The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: Jeremy Nelson on September 01, 2022, 02:21:50 PM
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Including all versions (board games, video games, Tiger LCD games, etc) what is the worst home game adaptation you've ever played?
My vote goes to The Price is Right DOS game, though it might be so bad that it's downright entertaining. Extra props go to the designer who thought people who bought this game wanted to see a bloody corpse in a Cliffhangers loss.
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American Gladiators for NES.
I mean, there’s games that aren’t faithful to the source material, and then there’s…this.
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Fun House, with equal disdain for the PC game and the NES game.
What BFG said about Gladiators, applies as much, if not more, to both games.
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You mean there are people who don't want to see a bloody corpse after a Cliffhangers loss?
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Fun House, with equal disdain for the PC game and the NES game.
What BFG said about Gladiators, applies as much, if not more, to both games.
*Chris, although now that I'm here I would add the Gladiators physical versions of the show's games. I remember being pretty frustrated by the Eliminator home edition.
/A real treadmill, climbing net, and zipline in our apartment would've been badass tho
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My vote goes to The Price is Right DOS game, though it might be so bad that it's downright entertaining. Extra props go to the designer who thought people who bought this game wanted to see a bloody corpse in a Cliffhangers loss.
And apparently the mountain climber can't get up the mountain on his own accord, he needs an elk to push him up the mountain.
I just watched a YouTube playthrough of this game. A few of the highlights include Credit Card being played with a $20,000 truck as one of the prizes, Range Game played for a $115 necktie collection (good luck stopping that range in time), and One Right Price played for a $23 set of earrings and an $18 hairdryer.
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Press Your Luck: 2010 Edition by Ludia.
They took the time to consult game show fans for the best board setups to use, and the fans responded by linking them to fan sites that showed them the three values in each square. Unfortunately, the developers somehow took that to mean that there were only three different cycles on the board, which gave game players a screen with two Whammies, a screen with seven Whammies, and a screen with zero Whammies.
https://youtu.be/5KLZ4IgyD7o?t=397
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A few of the highlights include Credit Card being played with a $20,000 truck as one of the prizes
Fun fact, with credit to Scott: That truck can also show up as a small prize in Cliff Hangers.
Less fun fact: You can only type four digits in Cliff Hangers, so if the truck shows up, so will the bloody corpse.
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IIRC, all the prizes in the Wii PYL game were worth the exact same amount, too.
NES Family Feud had terrible sound and graphics, was extremely slow, and a question database that didn't differentiate between front game and Fast Money questions.
NES American Gladiators at least had some elements of the show. I don't even know what Fun House was supposed to be, other than an existing game the company already had in the pipeline, with some IP slapped on top.
Electronic standalone TPIR was a waste, except hey, fun little Plinko board.
I can't imagine anyone playing the big Plinko board to the included instructions or game material, and the manufacturing problems have been discussed here at length. Awesome when you put a little TLC into it, at least.
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Fun House for NES was a reskin of a game titled Out of Gas, which I think you can find for the Game Boy.
There are so many examples that were either unplayable in that state, a total non-sequitur or just not fun, but on a personal level $100,000 Pyramid for Sierra was toothachingly frustrating.
I can scarcely imagine what I would have to do to set up the copy of the Fort Boyard home game that made its way to the northwest corner of these United States.
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My vote goes to The Price is Right DOS game, though it might be so bad that it's downright entertaining. Extra props go to the designer who thought people who bought this game wanted to see a bloody corpse in a Cliffhangers loss.
I’ll give them credit for one thing—they tried to differentiate prizes from different merchants so it wasn’t simply guessing a number. I seem to recall a faux K-Mart having lesser-valued prizes vs. the ones from the faux Sears.
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I think most Ludia games could qualify for a worst list.
The worst of them all, I think, is the Pyramid game they made. I mean, holy hell, there is such a thing as too easy and this fell into that category.
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Even though I absolutely agree with PYL on the Wii being godawful, I think I will give this honor to Tiger's Name That Tune handheld:
-The crappy sound chip made it almost impossible to guess some songs
-You had to spell the song title EXACTLY as it was written for the game, spaces and all, or you are counted wrong and lose money. Any other game I have played where you typed answers had some leeway built in for spelling or spacing, like Jeopardy on the NES.
-You lose the value of tunes for incorrect guesses. No version of the show penalized you like this and thus incentivized not buzzing in unless you were 100% sure.
