FOTB Ash The Bash is doing a charity stream of 500 Questions on Saturday, starting from midday UK, and finally gives us the answer to the question “does slightly rubbish format 500 Questions become better if it actually asks 500 questions?” Needless to say, I’m hoping to become the contestant around Q498.
You’ll be able to catch the action on Ash’s Twitch stream.
The community is hoping to raise money for Save the Children, and you can donate here.
Also of note is that the second series of The Wall starts on Saturday night at 9:15pm, which feels quite late. We discussed series one here.
Hope you can join us for decent chunks of this. A lot of work as gone in to writing and checking 500 original questions in the same worky-outy style of the show and – reboot possibilities aside – this will be your best ever chance to see how you’d have done on the show. There is the odd geeky question but largely they’re on standard quiz topics, so all game show fans should find something to enjoy.
This has been incredible, mainly thanks to a gentleman, Lewcario, absolutely steamrolling the game for nine-ish hours, which would be 8-10 recording sessions for television.
What strikes me is as a weekly show, this is boring, the progression is slow, there’s a lack of interesting jeopardy, there are no rising stakes to keep it interesting. I think I probably said this at the time. But as an endurance quiz it’s been highly entertaining.
There were some great moments throughout – I think most notably during LewCario’s run was when Halian was the sideline player, with two perfect battles completed, and then a super strong performance on the ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ 50-answer battle. Procyon_KTaNE was a very close second to that, again showing very strong promise, but just running out of luck against LewCario.
Some cracking nail biters, buzzer beaters, and just sheer superb knowledge on show from many players. And, we got completely unique players throughout the entire show – 70 different players in total. It really had a different feel overall with the endurance element to it, very much demonstrated by the aforementioned LewCario.
The dismissal of sideline players on very short visits was a little bit of a let-down in my eyes as in some cases it didn’t give some players a chance to even answer a single question (looking to the “two-strike sideline picks the category” rule here in particular); it was a decision made to try and increase player turnaround so more players get a chance to appear on stream, but ended up kinda neglecting some of them entirely. I guess that’s the first thing I would look to change if the endurance format of this were to happen again.
I think I definitely picked the wrong 90 minutes to step away for dinner – I know Halian is an excellent quizzer and I had no idea there were two completed battles.
Props to you as well Ash, I don’t think if anyone turned up 10 hours in they’d realise you had been broadcasting 10 hours straight.
I’m glad Ash put down that last paragraph, because I was kinda sitting on something like that myself, since I was the one that had the horrible edge case towards the end of the second block of 50. Called on as a sideline player for a Top Ten Challenge (the Papal names one) but not picked to do it as Coolio wanted to do it himself and got it wrong, then got the next standard question wrong for his second strike, then I’m given the Hobson’s Choice of the only question left on the board, which Coolio got right, so it was a ‘Thanks, Keshi, but goodbye’ situation. I’m sure I can’t have been the only one that felt maybe a little hard-done by at not being able to answer a single question.
Lewcario’s 2/3rds run of the whole game WAS a fantastic achievement, and I’m NOT taking anything away from that, but maybe there should have been something in place so that once he reached some sort of arbitrary figure, maybe 100 questions or a specific money amount, he could have been ‘Ian Lygo’d’ and made to step aside so someone else could have had a turn, but I realise that isn’t very fair either as he was doing extremely well, so it’s a double-edged sword whichever way you go.
PLEASE don’t take this comment as though I’m angry or upset, because I’m not. I enjoyed watching the stream and trying to answer as many of the questions as I could. The set, the cues, the feel of the game were all perfectly re-created, so you can tell how much work went into it, not just from Ash but from all the question writers and proofers as well.