Secret Island Discussion

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Auroni
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Secret Island Discussion

Post by Auroni »

So that happened. My goals for this set was to reward people for playing video games while at the same time writing fun questions that people could laugh about. Despite the tournament ending up too hard and a few dumb errors creeping in, I think I accomplished both objectives.

I've sent a request to Mike to put the set on Wastebin, but email or message me if you want it before that happens.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by grapesmoker »

This was super fun! Thanks for doing this.

Errata: as I mentioned yesterday, the "standing on a scroll of scare monster" clue, which I believe was the first clue in the Rogue tossup, also applies to NetHack.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by Cheynem »

I had a lot of fun with this set. There were a few too many questions on sequels, but I loved the mix of answerlines and genres.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by Cody »

grapesmoker wrote:Errata: as I mentioned yesterday, the "standing on a scroll of scare monster" clue, which I believe was the first clue in the Rogue tossup, also applies to NetHack.
I don't really know. When I heard the clue, I thought it was a roguelike, but I ruled out modern ones due to the phrasing as "scare monster scroll" rather than "scroll of scare monster". To be fair, that's very easy to confuse when hearing the question. However, standing on a scroll of scare monster in Nethack doesn't make you invincible since mobs that don't respect Elbereth will disregard it.

I really liked the Rogue question and was very pleased to hear it.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by adosreme »

Thanks for the great tournament, Auroni. I was pretty much there to back up Jay, but was excited to hear a question on Heroes 3, which is probably my favourite PC game ever.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by Harpie's Feather Duster »

This was great, would definitely play again.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by Ike »

This was a really fun tournament. I enjoyed the difficulty of questions and the wide breadth of coverage. It was obvious to me that Auroni put in a lot of time watching LP's and actually playing games to produce playable questions and I appreciate that. I hate it when people write tossups on Burger King using video games as if people who care about games actually care about bullshit like that - this tournament did a good job of avoiding that. Unlike Mike Cheyne, I think this tournament did focus enough on sequels. Many sequels are far superior to their original game or just so bizarrely different that they are different beasts in of themselves that they deserve attention.

There were a couple of quibbles that I had with the tournament philosophy, and I'm going to discuss them here. I just want to warn you that the rest of this post reads like a Sketch to a Poetics of Video Games Tossups document, so don't waste your time unless you are interested in such things.

I think some of this tournament's answer lines were tough to pull. The most obvious example to me being the Banshee Boardwalk question. It's a level from a game that most of us haven't played since the early 2000's, and given how unlike some of quizbowl's other topics (such as literature) where Things Have Names, you don't go around talking about Banshee Boardwalk with your friends as you might discuss This Side of Paradise with your friends after having read it. That means that, unfortunately, for the most of us (barring speedrunners and people who watch speedrunners), we only remember the level's essence and not really its name, unless that level's name was grilled into our memory. So unless that level is in lots of sequels or remakes, or otherwise really famous, most people are going to botch its name...and I'd try to dodge this issue when writing.

Games get remade a lot. I would have buzzed in and said Super Mario Advance for Super Mario Bros 2 and pwned Jerry to said question, because that's the version I played. I'm not sure if you would have taken that answer, but it might be a good idea to accept any remakes / ports in the future, and announce at the beginning of the tournament that remakes are acceptable. As a larger point, that just goes to show the unfortunately ephemeral nature of games right now.

Some of the leadins, I thought, were not really helpful. A lot of the leadins seemed to be clued towards speed runners who are trying to glitch their way through the game. That's not really helpful, for the most of us - if the game was pre-2004, we are relying on 10 year old memories and can only remember the most salient parts of the game. One of the reasons we're doing like 60% common links for ACFNATIONALS is that we want our TU pyramid to go from major details of somewhat obscure game -> major/minor details from well-played game, but not too much on minor details from every game so that you have to remember everything from everything.

I would try to avoid being coy in pretty much aspect of this tournament. As an example I think in that Sonic Adventure 2 tossup, which (I only played as Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, the remake - to stress an earlier point) you described a chao kindergarten by saying that they are blue creatures and have a namesake kindergarten. I don't remember what the kindergarten is by name, but I spent countless hours doing chao related shit: Salient and unique non-coy clues that I remember for example are that, they can be onyx, topaz, and peridot colored and have a watermelon on their head, but they also can be evolved into Immortal devils, immortal angels and immortal neutral types - which are much, much, more memorable ~and less coy~ than the clues given. I'm sure there were other tossups that featured clues that I would go "oh yeah, I remember that!" now that I read it and have the answer line in front of me, and in general I wished this tournament activated more triggers in my brain than let slip a couple of games that I have played. I don't know if this is because you haven't played the games themselves and just couldn't devote 20 hours to every question, but it's just worth throwing out there for the next time.

As I told Mike Sorice, I'd play any video game tournament that comes up because they are just so much fun. I apparently suck at remembering portions of my childhood. Again, thanks Auroni for writing this tournament! As a favorite aside: The Yukon Trail question really made my day when I finally got over my incredulity that it was being tossed up.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by Tejas »

Thanks for writing this, Auroni, I really enjoyed it. In particular, I liked the balance between harder answers on very famous games (Red XIII, Jabu Jabu's Belly, Pikachu, etc.) and those on lesser known games. Only criticism I had was that there were a few tossups on sequels (Burnout 3, Spyro 2) that may have been better asking for the series or a character in them. I'd love to play a video game tournament anytime, I hope there are more like this.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by Lagotto Romagnolo »

This was a really fun tournament. Thanks for writing it Auroni!

EDIT: I'm not a big fan of long lists of 'tossups that I liked', but I'll make an exception here: the End of Time, the Midnight Channel, Carmen Sandiego Word Detective even though I screwed up the title, hanar, and "would you kindly".
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

This was really fun and I had a good time playing it! I do agree with Ike that there were a lot of coy early clues that were pretty hard to recognize and buzz on at game speed, but that's certainly not the worst problem for a set to have and it didn't impede my enjoyment too much.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by The Ununtiable Twine »

Thanks so much for writing this! It was unfortunate that I didn't get a chance to play this over the summer. It was definitely a fun set to play and interestingly enough the secret mirror that was just held may actually result in Ramapriya and I collaborating on a video game tournament. It's always a blast to play in videogame-based tournaments.
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Re: Secret Island Discussion

Post by Auroni »

I never actually responded to this, but I took a lot of what Ike posted to heart. I only had direct experience with a small fraction of these games representing a pretty niche set of interests. For the remainder, I had to rely on a combination of walkthroughs, LPs, and FAQs. Therefore, it was pretty easy to miss out on well-known moments or moments that captured the "gist" of a given title, since I couldn't spend the needed amount of time with each game to write a really polished tossup on each one. In some cases, this struggle resulted in the creation of a fundamentally flawed question (the protagonist of GTA 3, who's not actually named in the game itself.) I think that if I do this in the future, it would need a much longer gestation period, and would require a lot of active playing on my part.

I also think that the set ended up a lot harder than I wanted it to be, since I went pretty deep not only into the pool of influential games, but also within famous games (that Silent Hill nurse scene was a terrible idea, sorry for that), but I'm glad that people found it zany and fun in spite of that.
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