It was cool to have a home version of a game show that I never expected to be released in that format. But, of all the Tiger game show games I had, that was the worst, even though it was the only one I had that didn't require cards or a separate question book.
Anthony
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Press Your Luck: 2010 Edition by Ludia.
They took the time to consult game show fans for the best board setups to use, and the fans responded by linking them to fan sites that showed them the three values in each square. Unfortunately, the developers somehow took that to mean that there were only three different cycles on the board, which gave game players a screen with two Whammies, a screen with seven Whammies, and a screen with zero Whammies.
https://youtu.be/5KLZ4IgyD7o?t=397
It's amazing that after ALL these years, no professional developer has managed to come close to either Curt King's or Big Jon's homebrew versions of PYL. Ludia was so lazy about their product that they made every single prize worth $4000 in BOTH rounds. And Gamestar's board isn't much better.
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This goes way back but on the Apple II the Wheel of Fortune : Second New Edition had a painfully slow walk to Vanna. It felt like it'd take her forever to walk to where the letters lit up (Queued):
https://youtu.be/2IYW6ENneCs?t=219
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Adding to the old software releases - The $100,000 Pyramid released for the Commodore 64 was terrible. It was clear they developed the IBM PC version with its 4-color CGA graphics first and then duplicated those same 4-color displays to the C64, when they clearly could have taken better advantage of the 64's 16 colors. But the game itself was just bad. The main game would show you the answer you were trying to describe - but only accepted one word clues, so it becomes more of Password than Pyramid. The winner's circle was a fill in the blank game where the computer game a set of one word clues for the category. But it was glitchy. Spelling had to be exact, sometimes the words would mess up the graphics on the screen, etc.
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There are so many examples that were either unplayable in that state, a total non-sequitur or just not fun, but on a personal level $100,000 Pyramid for Sierra was toothachingly frustrating.
And this was the best version, IMO. I thought they did a commendable job on this one, especially considering it'd been off the air for nearly a decade. My only gripe was that the game would sometimes run an error message mid-game, and if you were in single player mode, you lost all your progress.
This goes way back but on the Apple II the Wheel of Fortune : Second New Edition had a painfully slow walk to Vanna. It felt like it'd take her forever to walk to where the letters lit up (Queued):
I still contend that the early NES versions of Wheel had the best Vanna animations. She walked at a brisk pace, the animations were smooth, and, short of Vanna having jaundice, they didn't detract from the game experience.
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Ludia was so lazy about their product that they made every single prize worth $4000 in BOTH rounds.
$3,000 in Round 1, $4,000 in Round 2 - and all trips. For whatever reason, they also made it so Big Bucks in Round 1 goes to a trip rather than Square #4. The PlayStation 3 version has a bigger variety of prizes and prize values.
As for my personal "worst I've played", that's Ludia's DS version. All the problems of the Wii game, plus the board layouts are haphazard, constantly change colors, and have extremely basic-looking cash spaces (I do like how the Touch Screen is used to buzz in/stop the light, though):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7GYmCHxZZg
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This goes way back but on the Apple II the Wheel of Fortune : Second New Edition had a painfully slow walk to Vanna. It felt like it'd take her forever to walk to where the letters lit up (Queued):
Well that's what you get when you make her wear a dress from The Handmaid's Tale.
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The winner's circle was a fill in the blank game where the computer game a set of one word clues for the category. But it was glitchy. Spelling had to be exact, sometimes the words would mess up the graphics on the screen, etc.
And sometimes the blank wasn't calling for the keyword. I recall once seeing "These are Christmas ________", and the answer to give was "Things".
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"Jackpot" gets my award for worst home version. Where did they get those "riddles" from anyway?
Of the more modern games, I would have to say H2 for Wii. I can overlook many of the PYL Wii issues, and still enjoy it. The H2 questions were written so poorly, and the bonus game is almost impossible to lose.
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"Jackpot" gets my award for worst home version. Where did they get those "riddles" from anyway?
I think it was Matt Ottinger who discovered that the terrible questions for Jackpot and the original High Rollers home game were repurposed clues from the Now You See It home game.
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Mine goes to the original board game version of Cullen TPIR - I only played it once; IIRC, each player had a set of cards with numbers from 1 to 15, and whoever "bid" the higher number won whatever was on the next prize card.
