Jay Smith, the guy responsible for the Super Password site, launched his Game Show Download Page, which includes Scrabble, Blockbusters, Lingo, and of course, Super Password. They are all very fun to play, and come with saves for returning champions. Here's the link:

http://www.super-password.com/ctvgsd/news.html

It's also a nice extra that blockbusters players have a choice of 8 or 9 different colors to play as, other than the customary red and white.

Have Fun!

Even though I might be the only board member with a Mac (but probably not) these gaves worked for me under the latest Java app that ships with OS 10.4. So if you have a Mac, these games should work for you.

Excellent job!

Not even close!

Page bookmarked. Downloading SP. Thanks!

These look nice, and it's obvious that a lot of effort went into them. Still, while I hate to be one of those nit-pickers, what's the deal with square boxes on the Blockbusters board? Are hexagons really that hard to program?

I'm wondering if it's more an issue with connection detection (as it were) than it is the actual graphical issues. Checking a 5x5 array for five in a row is easy. Checking for a top-to-bottom or side-to-side connection on a hex grid is somewhat harder.

(EDIT: Hmm. Sez on the page that he's still checking for a connection, not just a five-in-a-row. Teh weird.)

But yeah, from what little I saw, they're pretty. I may have a look at them later on today.

*cough* What about me? :)

Seriously, I'm glad I can finally run a computer game show program without having to whip out Virtual PC.

Those are all really excellent and accurate versions of the real shows themselves. I hope he can get around to doing more in the future. I especially like the Super Password and Scrabble ones.

It's kinda funny (or weird/shocking, I'm not sure which), that I noticed the sound effects for the Scrabble Sprint round came from Sang's go-around. Oh boy... ;)

Well, you guys, I am Jay Smith, the one who created all the games and the webmaster of CTVGSD, and the Super Password page webmaster So I'm here to answer all your questions. I just joined when I heard you guys talking about my games!

wheelloon, YES, the Sprint sound effects ARE from Sang's Sprint Round, I taped from the gscentral.net real video of his round.

I don't have any episodes of Scrabble on tape, unfortunately, so my sound resources were limited. I did the best I could, though.

As far as the Blockbusters not having the hexagon boards is concerned, clemon79, you're exactly right. The connection method construction process would be very long and confusing and there could be tens or hundreds of combinations that would lead to a connection. The square methods, I thought would be more interesting. If you have ever seen the end game of the short-lived TRUMP CARD, that's almost a carbon copy as to how to play it.

BTW, guys, I always update my games and correct them if there are any problems. So far, two minor ones with Blockbusters (with the gold run) and Super Password (with the game freezing) and if you want, download them again and the problems should be corrected.

All the games took me a long time to do. SUPER PASSWORD took me 9 months to complete. BLOCKBUSTERS 2.5 months, LINGO 3 months, and SCRABBLE 1.5 months.

I have got to work @ Scrabble to get the One-Letter rule in the front game, as well as for the fifth and last word in a round, should I have the game go to a speedword? Right now, I do. I haven't updated the game yet.

Cheers and thanks everybody for the good feedback!

Jay

Other games I might do include WHAMMY! the all new Press Your Luck, Classic Concentration, and Bumper Stumpers, or whatever somebody proposes to me.

The ONLY potential downside to the bingo format of Blockbusters is the very real possibility of a tie. I remember I tried to do Hex in Turbo Pascal, and it was a fugging bear to do all the checks and whatnot. I can understand why you went the other way.

Seems to me it could be done as a tree. I can't see it being THAT much harder than connecting on a bingo card. But Travis makes a good point: one of the major reasons for it being hexes is that there is no possibility of a tie game that way.

Actually, there won't be a tie in the game, because it can be won one of two ways, by getting five up and down, across, or diagonally OR if one player gets 13 out of the 25 in their color.

Also, for the gold run game, when you're giving answers to clues, DO NOT use any punctuation marks, no hyphens, apostrophes, commas, or anything. I'm going to work on the game so it accepts answers with punctuation marks and ones without, in case something like that occurs.

I don't think it's in quite the same league as a Bingo check. Actually, I wonder if the fastest way might not be to check for when the potential *losing* player no longer has a possible path.

I just got to downloading them and have played SP so far. These are GREAT games! It would be really cool to see DoND in the near future. :-)

Keep up the great work!!!

Ah, okay, then it _is_ simplified. The site implies that you're trying to connect one side to the other, it doesn't suggest that it has to be in a straight line. So, yeah, the bingo check code is WAY easier to write.

The problem with such a setup is that it's not too terribly hard for it to turn into a situation where nobody can satisfy the bingo win condition in the first ten or twelve squares, and then it's just a boring race to 13.

