davidn | Moment of Truth

All last month: "I can't believe they're doing this, it's revolting."

All last week: "It looks like you're plumbing new depths of television now."

This evening: "Well, I'll watch it anyway, just in case."

Obviously as a direct result of the writer's strike that suddenly eliminated what little worthwhile American television there was, Moment of Truth is the latest "quiz" programme to appear on FOX - Television for Idiots. And I'm saying "quiz" with that irritating air-quotes action because there isn't one - the premise of the programme is that a contender, wired to a lie detector, answers increasingly personal and/or embarrassing yes/no questions for unlikely amounts of money, while people related to them (those who would be most shocked to hear the answers to some of the questions such as "Have you ever used the Internet to flirt with other women since getting married?") look on. You can decide to stop after each question, but after a question is asked you must answer it, and if you're caught lying then you're booted off instantly. Simple.

Before I continue, I must mention we can't blame America entirely for this. The TV company Endemol used to put the Netherlands firmly in the lead position of having some of the most consistently bad television in the world* and therefore the programmes that people were most eager to export - their latest worldwide example is Deal or No Deal. But against all odds it's Colombia that has come up with something duller, because even a full hour of somebody picking random numbers is more captivating than this (though over here they attempt to spruce Deal or No Deal up a bit by featuring twenty supermodels wearing very little in an attempt to extend the average American attention span).

If we examine the rules for a moment, which doesn't take long - from your point of view (and this is the only real decision-making moment in the whole affair) there is no point in lying. If you tell the truth, everyone knows Awful Secret #94 and you continue. If you lie, you're detected lying, you miss out on the cash, and everyone with the slightest sliver of a sense of deduction by elimination knows Awful Secret #94 anyway. There's no sense of skill or tactics to it. There's no challenge. There isn't even a game, to be honest. You've got to say "yes" fifteen times or give up halfway through if you don't feel like humiliating yourself any further (or filing a divorce if you've just admitted to anything particularly incriminating). The programme has actually been taken off air in some countries after one woman was arrested after exposing certain truths, but then I wouldn't have expected "Did you murder your late husband in order to get his life insurance money?" to have come up as a random question either.

I rather miss the era when TV games were actually enjoyable instead of relying on ridiculously overblown tension, and had some sort of challenge to them (at this point even any sort of game at all would be nice). Nostalgia is kinder to everything, but I don't think that it's just the rose-tinted spectacles that make things like The Crystal Maze look inexorably ace by comparison. And, of course, some things go without saying.

* Apart from MTV

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kjorteo

As an official child of Nintendo Power, though, the video game shows were where it was at for me. It was always my dream to be on Video Power (which I unfortunately can't find on YouTube anywhere, but for the downright sad theme song. The actual show was much less embarrassing than that, I swear.) Basically, kids were chosen from the audience and played an NES game (usually Rescue Rangers.) The two with the highest score went on to answer video game questions for points, then play the game again against each other for more points, and whoever had the most points at the end more or less died and went to Heaven: Picture, if you will, the contestant being fitted in a cat suit completely made out of the hook side of velcro. Now picture a room completely full of shelf after shelf of NES games, with all the boxes treated with the fuzzy size of velcro. Contestants had...I want to say 1:30, but it could have been 60 seconds, to basically loot the place and go through a slide at the end, and got to keep whatever stuck to them at the end. Plus there was one particular game (the contestant wasn't told which one) that, if they took, they'd also win a Neo-Geo.

Oh man, I wanted that so bad. As a child, one of my larger fears was somehow actually making it onto that show, and getting to play Rescue Rangers (as opposed to a game I've never even heard of and would thus suck at,) but having to be Chip. Because, as we all know, Chip sucks and would have cost me the game and my chance to go to video game Heaven.

Anyway, I wasn't able to find a Nick Arcade clip, but here's a commercial that at least shows what the end part is like. I'm almost sure that what happened was that the contestants were in a giant blue screen room with monitors off to the side so they could see what was going on, which would explain why (when actually watching the show) the contestants always seemed to be looking at something off-scene when trying to do their whole video game thing. Still, though, that was so incredibly cool back then.

The other major thing I remember about Nick Arcade was that sometime during the actual show, before the end segment, there was invariably a part where a team had to play their choice of real video games and try to beat a "Wizard's challenge" (usually either beat level 1 or score x points before y seconds) for points. And everyone I ever saw play, without exception, was absolutely terrible at Gradius. (

slither remembers it differently, with Magician Lord being the game that everyone tried but no one had the slightest bit of skill with for whatever reason. I do remember some rather spectacular Magician Lord failures now that I think about it, but I remember having the "You idiot, why do you suck so much at games?" moments more with either Gradius or ActRaiser at the time.)