Runner-up is the original Milton Bradley version of Barker TPIR; the prices bared little resemblance to actuality - cars could range from $1023 to $9876. In addition, the IUFB game consisted of each player with cards from 1 to 6, and whoever played the highest card not matched by another player won.
MB Family Feud gets an honorable mention; all games were single-single-double, so if you won the first two and got control of the third, you played, and intentionally got three strikes to make it impossible for the other team to win.
(Bonus question: the box art had a game in progress - what was the question? Name a man's first name that begins with R)
Also, Password, but that gets an asterisk; pretty much all it had was pairs of cards with identical 5-word lists, a pair of red lenses so you could only see one word on a card at a time, and a dial that could be set from 1 to 10...but when you think about it, that's all that Password was.
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The worst "board game" home game for me was The $1,000,000 Chance of a Lifetime. For a big money game show, it was quite cheaply produced. It was also sort of a revelation to me how much it resembled the Wheel of Fortune home game.
In terms of video game home games... the PYL DVD game was awful simply because it didn't work. A close second place was Fun House for the NES... the Fun House itself was NOTHING like the game show.
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Don—the TPIR game is just a version of what has been produced ss Raj.
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The worst "board game" home game for me was The $1,000,000 Chance of a Lifetime. For a big money game show, it was quite cheaply produced. It was also sort of a revelation to me how much it resembled the Wheel of Fortune home game.
Did you think you were going to win a million dollars? What would you have done differently?
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Also, Password, but that gets an asterisk; pretty much all it had was pairs of cards with identical 5-word lists, a pair of red lenses so you could only see one word on a card at a time, and a dial that could be set from 1 to 10...but when you think about it, that's all that Password was.
What else did you expect, a cardboard cutout of Allen Ludden?
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Adding to the old software releases - The $100,000 Pyramid released for the Commodore 64 was terrible. It was clear they developed the IBM PC version with its 4-color CGA graphics first and then duplicated those same 4-color displays to the C64, when they clearly could have taken better advantage of the 64's 16 colors.
This was honestly one of the ones I was so very excited about, and let down the most. Mind you, I was around 13 or 14 when this game came out, so expectations were unrealistically high. Remembering how games like "Summer Games" had the runner's time in what looked like LED numbers, I was fully expecting this game to also have that for the main game and winner's circle timer. I was extremely disappointed.
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The worst "board game" home game for me was The $1,000,000 Chance of a Lifetime. For a big money game show, it was quite cheaply produced. It was also sort of a revelation to me how much it resembled the Wheel of Fortune home game.
Did you think you were going to win a million dollars? What would you have done differently?
I realize that Million Dollar COAL only lasted two seasons, but I would've liked a keyboard-like gameboard to actually push the buttons. The home game, you slid the letters either up or down to reveal where to reveal the letter on the gameboard. Cyndi Seidelman reviewed the game a while ago and I think she would agree with me. If the game became a bigger hit, I think a more upscale version could've been fun, like they did with Deluxe Wheel of Fortune. I thought that wheel and the removeable wedges was awesome... never did get myself a copy of that game though. The upscale COAL game, I think, should have a lighted keyboard, and maybe a backlit puzzle board... maybe even the sound effects, especially for the stinger. In hindsight, I should've counted the paper money to see if it totaled a million dollars.
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Matt: board games generally only have a profit margin of about one percent. Each new gewgaw adds cost and reduces the likelihood that a prospective buyer will pick it up off the shelf. If one person grabs it for the light-up game pieces but two put it down, that’s lost money, Yes, everything is wax paper, cardboard and plastic, but there’s a reason for that.
I wonder if the Cardinal company produced those long boxes at such a qupuantity that the $25,000 Pyramid game wound up that size too. It certainly didn’t need the Monopoly or Mouse Trap box.
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Also, Password, but that gets an asterisk; pretty much all it had was pairs of cards with identical 5-word lists, a pair of red lenses so you could only see one word on a card at a time, and a dial that could be set from 1 to 10...but when you think about it, that's all that Password was.
What else did you expect, a cardboard cutout of Allen Ludden?
A little while ago, a more upscale version of Password came out with a golden score indicator and other nice upgrades. Betty White and Allen Ludden appear on the box cover. IMO it was a lot of effort and money put into something so simple.
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Matt: board games generally only have a profit margin of about one percent. Each new gewgaw adds cost and reduces the likelihood that a prospective buyer will pick it up off the shelf. If one person grabs it for the light-up game piec3 but two put it down, that’s lost money, Yes, everything wax paper, cardboard and plastic, but there’s a reason for that.
