Moment of Truth
Jan. 25th, 2008 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnAll 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.
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
no subject
Date: 2008-02-01 03:59 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-01 06:23 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-01 11:40 pm (UTC)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.