From:

davidn

That theme song is really something - I haven't seen anything quite like it since the Zelda rap. Strange how we never noticed how laughable these things were when they were on (see the Gladiators theme I linked to in the earlier comment).

The end part does sound a lot like Knightmare. I'd actually quite like to see more of that brief clip just to see how well the whole thing worked, because as much as I love it, Knightmare was incredibly slow-paced by necessity, and having a live game rather than playing against an invisible man controlling everything through an Amiga upstairs would make things have to be a lot faster. But for the most part, I think the nearest thing that we had to Arcade was Gamesmaster, which I didn't watch a whole lot (largely because of irritating Scottish host Dominik Diamond) - ingeniously, though, it starred Patrick Moore as a sort of demigod-like "Gamesmaster" entity. He didn't appear on-screen as his human self, instead being confined to a video screen or as the central biomechanical brain of a large robotic thing. Every time I try and describe British children's TV to anyone it sounds like I'm on drugs.

I don't think the programme really had any kind of continual organized game to it, instead inviting people down from the audience to play against each other and possibly win something of questionable value. There would also be a couple of star guest rounds - I have the one with Michael Jackson and Macaulay Culkin on it on tape - in which most people were comically useless, occasionally to the point of the Gamesmaster stepping in to stop the game and organizing something different instead. There was also a tips and cheats section where he dispensed advice to people perched atop a fiery mountain.

Video game programmes don't seem to have had much luck, on the whole - I know that there's G4 or whatever it's called here (I don't even know if that's a channel or a programme in itself), but I've heard from several people on the Classic Gaming board that it does to games what MTV does to music. The situation is much the same in Britain, with a couple of short-lived shows with rubbish names like "Thumb Bandits" and "Bits" being aired at about eleven at night. Ironically the situation was much better when games were more 'underground' and unpopular - the best of the lot proudly acknowledged that games were still considered a Bad Influence. There are some reviews of games like Sonic and Knuckles from when they were new on the site, and enthusiastic reports on the Philips CDi and 3DO before their respective catastrophic failures.

At least we now have a virtual form of the velcro room in the form of the many emulation sites on the Internet - dive in and download as much as possible before someone spots it and shuts it down! Although they've got a lot more stable since I discovered the whole emulation community in around 1999.

Now I'm off to watch Gladiators. :)

From:

kjorteo

I just found this when looking for more Nick Arcade info, from Wikipedia:

The show was the first in America to regularly intermix live action with animation using a bluescreen (Knightmare was the first show worldwide).

So how about that. :) Still wasn't able to find a good clip of that final zone, though the Wikipedia article confirmed my theory that the contestants were in a blue screen room with monitors off to the side displaying the game so they could see themselves. This resulted in things moving much faster than Knightmare, though with the side-effect of it always looking like all the contestants were looking at something off-screen even as they were in the middle of the game. (Because they actually were.)

And, uh, Patrick Moore as in, the elderly astronomer with a monocle Patrick Moore? Patrick Moore Plays the Xylophone Patrick Moore?

I've been told by people who actually saw them that Tech TV used to be amazing and G4 has always sucked, and then G4 acquired Tech TV and dragged the new G4-TechTV thing down to G4 levels, making former Tech TV fans understandably upset. This theory was even put forward in a VG Cats strip. Having never watched a single thing from any of those stations ever before, though, I honestly wouldn't know.

And I should mention that I used to have access to all the big file dumps on Usenet, and as a result, I have nearly-complete ROM dumps for just about everything NES and SNES. This does include all the different regional versions and multiple attempts at dumps, and genuinely awful hacks, but hey, all the good games are still in there somewhere. (I just checked, and I have 4,728 NES ROMs, 26 of which are Super Mario Bros. 3 and/or hacks that actually start with "Super Mario." Tracking down all the hacks that start with completely different names, such as "Bloody Axe Bros.", is beyond the scope of this check.)

But hey, without that collection, I wouldn't have found Eggerland: Revival of the Labyrinth, so no complaints here!

From:

davidn

Interesting that Wikipedia mentions them both together as well! By the end of Knightmare, they were experimenting with allowing the dungeoneer to see as well for brief periods of time, but the eighth series was the last and the idea never went further than that.

Something I didn't realize at the time was that the reason the dungeoneer was blinded wasn't a planned part of the game at first - it was done out of necessity because of the environment being computer-generated. When the creator, Tim Child, put forward the idea for a new series, he had actually changed it to a completely virtual environment with a seeing dungeoneer and just one advisor - something that hadn't been possible in 1987. But the trouble was that nobody liked the idea, and it's gone back for another redesign.

