Well it’s been a bit of a dry week in terms of things to be excited about, and there probably won’t be any updates over the Easter holiday (although I’ll doubtless be around on Twitter). There won’t even be Bother’s Bar’s Sunday Night Poker on Sunday night, the first Sunday night off since the beginning of January. That measn you can watch Jimmy Carr play Deal Or No Deal cautiously for charity on Sunday night at 8pm with ease.
So to take us into Easter weekend, with the brief mention of The Hunger Games recently what better thing to look at then a one credit playthrough of hard as nails dystopian game show video game Smash TV? In particular this is the Super Nintendo Super Smash TV version. I’d buy that for a dollar! In fact I think we paid about £40 for it back in the day.
I wonder if it’s ever been one-lifed.
My college principal was so appalled by this game, she asked to have it removed from our common room.
But it was replaced with a pinball machine, so… you know.
I expect her main objection was it was quite difficult.
The Chase is being piloted for the US, apparently.
Ooh, interesting. I’d be very intrigued to find out who the US Chasers would be.
Buzzerblog has suggested this will be for Fox.
Swear words. They’ll ruin it, I swear.
(Not as badly as NBC, but with a slight adjustment to the money it’d go nicely on GSN)
That said, Ken Jennings was shopping a similar format a few years ago, so they might get him in as a Chaser. Seems like the most obvious choice.
This is the question though – would this actually work for an American audience in prime time? With the right host and Chasers, and following the British production decisions to the letter, it has the potential to be really good, but the speed of it, the need for the questions to be difficult and the contestants to be quite smart, and perhaps most of all the low win ratio might doom it from the very start. I’ll take off my cloak and put down my scythe now, thanks.
So I log on to Twitter and basically find that Brig and Alex have said the exact same things.
Can see the idea of the players keeping their money and then a million dollar final working quite well. Until the producers get desperate for a million dollar win, of course.
If I had to make a prediction – $5,000 per question in the money chase, $500,000 shared if they win the bonus round (thus allowing them to actually have some winners occasionally). Hope they can cast the contestants well.
And if they insist on having celebrity editions, for the love of all that is holy, let the Chaser pick an opposing charity and donate anything that isn’t won to that.
Okay, rant over. I’m quite attached to the Chase and I’d like it to do well but I just don’t have any faith in US game show producers…
Promos have begun on Challenge for Blockbusters. They feature people humming the theme tune, then Simon Mayo popping up saying “You know how it goes” followed by a quick burst of the refreshed theme tune. Sadly, no video, but the theme tune sounds really good.
Shamelessly pilfered from KeshiHeads:
A new episode of RFM is tomorrow in Japan, a 3 hour show and a conclusion of the current story format. Whilst we were all worried that that could be the end of the show, Fuji have rather brilliantly renewed their site: http://www.fujitv.co.jp/tosochu/index.html
and added this interesting tidbit: http://www.fujitv.co.jp/tosochu/battle.html
Sounds like a new game they’re going to try out! Interesting.
Better yet – the show has an official board game!
http://jbook.eshop.fujitv.co.jp/p/p.aspx/4195546/s/
You can watch it ‘live’ right now, until 1:54. Link in this post (I’ll have to remove it later):
http://bkeshiheads.runboard.com/t2017,offset=120#post316836
Cheers Dan!
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzA4MTUwMTA4.html
On the subject of Japanese stuff, here’s Quiz Hexagon II.
Expect 27 contestants, electric chairs, and not much sense.
I’m going to watch this tomorrow just to see if I can work out the rules.
I’d recommend watching another ep, because this one is the last ever one and so the last half is dedicated to tributes and crying.
Irrelevant personal news, I ran into Gordon Bellamy of the Million Dollar Mind Game video game developers team today. Fun guy.
Interesting scheduling move for the Cube…9:15pm next Saturday…head to head with MPD.
Also seems a short series (5 episodes) unless they’ve recorded more and are splitting them? Know there is a few celeb ones too.
I think they have recorded two series at once.. I don’t know when they’re planning in showing the Olympic Specials, although you’d presume it’d be close to the Olympics.
Here’s a clip from the Japanese version of Cash Cab uploaded to DailyMotion http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4nbag_yyyyyyyy-080308_fun
Why does he take his clothes off?
The contestant is comedian Yoshio Kojima, whose schtick includes always appearing in a swimsuit, even interviews.