun. You could make that into a sort of competitive version of Run For Money.
Did anyone watch Mission Millenium (sic) today? I intend to watch a recording of it this evening.
That webbed feet question on OC tonight is the most esoteric question I’ve seen on the show…and it’s only a quarter-final question? I shudder to think about the final…
To be fair, I should have gotten that from Stalin and Donald Duck (Good clue ordering, actually), but was distracted by Rachel Stevens (Though I have vague memories of hearing that in the past.
Did stronger on opening move counts in boardgames (1 point), chess tactics (Me finding a group on the wall rather than just knowing that a group with a particular connection is rare) and the googleplex sequence (3 points) – Probably picked up a couple of other points somewhere along the lines.
I was so proud of myself for getting that question right! For 2 points as well. My housemates all thought I’d cheated somehow 🙂
Mission Millenium had good ideas … but it’s wasn’t really much entertaining to watch.
The host Jamy Gourmaud is mainly known for being the co-host of C’est Pas Sorcier, a kids’ science vulgarisation show (17th season this year, nearly 500 26′ episodes) – and it quickly became popular between all ages, becoming quickly a “cult” show.
For those of you that had watch this sunday’s Mijoenenjacht – would you have dealt at the same time that the contestant did ? That’s quite a nice sum of money .. but the board is strong.
No. I would have dealt when the game started going badly. I don’t think that I’d gamble 6 figures with one to open and the only higher prize is the 5 million.
Mmm, having seen the clip on Buzzerblog, I don’t blame him for dealing, but I think I could have gone one round more – the only real disaster is hitting the two big ones, but even then with those back ups you’d still be looking at a significant sum of money, I think.
Ta for that. I think I get what’s going on (it’s useful that in a Spanish speaking country, the French contestants tend to use English as a common language). Also it’s interesting that it seems to have been made by most of the staff from La Carte Aux Tresors, despite not being an Adventure Line show.
For those playing along at home, five teams of three go to Mexico to find the Mask of Chaac over six weeks. In each episode there are five challenges:
1) Rendezvous
Given a guidebook of local knowledge and a clue to a location, get there as quickly as possible. The first three teams get a bonus clue for the next task, the winning team gets to penalise other teams later on.
2) Rally urbane
I think this might be some sort of scavenger hunt, the teams seem to be charged with finding objects and getting to a certain place. This week they had to collect two specific wrestling masks and get to a lucha libre wrestling stadium. The first team there received a bonus challenge which would earn them a joker, which I think means they can opt out from eliminating a team member from the competition, because *I think* the team that finishes last here has to send someone home. Top three teams receive a clue for the next challenge.
3) Course Millenium
Similar to task one, but complicated by the fact that the winners of task one get to penalise two other teams, this week by having one member of each wear a wrestling mask effectively acting as a blindfold. The first team to the finish goes straight through to task five, the rest must battle it out in task four.
4) Physical Challenge
A relay bike race this week. The winners go through to task five.
5) 3D Trial
Right, the remaining teams rock up to some ruins to find one of those code-cannister things that featured in The Da Vinci Code, the names of which I have forgotten. One member of the team is strapped into a virtual reality machine (very 1996) and sees the ruins as they might have been hundreds of years ago. The team must communicate with each other where they are, because the VR man can see a large cannister floating in the air when they’re in the right place, and if the team are in the same equivilent place in the ruins then they should be able to find the cannister. This is a bit easier than trying to find a small five-inch thing lying in some weeds using your eyes alone, presumably.
I expect there are five weeks of this and a decisive sixth week. Have I got this right?
Anyway, the graphics are nice but I found my attention wandering quite a lot.
The team must communicate with each other where they are, because the VR man can see a large cannister floating in the air when they’re in the right place, and if the team are in the same equivilent place in the ruins then they should be able to find the cannister. This is a bit easier than trying to find a small five-inch thing lying in some weeds using your eyes alone, presumably.
…So, we’re about 2 years away from someone making a gameshow based on Geocaching, then?
Well, it’s been technically possible for years – the query is how many people have (a) heard of it in the first place and (b) own suitable equipment. With the advent of the IPhone 3GS, let alone the 4, and Android phones, the number in (b) will have risen quite considerably, though software is non-trivial (and, in some cases, non-free). I suspect most car satnavs don’t let you see a raw lat/long, which is part of the reason why I’m less interested in having one.
I have a gut feeling that there’s enough out there to provide an audience to sustain a game show outside analogue terrestrial TV (though are such outdoors-y types big game show viewers?) but the budget that a show for such a channel would not provide much of a game show, especially if it is an outdoors-y sort of show as OB costs are extremely considerable.
In short: I’d love there to be one but am not holding my breath.
I think there are too many mundane things about geocaching that would prevent it from being acceptable by a mainstream audience. I mean, yeah, there are a lot of really awesome caches out there, but when you’re doing “another ammo tin in the woods” or “another urban micro,” a lot of people who really aren’t into the sport would just be turned off by it. Also, something about the whole “it’s not about the numbers” argument would come into play here, I’m just not sure how.
Oh, and hey.
Anyone know where the final episode of Series 3 of Pointless has gone by the way? Bet the new contestants for that show are feeling pretty annoyed right now…
Yes, I’d bet the celebrity contestants will be annoyed.
The final episode is a charity/celebrity special, I suspect they’re holding it back for mid-December.
Your write up to the format of Assassins Creed Brotherhood and the endless posibilities to turn it into a gameshow, has sort of been done for tv already.
Either the last season or the season before of CSI New York – did a plotline very similar – except of course one of the character players instead of being ‘play shot’, got killed ‘for real’.
Of course this being a CSI franchise, any massive holes in the plot line was quickly glossed over for slo-mo blood splatter and a jarring pointless on-foot chase, and the murderer was identified, caught and charged all within the hour..
(and may have got away with it if it wasn’t for those pesky kids…)
It’s basically StreetWars then? http://www.streetwars.net/?page_id=37
Ooh! Basically. The AC:B game seems to dish out its contracts at random though, and you’re told how many people are pursuing that person (and indeed, how many are pursuing you) so you can strategize accordingly – once a contract has been met everyone on them gets reassigned.
There’s nothing quite like getting someone who happens to be running away from someone else (if you do things too fast, they “notice” you and you get the chance to run and escape – cue lots of amusing chase action) straight into your path.
Envious. I have to wait until February for this, being a PC and all. Also looking forward to Portal 2, which looks bastard hard going by the E3 demos.
Actually just completed the story in single player. Can’t wait for third one proper!
It’s “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” for the 21st century (warning: supposedly “funny” press release): http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/11_november/22/fast_loose.shtml
Mmm, SRO have been doing tickets for this for a while.
Is the guy on the far right from Braniac?
I thought the game Brig described in the original post was a bit familiar. Turns out that similar things have been run by the street games crowd from That London and That Warsaw. See, for instance, Photo Run (shoot other competitors) and Lumenatio (shoot, er, people wearing a numbered swimming hat).
(That’s for values of “shoot” equivalent to “take a picture of”.)