Captnkurt! Come on down!

I don't know if you've ever watched The Price Is Right, but growing up in the 70's, game shows like this were about the only things on TV during the day that were semi-interesting for a kid to watch.

One of the perennial games on TPIR is called Race Game. A contestant is brought up and shown 4 prizes and four price tags. The challenge was to match the price up to the correct item. Once they made their guess, they came back and pulled the lever on this ginormous slot machine-looking thing that would flash the number of prices they got right. If they missed any, they had to keep going back and making changes. Oh, and they had only 60 seconds to get them all right.

What often happened was you got someone who had absolutely no clue. They're up there putting a $5,000 tag on a wicker chair and $300 on a speedboat. Maybe it was the bright lights and the shouting audience. Maybe it was nerves. Or maybe they were just morons. Who knows?



Anyway, watching the game when someone just totally at sea was pretty nerve-racking for the audience, not to mention the contestant. Invariably they initially would get one, maybe two correct, but then get flustered when they ran back to make changes. Usually they freaked out and blindly switched around two random tags and raced back to pull the hideously oversized one-armed bandit only to see they still had two right and two wrong.

It was usually at that point that things pretty much unravelled, and the befuddled player hemmed, hawed and generally agonized over trying to decipher which tags the audience was screaming for them to switch. They usually got in one last yank, only to find they had gone from two right to one or even zero correct.



"So?", you may be asking. "Your point is...?"

While playing this game called Star Chemistry, I felt just like one of those TPIR Race Game losers. Making crazy guesses, desperately trying to divine the right answer, but really doing nothing more than blindly stabbing in the dark.

In this game, you are shown a group of actors. How many depends upon the difficulty level you choose. In this example, I have chosen the medium level of difficulty. It wouldn't have mattered. I sucked on the Easy level, too. You job is to place each star next to one of the other stars they have appeared onscreen with. It works out so that it forms a little circle, with each actor appearing with each of his/her neighbors in a different film. It's a bit like The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon on steroids. By the way, that is another game I really, really suck at, but I know of a couple of friends, plus my very own Mrs. captnkurt that would totally wail on this game.



Although the Star Chemistry game was not my cuppa tea, the page listing the history of every single pricing game ever played on The Price Is Right (over 80) in the past 30-some years was pretty sweet.

(via Little Fluffy Industries)


Technorati tags: star chemistry, flash, game, celebrities, actors, hollywood, six degrees, kevin bacon, price is right