I wonder if the Cardinal company produced those long boxes at such a qupuantity that the $25,000 Pyramid game wound up that size too. It certainly didn’t need the Monopoly or Mouse Trap box.
I still say the board game for COAL is VERY cheaply produced, but when I was responding to what I would've done, I realize of course a casual fan of the show would be okay with the cheap, plastic letter board. My family was not nearly as absorbed in game shows as I was, and honestly, I don't recall ever playing this game with them. I related very well with that kid in the TV show The Middle, where he tries to get his family to play home games of various game shows. No one really wants to play these games, but a few reluctantly do it anyway... that was ME growing up!!
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With mentioning box size as a factor, a lot of those early games used size to make people think they were getting their $2.98 or $3.98's worth. Among those who designed games to fill the box was Lowell. Even though they're among some of my favorites, they did some odd things to make something out of next to nothing. Some key examples are I've Got A Secret, Strike It Rich, and You Bet Your Life. I just read the rules to IGAS for the 5th time, and they're finally getting clearer. No better, but clearer. Using the giant "selector spinner" to determine which player will have the secret and who will be the panelists is very time consuming - not to mention it's possible for a lucky player to have the "secret" several times. The spinner takes up nearly half the insides. It would be easier to just rotate players taking turns as having the "secret"...and you'd have a lot of box space to fill. The IGAS home game is among the most awkward projects. Panel games tend to be problematic anyway, as they don't come with a package of "instant wit and charm." IGAS attempts to manufacture the humor with their made-up secrets, which can wear thin.
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Matt: board games generally only have a profit margin of about one percent. Each new gewgaw adds cost and reduces the likelihood that a prospective buyer will pick it up off the shelf. If one person grabs it for the light-up game piec3 but two put it down, that’s lost money, Yes, everything wax paper, cardboard and plastic, but there’s a reason for that.
I wonder if the Cardinal company produced those long boxes at such a qupuantity that the $25,000 Pyramid game wound up that size too. It certainly didn’t need the Monopoly or Mouse Trap box.
I still say the board game for COAL is VERY cheaply produced, but when I was responding to what I would've done, I realize of course a casual fan of the show would be okay with the cheap, plastic letter board.
I don't remember much about the home game, but as a child I do recall being pretty disappointed by the plastic keyboard. Granted I don't know how they could've made a cost-effective computer keyboard, but I was 6 at the time. :P
Having played CoaL on a Zoom stream a couple years ago I realize it actually wasn't a bad home game, even if Wheel's home game puzzle board was a lot snazzier.
/The contestant application was cool tho
//Even though I got the game well after the show's cancellation
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"Jackpot" gets my award for worst home version. Where did they get those "riddles" from anyway?
I think it was Matt Ottinger who discovered that the terrible questions for Jackpot and the original High Rollers home game were repurposed clues from the Now You See It home game.
Several of us worked together to finally figure out the connection between High Rollers and Now You See It.
The Jackpot riddles were definitely written for the Jackpot game, but probably not by Bob Stewart's staff. The riddles were way too hard for regular game play. They're the kind of punny riddles you tell as jokes, the kind that aren't supposed to be figured out by the other person. ("I'm what you look for on the bus." "Deceit". Get it?)
In the seventies, Milton Bradley was in a hurry to put out product, and quality control took a back seat to just putting stuff in colorful boxes and onto shelves.
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Mine would have to be "The Baby Game"... I went through the entire stock at the store, and couldn't find **one** that actually included the baby. Which you really need, in order to play the game.
- Kevin
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In regard to the "cheapness" of COAL, look, you're not getting a light-up keyboard. It's 1986, and game show games with light-up functions are either the Quizzard in $OTC or those tiny lights running off a 9-volt in Electric Jeopardy, and both of those are toward the luxury end of the board game spectrum. A board with 27 responsive light-up keys would be prohibitively costly.
That said, the puzzle board itself was cheap. A wipe-off board with a crayon, and not even a couple of plastic legs to prop it up. Put that next to the standard Wheel of Fortune home game at the time, and it was easy to see which one would be more "worth" your $12.99 or whatever. Also, I don't think there was any play money included at all. I remember making my own for it.
Even with the cheap-outs in production, though? Still a fun game to play, which is more than can be said about a good number of others in this topic.
