TPiRecap: 30 December 2010 (Best of 2010 Viewer's Choice Edition)

[TheKid965]

▲ To be totally honest, I had already made the Blogger page and set things up on the new format several days before I even knew the new boards were coming. If anything, I did it as a response to the increasing inadequacy of the old board to keep up with the formatting I needed to do the recaps properly. (Judicious use of the [color=#ffffff] tag and periods helped me "cheat" and get something akin to a properly-spaced layout for Contestant's Row and the like, but it was a royal pain to work with. Use of the special Unicode characters I'd adopted some months ago with my switchover to Ubuntu didn't work as well as I would've liked, since the characters didn't always display properly in Windows and that caused slight, but irritating discrepancies in formatting.)

The new boards are a major improvement, if anything, but this transition was planned well in advance. When I noticed the new boards still didn't (yet) have the table support I was after, I decided to go ahead with the Blogger route anyway on at least a trial basis, until the table plugin gets added here if nothing else.

Regardless, this was in the works well before the boards were upgraded. The one has nothing to do with the other.

[kaos42]

I thought it looked really cool. However, I was curious on the 1983 episode's Now & Then. Was the Reese's Peanut Butter Chips the "anachorism alert" of that game?

[TheKid965]

▲ Nope. Those existed in 1979 as well as '83; I have a contemporary game show in my collection that features a parting-gift plug with them. They didn't start (intentionally) putting anachronisms on the board until the early '90s or so, IIRC. Possibly earlier, but not by much.

I really don't like how Now....and Then came out at all. My attempt to recreate the circular gameboard just doesn't translate. When I do the game next I'll probably end up using a Match Game-like tiered setup, which still works for representing the six-wedge gameboard and is more suitable, visually, for this format. Temptation could also do with a tweak; it looked perfectly fine in OpenOffice.org when I laid it out, but Blogger did something strange to the "Eggcrate" portion of the display so that it no longer lined up perfectly with the four-cell ARP below it.

Ironically, Trader Bob -- a game that I won't be doing again unless I find another episode that featured it -- turned out the best so far. But the more I play with this (by doing TPiRetros and, eventually, once the daily grind starts up again on the 10th) the better I'm getting at it. One of the hardest parts so far, but also one of the most fun for me, is in trying to simulate the color schema of the various eras of the show; note especially the Contestant's Row displays and Showcase tables.