Videogames and Misc. Topics Discussion

[Mike Bentley]

Discuss videogames and everything under the 3/3 other in this topic.

[stevebahnaman]

Could you post a list of the Videogames questions like you did for the sports questions, so I can see if one thing I thought was in fact accurate?

[Mike Bentley]

Mario & Donkey Kong / Ms. Pac-Man
Frogger / Punch-Out
Total War / Revived Series
Virtual Boy / PS2 Launch
Burnout / NCSoft MMOs
Max / WiiWare
Game Gear / Golf Games
Skies of Arcadia / Fighting Games
Dracula / NFL2k series
Activision / Flight Simulators
Bomberman / Games set in London
Silent Hill 2 / Mega Man X
Dark World / 2.5D Games
Hockey Games / FFXIII
Ghostbusters / Expansion packets
Killzone 2 / Riven
Dante / Disney Games
Trauma Center / Casual Gaming Sites
Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time / Ubisoft Games
Laserdisc / Modern Warfare 2

Looking back, I think I did a poor job suppressing my interests. Things that I obviously like (older videogames, especially of the 16-bit era; platformers) came up too frequently while things I don't like as much (PC Games; AAA 360/PS3 titles) didn't come up enough. I also shouldn't have indulged myself quite so much with some of these questions (e.g. Laserdisc, Ghostbusters, Dracula and Virtual Boy).

The counter-argument, I guess, is that some of the "popular" modern games ended up being more difficult than tossups on older series like Bomberman or whatever. For instance, I think the conversion rate of Killzone 2 and A Crack in Time was pretty low and I'd be relatively surprised if there were a lot of people getting early buzzes on questions like Trauma Center.

[stevebahnaman]

I wondered whether Killzone 2 was a particularly good tossup answer choice given that recent games tended not to show up much anyway.

I wonder if the problem you mention would have benefitted (like most non-submission tournaments probably would) from a tournament-wide distro where you followed "2-2 X360/PS3, 4-4 PC with at least 2-2 after 2000..." and did it that way. NAQT does this I think. Did you do anything like that, or was it more of an eyeball thing?

[Demonic Leftovers]

The overabundance of video game questions on your favorite topics was definitely noticed and commented on by my team. As for the modern video games questions (which is what I know the best) I thought they were ok. I got Killzone 2 because I played it and if we had played the finals I could have gotten the A Crack in Time question. However I agree these were probably too hard. I think the solution is too make these on series or notable characters or other aspects from these series. Turn Killzone 2 into a Killzone question and the A Crack in Time question into a question on Ratchet or Clank. I would have liked to see more balance between modern and old videogames.

[gregpweinstein]

I agree with your assessment of your video game questions. Luckily, for my team I was playing with John Kilby but usually I am okay on video games due to my interest the past 10 years, but there was a definite shift towards the 90s and more nintendo and other systems of the sort as opposed to playstation and xbox, which I always thought a distribution would be 1/4, 1/4, 1/4, and 1/4 for the respective big 3 and the extra for pc and systems that have died out, but which were prevalent. Either way I am not able to comment on the difficulty or accessibility of the questions that you did write.