The Golden Globes. The BAFTAs. The TV Quick Awards. The humble game show never wins any of them, but we say YES! to great game shows and now you can say YES! in our annual Poll of the Year. The vote is open and you have until Wednesday 13th to make your voice heard.
Here is our Polling Page, and here is the UKgameshows.com one (which basically leads to that one anyway).
Maybe this will or will not be good enough to start the campaigning for a 2016 return of the International award: the first episode of contents trend follower JTBC’s Code was broadcast yesterday and the raw version has been uploaded to Dailymotion. I’ve seen only a few seconds of the second part (and am downloading both parts of it now to watch later) but that’s enough to confirm to me that it appears to have the exit game nature, which makes it Very Eeeenteresteeeenk. No clue whether it’ll rely heavily on Korean and thus be practically unintellgible and Bumdidilyumptious didn’t seem impressed so you might not want to wait for a fansub; part 1, part 2.
Happy New Year!
Eyes down for a full house of format spoilers, as far as I can tell.
Ten Korean celebrities start the game; I get the impression that one is eliminated at the end of the show, and presumably future weeks will feature successively smaller line-ups.
The set is essentially a quincunx. Imagine the representation of the number five on a normal spotty six-sided die; the whole set is effectively a giant square (cylinder) with one triangular room at each of the four corners and a square room in the middle. The rooms are dressed fairly abstractly and somewhat sparsely, though I like the room which has a wall of (often meaningless) mathematical formulas, diagrams and other squiggles. The centre room contains what purports to be a lift, and the first (this week) nine celebrities to get into the lift survive to next week.
After a quick co-operative puzzle among the team to start, the main body of the show consists of the players trying to work out the code to permit them to get into the lift. This week, the code is a four-digit number, but the keypad suggests that other weeks may differ. Eight or so mathematical clues to the code are written on scrolls, hidden behind padlocked doors in the various rooms. You might find some of the scrolls yourself, but it’s mostly an information trading game about what’s on the scrolls (and people might lie, etc.) and thus something of a popularity/politics contest.
The padlocked doors’ padlocks are also clued by physical props in the various rooms. These are not the most original things in the world, but there is some inventiveness behind them and happily they’re not absolute daisy-cutters; no appearance for David’s parking space puzzle yet, but it’s only episode one so far.
There’s a neat twist in that one more scroll is potentially given away in a semi-co-operative voting game. All ten team members vote individually who should get the scroll. If all ten agree, that person gets the scroll. If nine agree and one disagrees, the single voter decides who gets it. If the vote is any more split than 9-1-0, apparently nobody gets it.
Once you’ve found (or traded for the information on) sufficiently many scrolls, you may be able to work out the code for yourself, or outright beg the answer from someone you’re working with. You might be able to work the answer out from as few as three pieces of information with the right three and some insight, but more likely you’ll need perhaps five or so of them. This was actually a pretty non-trivial piece of maths; it’s not immediately clear whether there genuinely is play-along-at-home potential for non-Korean audiences, or whether there’s too much Korean language in the clues for it to work. There seemed to be an instance or two where they were playing fast and loose with the notation – is the number xy the product of digit x and digit y or the two-digit number formed by digit x followed by digit y – but, being charitable, perhaps the Korean language cleared it up.
There is no obvious penalty other than a load of unhappy flashing lights for attempting to submit the wrong code. (There might be a non-obvious one; not sure, maybe you might only get one go.) Once six people submitted the correct code, they stopped the whole code-finding game and instead set the last four identical individual physical puzzles, with the fastest three there making it into the lift. The first person into the lift that episode may or may not have won 20 million won (~US$20,000), or perhaps it’s the person who wins the last show, or something different.
It’s not The Genius, but even without any degree of fansub, I was getting into it by the end. I’ll probably look out for future episodes but cannot immediately give a wild must-watch recommendation. It probably helps that we can understand what’s going on properly, but Race to Escape works much better as a game show with a coherent start-middle-middle-middle-middle-end narrative, and has more visually interesting (TM American Gladiators) even if less absolutely watertight puzzles.
Watched the first twenty minutes, will continue to watch tomorrow, although English subs would be nice.
Quite enjoy they’ve basically put a Matrix-y spin on the Genius explanation graphics, half expected it to be a Main Code and a Death Code.
Talking of foreign matters, France 3 have confirmed Julien Lepers has been binned from Questions pour un champion – and replaced oddly (given the supposed quest for a younger audience and a whole host of younger women being touted as his successor) by another older, grey-haired man:
http://www.ozap.com/actu/-questions-pour-un-champion-samuel-etienne-remplace-julien-lepers/486981
That’s so odd!
Right, it’s been noticed that Hunted wasn’t on the list. If you want to change your vote to include it get in touch and I’ll sort it out.