We’re going to spend too much time this week playing this:
(How we did - Q1: Wrong, Q2: Right, Q3: Realised we’d pressed the wrong button just after selecting ‘A’. We’ve got better at it since.)
1 vs 100 on Xbox Live. Massively multiplayer online quizzing fest, with UK-only and Europe-only flavours. It’s free to play if you’ve got an Xbox Live Gold account, and you can win prizes along the lines of Xbox Live Points, XBLA games (of Microsoft’s choosing, annoyingly) and if you’re really, really good at it – seriously, must-be-cheating-or-a-robot surely properly good – a car. There are even themed ‘matches’, like Extra Hard (which we scraped 59% at), Trivia (around 70%, we think) and Football (hasn’t happened yet, but we confidently predict at least 98%),
It’s really rather good, and hopefully all the creases will be ironed out later on. Such as?
- - Not giving you a rundown of your performance at the end of the quiz
- - Not allowing you to see a list of your previous scores, even though they are recorded to get your lifetime score
- - Only putting you in a group with people on your friends list if you’re really lucky, and then probably only one of them
- - Not telling you your overall rank
- - Stupid, clearly wrong multiple choice options (genuine example: “Which member of the Monty Python team played the King in the Shrek movies? John Cheese, John Cleese, or John Squeeze?”)
If you see BrokenTV on there (that’s our gamertag, not just us talking in the third person due to an increasingly tired running joke), do say hello. Or indeed, add us to your friends list, as long as you don’t expect us to play Left 4 Dead or anything. We’re quizzers, not fighters..
Earlier this evening, the random-groups-of-four-o-mizer has put us up against Brig of the spiffing Bother’s Bar for a couple of games. Aggregate score of what we’ve decided to call The Grand 1vs100 Xbox Live TV Blog Classic: Bother’s Bar – 1, BrokenTV – 1. Will 1 vs 100 give us the chance to claim the overall (imaginary) crown? Keep tuned to this station.
7 .:
It was great fun, and much more fun against someone you know.
Anyone reading can add me (Brig Bother) if they'd like some possible hot quiz action, or somesuch.
It's just a pity that the main Live Show is on Friday night, because get me and my exciting life, I'm usually out. Still though.
I'd be intrigued to see if it does give its big prizes away, the mob is generally chosen to have decent players in it, and The One might get the three helps, but he doesn't get a three question headstart they effectively get in the UK version. So you're already up against people who can prove themselves. Technically the gambles get less worthwhile he longer you last, but actually the top prize is far and away worth more than 10,000 Microsoft points, so.
The US show deviates from the original Dutch by quite a long way, and it's perhaps telling that none of the countries that adapted the US version of the format ("money or the mob!") still exist. It's sort of a shame, I don't love their version of the format, but it used to have some clever and brilliant queston writing for its first season, dumbed down for season two.
Given the way most of the questions in the 'ultra hard' quiz seemed to be answered correctly by at least 40% of the participants*, any prizes would be generally deserved. If only there was a Facebook-style way of seeing how everyone else on your friends list fared in quizzes you've taken. Giving them the option to opt-out of the list should they prefer, natch.
(*Now statistically, if only 20% of people know the answer and everyone else guesses with a 33.3% chance of success, you'd arrive at a figure above that, but shh.)
Going by the rules - http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/live/1vs100/game_rules.htm - , it seems the more skilled players are likely to be chosen as The One and The Mob, which will certainly make things interesting as time goes on.
This is really fun. Will be interesting to see how it develops.
Stats - can you not get the stats you're after by pressing Back at the end of the game? I'm not sure myself, like.
Brig Bother - I'll add you. I'm Alan Arndale.
One last, geeky thing. Any idea why embedded youtube videos on BrokenTV don't work in Google Reader, yet do in every other feed I subscribe to? I just get a black window with "An error occured. Please try again later". This is on a Mac running the Firefox 3.5 btw.
The only reason I can think of for embedded YouTube videos not working is that I'm using Windows Live Writer to update the blog (as opposed to Blogger's web-based interface). Live Writer includes a handy function where you can just paste a YouTube URL into the general edit page (as opposed to adding the HTML YouTube code into the HTML page), but which does seem a little buggy.
I've changed the code of the 1vs100 video to the original YouTube embed code now, so it should hopefully work. If it doesn't, then, erm... I'm not sure.
Also, from what I remember, I think you can get the stats if you're quick at the end of a game, but only the same type of statistics you get during the Stat Breaks. Even then, you need to be quite quick - once you're dumped back into the lobby, I think you're only able to get your overall stats, such as lifetime score.
I strongly suspect that things like the "friends score tables" will only come along after the game comes out of beta, at which point it'll probably cost a few MS points to play.
We're already getting repeat questions, which is a bit of a shame. 222 questions a night, about 1110 a week. I've never been very fond of question setting, so I don't know exactly how hard that would be to keep up, but a quickfire quiz telly show can get through 100+ on a daily basis so it should be possible to go a season without a repeat.
And goodness knows what the theme for He Said She Said was.
Isn't it tomorrow night's round (well, looking at the time, tonight's) that features "user generated questions"? Heaven knows what they'll be, but maybe that'll provide the XBLA QuizMaster with a lot of spares.
Good point about the repeated questions, though. It's not as if the game is on a disc spinning around the console, it's all handled centrally. Wonder how many of the questions are being re-used from the US version of online 1vs100.
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