Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors

[nsps]

Hey, has anyone played this unreleased Sega CD "adventure" game that was apparently pulled several years ago after some gaming magazines already ran reviews?

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2006/02/28/penn_tel.shtml

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1667022&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

I haven't played it yet, but it sounds a bit like an absurdist anti-game a la "Bad Day on the Midway," in which you basically wandered around with no goal and explored the area until you died. The difference is that the main game is actually a goal-oriented adventure, but the mini-games were preposterous.

I don't know how fun the most famous part of the game would actually be to play, but its concept reminds me of the Thumbs news article from a while back on "Tetris 1D:"

The most infamous part was "Desert Bus," a "VeriSimulator" in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I'd read the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point.

[miffy495]

My god. That is so genius. Genius in the "How can we tortue players?" sense, not the good game sense, but genius nonetheless. I love Penn and Teller. Something tells me that they endorsed this out of sadism and just because they could afford to do so. all the way.

[nsps]

Yeah, there was a thing in one of those links to Penn's podcast in which he said that it was based on people who are attempting to prohibit free speech and censor video games. So his friend suggested a simulation of a boring drive that captures real life. Apparently the most exciting thing to happen is a bug that splats on the windshield. They were going to have some sort of high score contest and take people to Vegas.

Sometimes I like P&T and sometimes I don't. Their show "Bullshit!" lost a lot of credibility when it started practicing some bullshit of its own rather than sticking to the facts and talking to real experts, but some of their stuff is still quite funny. This game is, if nothing else, something amusing to talk about.

[MrChlorophyll]

I love stuff like that. One of my favourite occurances of something in this vein was when Andy Kaufman wanted to have a show where for that one episode the picture would be all on the fritz and generally wonky so people would be messing with their t.v. sets trying to fix it. Oh, what genius. Sadly, the network didn't let him do it. Son of a bitches.

[miffy495]

When do you think that Bullshit lost their credibility? I've only seen a couple of episodes of season three, but I quite liked the first two. They mess it up once in a while, but they tend to be aware of their bias and alert you to it. At least they don't fuck around pretending to be objective all the damn time.

[nsps]

Well, I think the very premise of the show implies that it is only concerned with the facts, and not bullshit. So when they turned out to be libertarian idealogues pushing a corporate-funded think-tank agenda, I felt betrayed.

I was very intrigued by some episodes that challenged my own beliefs and assumptions, but then I saw some episodes that I knew were not based on real science. After that, I did a little Google detective work and discovered that many of the political episodes featured no real scientists, only people who get paid to represent entities that support the Cato Institute style of corporate Libertarianism and inept, less-than-able representatives of the other side. Now I have trouble believing anything that I see on the show.

I find the show funny and thought-provoking at times, but must warn people not to watch it with the belief that P&T are cutting through bullshit spin, because they're actually slinging it.

I don't want to derail the topic with detailed discussion, but here's a blogger who breaks down some of the "experts" and misrepresentations that the show has perpetrated (start from the bottom entry—poor archival readability):

http://home.houston.rr.com/skeptical/arc20030401.html

(In short, this guy had previously endorsed the show, but caught it misleading on second-hand smoke's harm. He's a smoker, so he didn't care too much, but he started to notice it on more shows, with the environmental hysteria episode being the last straw.)