Game Show Garbage: Nick Arcade

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I know this show has tons of fans, past and present, but I have to
call them like I see them. What happens when you combine video games,
video puzzles, a balls-hard end game and one of the worst game show
hosts in TV history?

You get Nick Arcade! Check it all out at a brand new induction at
http://gameshowgarbage.clw83.com

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@GameShowGarbage

http://gameshowgarbage.clw83.com/nickarcade.html

Nick Arcade

Playing less video games than the Amish and the show is based around
video games?

Nickelodeon: (January 1992 - September 1993)

Game Shows that are based off of video games fit one of three
categories: Starcade, Arena, or completely horrible. After Starcade,
JM Productions tried to bring video games to real life with The Video
Game. It turned out to be one of the biggest train wrecks of the 80s
game show field. The problem was that they took away the video game
playing out of a game show that was supposed to be about video games.
The only times anybody played video games was the qualifier and the
bonus game, which was directly ripped from Starcade. I mention The
Video Game because in 1992, Nickelodeon completely carbon-copied the
problems of The Video Game and add so many other problems that it
forced my hand to induct it. What came of it was a mess that for some
odd reason has a huge following online. That mess is affectionately
known as Nick Arcade.

Now, if you've read my You're On induction you know who this goofy
smiling nimrod is. This is Phil Moore. He got his break in the
business by being the warm-up comedian for the lone Florida season of
Remote Control. The main thing I remember from that is the line "He
tells jokes, sometimes" from stagehand Chris Iller. The video might
still be up on YouTube. Here, he just gets on everybody's nerves
fast, especially with his Pai-yow's and his annoying non-rhyming
rhymes when they go to the Video Challenge area of the set or when
they go back to home base. It gets to the point where you want to
listen to Michael Cole's Commentary on Raw and Smackdown every week.

The show kicks off with a toss-up game. It's a game created by the
producers and from Psygnosis games. They were ok, but I'd rather have
them play actual games that we could go buy in a store and not Show-
only games. It's what really irked me about Hi Score's end game of
Dinky Bomb. Mainly they were bad versions of Pong, some lame form of
Missile Command and a generic run from left to right game where you
have to avoid several obstacles and whatnot. This was made worse by
Phil's annoying commentary. If you had a half-decent host in there,
it wouldn't be so bad, but it just gets bogged down hard.

Anyways, time for the meat of the game. The team that's in control
has to guide Mikey, a blatant rip-off of Mike from the Startropics
game, to the goal on a 3x6 grid. Each one of the boxes contain
various things, as Phil calls them the 4 P's.

Points, which just is what it says. Bonus points that get added to
your score.

Various video puzzles. Now this is where the show gets bogged down.
Most of the video puzzles take about 20 seconds to explain and another
30 seconds - 1 minute to play it all out. The puzzles vary from
guessing how many times X happens to trying to figure out what music
video is playing while the video is being distorted, to trying to find
3 of a kind out of 5 flashing images. While it was an interesting
idea, these questions fit more on Get The Picture or Think Fast rather
than a game that's supposedly about video games.

Pop Quizzes, which are multiple choice/regular questions that are
asked. These are fine, but still not about video games.

Prizes! These are standard Nick-fare bonus prizes. These are quite
good, and are an apt reward for finding them.

What they really did well are the enemies that, if hit, give control
to the other team. It's like a Wipeout, just that you don't lose any
points. Above is a video featuring them all. The most known is "Game
Over", the town bully and the Witch Doctor. The video that's above
shows them off. They are nicely done and probably are the best thing
about the show.

Now we finally talk about a video game matter in the Video
Challenges. This is where you expect the show to shine.
Unfortunately though, this is where it also falls apart. I bet you
that they never let the contestants play the games beforehand, so they
often didn't know what to do. That was one of the beauties of
Starcade and Video Power, they let the contestants play the games
before hand, so they didn't look like outright fools when they were
playing. It also doesn't help that Phil loved to do an annoying dance/
song number towards the area, which was on the other side of the
studio, eating up even more time. Usually, contestants would wander
aimlessly with no direction from Phil or their partner. Then again,
this is to be expected, since some of the games were for the Neo Geo
and the Turbo Grafx, which were only owned by rich kids or those who
lucked out in the early 90s and got them for $50, respectively.

The bonus game is just one big mess. While I give them credit for
doing something really inventive, it becomes a double edged sword due
to not allowing contestants to run through them in advance due to the
technicalities of it all, which is what doomed Nadine looking back at
it now. Either way, the contestants were put in front of a green
screen and had to wave their arms around and run around and "touch"
rings, humans, books, whathaveyou. It's so frustratingly bad that in
all of the episodes, only about 7 or 8 won the grand prize. That's' a
worse record than the Big Numbers on Wink Martindale's High Rollers
and that bonus game was much harder than this one. The biggest
problem out of all of this is that they would be touching the item,
but the computer wouldn't register. Now, you could make the argument
that this style of bonus game was way ahead of its time, but they
hyped this as their big selling point of the show. There should be no
flaws in it at all. That's like if the $100,000 Pyramid's bonus game
had you instead of trying to get your partner to say the category, you
had to get them to say them in conversational French. That's a
gigantic flaw. They had to go through 3 of these levels with the
grand prize being a trip to Universal or some electronic package. I
remember one prize being a commodore CD System, so that's a really
nice prize.

In conclusion, what could have been a fantastic show gets bogged down
by several things not associated with video games whatsoever, when the
show was about video games to begin with. The format is sluggish and
just boring to sit through up until the bonus round, which also can
get bogged down as well due to either unresponsive computers or
contestants not knowing what to do. The biggest problem of the show
is Phil Moore. He had no control over everything, he would often
bumble questions and his utter annoyance made me cringe. As a matter
of fact, this is the second show I blasted him in. This means...



That's right, Next Week - Phil Moore gets his just due here on Game
Show Garbage!