And yes - that is the Patrick Moore you're thinking of! The monocle-wearing, xylophone-playing, biomechanically enhanced Patrick Moore.

I've been meaning to play Eggerland or Lolo or whatever it's more correctly called since you mentioned it on videogame_tales (large post for that coming up, by the way, because I started playing Hexen 2 again this week). I always feel like it's a bit of a gap in my geek status when I say I've never actually used USENET - the Internet had barely been invented in Scotland until about 1995, and we got a connection a few years later. It's actually amazing how much more convenient Internet access has become in the last ten years, when I think about it.

From:

kjorteo

Good Lord, I see what you mean about the sheer Scottishness of that host....

And hey, Adventures of Lolo 1 and 2 are on the Wii Virtual Console now! And if you're less scrupulous, 1, 2, and 3, and Revival of the Labyrinth are all somewhere in my ROM collection. They're really fantastic games, but if you want to get into the series, I strongly recommend playing anything but Revival of the Labyrinth first, since that one is about a million times as hard and has those stupid ? rooms that make the game completely inaccessible to everyone except people who love the Eggerland/Lolo series so incredibly much that they're ready for a new challenge and don't mind about eight of the 150 or so rooms being blatantly unfair and stupid. (It is a fantastic game overall if you can handle it, though, and I do recommend it eventually.)

Meanwhile, it's probably better to pick one of the American Adventures of Lolo games and play with them until you're intimately familiar with the basic rules, all the enemy types, and tricks like enemy respawn displacement and how to creatively use other enemies to block the Medusa line-of-sight. The thing I love about the Lolo series is that all the rules and enemy behavior and everything is so consistent and straightforward and that you can easily tell at a glance what you're supposed to do and what's in your way, but obviously one has to actually learn the workings in the first place.

From:

davidn

OK, I'll have to look around for those - we don't have a Wii, but if we ever get into this generation of consoles, that's the one that I think we'll go for. It sounds like the kind of thing that

quadralien would enjoy as well, so I'll point him at them. As I'll detail in the write-up of Hexen 2 I mentioned earlier, it looks like he's just solved something about the game that as far as I can tell, no walkthrough writer or forum-goer on the entire Internet has ever worked out - so he's the kind of person who would not only be able to do all of those unfair ? rooms, but then tell you why it was immediately obvious and logical that that was the way you had to solve them. I'd look forward to his explanation of that blocks-round-the-edges room in particular.

To go off in a completely different direction, it does seem slightly hypocritical of me to be so involved with preventing piracy in Clickteam while at the same time not giving a second thought to downloading games - there's something different about the feeling of downloading things like NES ROMs, even if they are now currently available again. I wouldn't immediately download anything released recently, but it's a bit difficult to define where the cut-off point is. I downloaded Hexen 2 the other day, for example, but I'm not sure if that would have felt 'wrong' or not if I didn't already own the CD (the only reason that I didn't install it from my own CD being that it's currently across the Atlantic).

The argument against downloading discontinued games was always that it stopped companies from putting together re-releases, but only the Wii seems to have that right at the moment. Vivendi's comically appalling handling of the "Windows remakes" of the King's Quest and Space Quest series put a lot of people off that excuse, I think - they're just the original games put onto a CD with an outdated version of DOSBox set up to run them fairly badly, and each of the collections has at least one game in the series missing entirely.

The same is true, unfortunately, of Knightmare. It has a small but dedicated community surrounding it, and I used to be quite an active member of the forum a few years ago. (Come to think of it, I'm not totally sure why I'm not active there now.) The creator, Tim Child, used to pop up occasionally and politely request that people don't offer to provide tapes of the programme to each other because it would harm the possibility of an eventual DVD release, and everyone respected this. Such a release never appeared, and the end result is that outside Britain the programme is now completely unobtainable - I was actually pleased to find so much of it on Youtube, compared to last time I looked were there were just the few clips that the fan site had been allowed to put up.

Additionally I'd like to mention that the currently ongoing conversation on my latest post is a bit weird.

From:

kjorteo

Everyone who engages in downloading has their own personal code of ethics. Mine is that I freely do it, but if the product is actually available, I treat what I downloaded as an evaluation. I always (well, as soon as I get the money, anyway) go to Amazon and buy the CDs I've listened to enough times to determine that I like. I have pretty much every NES ROM ever, but I don't hesitate to buy any particularly good games on the Wii Virtual console when they're out. (When I saw they just released Lolo 2, for example, it literally took as long as saying "Lolo 2 is out!? Oh, hell yes," and then I bought it on the spot.)

And fortunately, Revival of the Labyrinth is the only Lolo game I know of with the damn ? rooms, but I must admit being interested in seeing how he handles them. And the blocks-around-the-edges room is not the most illogical one, believe it or not.