This submission is for the NES game show game Hollywood Squares. It's a game of celebrity tic-tac-toe where you are asked a question and must agree or disagree with the answer the celebrity provides after they make a usually unfunny or tasteless one-liner.
There are 3 rounds and when you win the game, you get to try your luck at winning a car.
The game operates on two different timers/framerules/whatever you want to call them. The question you get is determined when you pick the square you want to go for which is running in increments of 10 frames. The kicker here is that even though you can't choose the square the opponent goes for, you can influence their timing to make them get the question you want them to get, and the answer we want them to give. This is important because we need them to do our bidding for the whole run.
You can force their hand at answering correctly or incorrectly by hitting A or B during the window of "agree" or "disagree" (which are not strictly 10 frame windows) which is faster than letting them think about it, and better for us since we need to lose round 2.
Lose round 2?? Yep. You have to play all 3 rounds no matter what. We go first for rounds 1 and 3. CPU goes first for round 2, meaning the fastest way out of round 2 is to purposely lose. If we try to win it ends up taking 4 turns instead of 3 and that is just not good.
After all this is said and done, we get to go for the car, (there are 5 cars, and we want the first one for no menuing) which is influenced by the final question we get.
If you remember the show, you know that there were 5 keys and 5 cars, and you had to find the right combination of key and car. In this version the keys are completely meaningless, meaning you only need to pick the right car, which we manipped to be the first one, and that's all she wrote.
Samsara: Replacing submission file with an identical version that fixes the cycle count bug, and gosh I still cannot wait for BizHawk 2.9!
Two things come to mind when watching this run. First, I have permanently connected Hollywood Squares with the late great Gilbert Gottfried shouting YOU FOOL despite what I can only describe as a mountainous amount of time between me learning about that segment and now. Second, there is something weirdly uncomfortable about seeing "Bible," in quotes. Gametek was really on top of their game(tek) on that particular typographical decision, although I'm not quite sure that's a good thing. It's like the text version of the uncanny valley. Perhaps it's the uncanny valley of the shadow of death.
Anyway, this is a fast and fun little romp through a Gametek experience, definitely worthy of acceptance, but it did help me realize a small problem with our rules: While writing this judgement, I realized that we were still barring game show games from standard publication. In response, I have
corrected that error, and now I am actually able to accept this! Hooray!