Also, strangely, while COAL only got one "edition" of a home game, that appears to have been made with three different "versions" of the keyboard. There's the one pictured on the back of the box, with opaque plastic and the raised sliding letter "buttons." There's one where the plastic buttons get replaced with printed cardboard rectangles you punch out from a sheet. And there's a third that uses a flimsier, clear plastic to lay the cardboard letters on, which is the version I got as a kid. Search for the game on eBay and you'll see the differences in the listings pretty quickly.
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I am thirty-five yers late, but a sheet of laminate over the puzzle console or Wheel’s Used Letter BoarD would have been great, though I don’t remember dry erase markers being easy to find.
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Matt: board games generally only have a profit margin of about one percent. Each new gewgaw adds cost and reduces the likelihood that a prospective buyer will pick it up off the shelf. If one person grabs it for the light-up game piec3 but two put it down, that’s lost money, Yes, everything wax paper, cardboard and plastic, but there’s a reason for that.
This is exactly why I'm annoyed, but understand why Pressman has been manufacturing the exact same Wheel box game for nearly 40 years. Larger puzzleboards and additional bells and whistles won't really convince someone to spend an extra $10 on it when all you're really trying to do is maximize the profit on what I'm guessing is a costly license to own.
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The main game would show you the answer you were trying to describe - but only accepted one word clues, so it becomes more of Password than Pyramid.
Or Million Dollar Password, then?
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Also, I don't think there was any play money included at all. I remember making my own for it.
Board Game Geek (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10319/1000000-chance-lifetime-game) shows a (prototype?) version with play money and a "$1,000,000 Bill" at the very end of the slideshow. I'm leaning towards prototype, as the play money says TELEPICTURES CORPORATION, which had merged with Lorimar by the time the show premiered. Plus the box art looks really, really generic.
/Cool that the back of the million dollar bill shows what looks like the pilot set
//I definitely would've noticed that at 6 years old
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Also, I don't think there was any play money included at all. I remember making my own for it.
Board Game Geek (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10319/1000000-chance-lifetime-game) shows a (prototype?) version with play money and a "$1,000,000 Bill" at the very end of the slideshow. I'm leaning towards prototype, as the play money says TELEPICTURES CORPORATION, which had merged with Lorimar by the time the show premiered. Plus the box art looks really, really generic.
/Cool that the back of the million dollar bill shows what looks like the pilot set
//I definitely would've noticed that at 6 years old
I just dug out my home game--my million-dollar bill has Telepictures. (Cardboard squares keyboard, if you're wondering.)
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All I have in my copy of Lifetime is a casting call for couples. No money. Not even a coupon for Corn Bran.
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Oh man, that bill is an excellent mix of cool and cheesy and would definitely have had a place of honor had I gotten one with my box.
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The '80s Hollywood Squares home games from MB. Even setting aside that adapting HS to home play is kind of pointless to begin with, the Xs and Os were these flimsy colorform-like stickers that basically became unusable after just a few playings.
No "love" for the first Endless TPiR game, which was just a straight-up re-skin of the '80s MB edition? They didn't even bother to update the prices, resulting in the absurdity of playing Any Number for a $6000 car in 1998...
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The worst home game I have played is Milton Bradley's PDQ. Both teams play on the same game board so when a team takes a lead there is no incentive to use helpful letters so as to hinder the opposing team . The solution is set up separate gameboards for the teams and a barrier so the teams can't see each other's boards. An emcee with a timer would make the teams adhere to time limits.
I admit I think Jackpot by Milton Bradley and Finders Keepers (with its empty boxes you are expected to fill in order to play) by Cardinal and both pretty bad but I haven't played either.
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I admit I think Jackpot by Milton Bradley and Finders Keepers (with its empty boxes you are expected to fill in order to play) by Cardinal and both pretty bad but I haven't played either.
I actually played Jackpot once, as prescribed by the rules, dividing the wallets as equally as possible among who we had. It actually worked quite well...until we wanted to play game 2, and now 15 cardboard folders each needed a tiny slip of paper from the endless sheets of perforated riddles. We put it away.
Perhaps a design like Jeopardy! or Concentration, in which an entire game lived on a single sheet of paper, would have sufficed. Sure, there's potential for wasted material, but I've finally realized at this stage in my life that we'd never play anything often enough to exhaust the Q&A.
-Jason
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Finders Keepers (with its empty boxes you are expected to fill in order to play)
That explains why I never understood the game as a child. I cosign this tho.