Television has frankly been a boring recently and I find myself watching less than I used to (and if MIPCOM is anything to go by this week, this may well be a continuing trend). I have instead found myself videogaming a lot more recently and pondering what if anything can be learned.

For some reason I had a hankering to play a hidden object puzzle adventure game towards the back end of last week and I asked on Twitter for suggestions and thanks very much for those that did. A hidden object game is as it says – you get a busy scene with typically lots of objects in it and a list of objects, your job is to find the specific objects in the scene, and then you can move on to the next bit of the narrative. If you get stuck you can normally ask for a certain amount of hints and sometimes you’ll be against the clock.

I tried two games, one on recommendation and one as a punt. The first one, Madame Fate, part of the Mystery Case Files series (you can buy on Steam) is getting on for around ten years old and unfortunately feels that way, playing in a fairly small box on modern monitor resolutions, which makes the act of trying to find hidden objects in detailed scenes that much harder. This one has a carnival setting and a story involving finding lots of objects to stop a murder and thus is against the clock. Nicely you get several scenes you can jump between if you get stuck and there’s even some light puzzling elements (make ten words out of these letters, for example). Unfortunately I’m a bit rubbish at it.

Slightly more involved I played Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride on PS4 from Polish hidden object specialists Artifex Mundi (£11.99 at time of writing). The graphics, video and acting are not much to shout about, but there are a couple of things that made it lightly entertaining. It’s more of an adventure game in that you need to examine objects and use them on other objects to release other objects that are useful down the line – but it’s set up so that you’re not more than about three screens away from a place you’re meant to use an object – we’re not talking Monkey Island levels of difficulty, it’s mainly unusual key looking for unusual lock. Frequently you will have puzzles to solve that are to be frank not difficult (it’s not The 7th Guest), but mechanical enough that solving them is a dopamine hit. There are hidden object scenes where you might need to figure out combinations of objects (to get a gold candlestick, you find a brush, paint and paint it) or find bits of object that fit to make something useful, and whatsmore you can skip hidden object scenes entirely and instead take on a domino task. I probably got 6-8 hours out of it, and if it was a gameshow it would be something gently entertaining like Brainteaser.

I don’t know how far down the hole I’ll end up going. Here is basically the TV version of it:

This is interesting, FOTB James Wallace who we posted a thing about sometime ago has gone live with his new blog, Mr Babbage’s Lock Up, which looks at the technology behind the technology of various bits of gameshow equipment and related things. Go and have a look, right now various interesting articles about things like the graphics from Catchphrase and how the displays on Family Fortunes (i.e. Mr Babbage) worked.

In other news, @davemadeatweet has revealed that Dave Made a Maze, a film that looks set to get straight to the heart of Bother’s Bar’s Film Club, is getting a UK release in January.

Remember! It’s BBGNXII: Champigion of Champignons on Saturday night! Jackbox 5 releases on most platforms on Wednesday.

Finally a big thanks to everyone who has left a tip over the last month, much appreciated. If you’re buying anything from Amazon.co.uk, doing it via the link on the sidebar (or here) gives us a small cut.

This might be quite fun, hats off to Buzzerblog for noticing that LostinTV are advertising for a Channel 5 show that sounds awfully like Hollywood Game Night.

Monkey Kingdom, the production company behind ‘TFI Friday’ and ‘Made in Chelsea’ are making a brand new game show for Channel 5.

The show features two teams of celebrity guests playing hilarious games that test pop culture knowledge, acting skills, and nerves of steel. There will also be performances from our studio band!

This exciting programme is based on a successful global game show, so you won’t want to miss out!

We quite like HGN (we wrote a little bit about it in the past), although rather suspect the level of celebrity for this might be quite low. Still, if you’re interested, it’s filming at Elstree at the end of the month. I can’t go but if anyone can do let us know what you think. Or even if it actually is Borehamwood Game Night.

We’ve been alerted to the fact that the new Crystal Maze board game has begun its slow roll-out and you can buy it from WH Smiths for £28. KEEP ‘EM PEELED.

It’s meant to be coming to bigger retailers in due course.

And so the MASSIVE BIG NAME host for Money Tree has been announced and you WON’T BE DISAPPOINTED, it’s Alfonso Ribeiro who you may remember as the seventh place finisher on I’m a Celeb in 2013 and more famously, Carlton from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air 25 years ago. So either a) somebody is taking the piss or b) there’s a large disconnect between what TV peeps think is a big name and the general public.

However he has hosted a gameshow before, the pretty good fun Catch 21 on Game Show Network in the States, a modern reversioning of Bother’s Bar favourite Gambit, at the turn of the decade.

Right, yesterday I found myself playing Town of Salem, a game that’s actually about four years old now in various capacities but is in fact about to come to mobile next week and is currently on sale on Steam (although there’s a completely free to play browser version as well) so shut up it is still relevant.

It’s online Mafia/Werewolf basically – an informed minority vs an uninformed majority, the Town must try and get rid of the Mafia by lynching them during the day or killing them at night, each night the mafia (who know who each other are) kill townfolk and win if they have a majority. Add into the mix neutral characters who have their own set of win conditions (the Jester who wants to be lynched, the Serial Killer who wants to be the last person standing and so on) and there’s plenty of confusing fun to be had.

There’s no voice chat, all discussion is done through IRC-style chatbox.

I’d suggest it’s not the friendliest of games to just dive into and start playing – even the initial set of roles feels like rather a lot to take in (there’s no real training given other than tool tips, some sort of nursery slopes starting with vanilla Mafia and increasing the amount of roles would be useful, I think) but I suggest you do have a go because I want to hold a Bother’s Bar Lynching Party on a Saturday in November, possibly with Discord reaction (but all legit strat in the chat).

Here’s someone’s early experience to be getting on with:

And if you’re thinking they should have done this on telly… they have! There was a five episode pilot series called Traitor with Tony Livesey on BBC2 almost fifteen years ago but we can’t find any video of that. It was also used as a task on Dutch Mole a few years ago.