Not to knock your game, which I'm sure you've very proud of and is a programming feat I certainly couldn't pull off. But out of programmatical necessity you kinda yanked out a big part of what makes Blockbusters good.

Not like there's not a couple dozen DoND games out there already. I personally don't like games like those...they lack 0 suspense...and why the hell shouldn't I go all the way? Do people really puff up with pride when they "win" $400,000?

I'd much more prefer he concentrate his efforts on games similar to what he's done already.

*Edit* Well, it look like someone beat me to the punch on this one, but I'll say it anyway.

I'm not trying to shoot down your request by any means, but with the Bigjon version, the Basic Games version, the game control, and Pacdude's Flash version, that's already 4 homemade applications. I'm not even counting the numerous online versions on the internet. I wouldn't count on it, unless he just does it as an exercise in programming. No offense.

But maybe that's just me...

Super PASSWORD: 500/5 (This man is true fan!!!)
Scrabble: 4.5/5
Blockbusters: 4/5
Lingo: Haven't Played Whole Game Yet!

I would love to see the first computerized versions of PASSWORD Plus and the Marshall version of The Hollywood Squares (to honor the 40th anniversary of the show and I would like to help with the questions for both games)

HOWEVER, GREAT GAMES!!!

Lingo seems to be seriously flawed... considering I got like four red balls in the same round... one every turn.

Yes, it does seem like the red balls in Lingo are programmed to be put back into the mix after they are chosen.

All the games are great, but Im afraid Lingo's gameplay feels kinda slow. Seeing how only a handful of teams have amassed 500 points on the show, it seems that the goal of 500 is a bit high. I would recommend lowering it to 300, because after the influx of red balls and high point goal, one game takes me a while to get through. Proof positive is that the poster above hasn't gotten through the entire game yet.

Two problems:

1) You're playing Lingo for points.

2) You're playing Lingo to a predetermined score.

Whether the game looks nice or not, that's not how Lingo was meant to be played.

Do The Pop & Rocker Game!

(ducks)

Seriously though, they all sound like great ideas. Maybe Caesar's Challenge would be a good one too? That seems like it would be fun to play.

LINGO, I have to admit, also needs some work on, I currently have it programmed to have 5 red balls in there, I intend to lower it to 3, and also lower the point total needed to 400, and to speed up the game a little bit. I'm also adding more words to the game as well. But I appreciate all of your opinions and will make those changes ASAP.

I am working successfully on SCRABBLE, having the front game use the one-letter rule and having the fifth and final round played in a speed round.

I have also made a minor change to SUPER PASSWORD, now the computer can guess the word on either the 4th clue to the puzzle, or the 5th clue, or not get the puzzle at all in some cases, it's a random decision. To make it a bit more challenging, hopefully not too challenging.

Well it's not as hard as it seems. I was able to do it in my DOS Blockbusters game, and with some simple computer logic code, my game could detect any win, I did not have to plot out every possible win.

But kudos for the effort indeed!

John

Not being that advanced of a programmer, John, I'm gonna guess it was a sort of a tree structure, where it basically kept checking for adjacent hexes the same color as the current one until it realized that it had worked its way across the board one way or the other? I'm interested in the logic.

Lets see the best way to explain this.

Basically I gave every hexagon a var name, so say hex(1), hex(2) hex(3) etc etc.

I then had to tell the program which hexagon touches which other hexagon. So going down on the left side, I had write hex(1) touches hex(2) and hex(5).

Once I went though the whole board of which hex connects to which other hex, it was then a matter of finding a win pattern. To do that it all depends on which team gave the answer. If white did, then I'd try to find a side to side connection. If red did, I'd try to find a top to bottom.

Say it was white, I'd start at hex(1) and see "is that white", if that hex is NOT white, then i'd go to hex(2), the one directly below hex(1).

Lets say hex(2) IS white. I'd then go to the code to see which hex touch hex(2). I'd then see if THAT hex is white. If it is, then I'd now see which hex touch that one, etc etc and if that makes a connection you have a win.

Now since it's possible to make different paths, say there were two different ways you could go on the board, once it found one path that was a dead end, I'd have to flag that direction so when I start at the beginning again, it wouldn't take the dead end path, it would go the other way.

If you continue to do this you'll either find a win or you'll reach the end of the board and no win would be found.

Once the computer knows the layout of which hex touches which, it's easy to find a pattern with some nested if then code!

Hope that helps! IT was a headache to do, much the same teaching High Rollers how to know all the combinations to the roll of the dice!

John

Yeah, I was interested to know the algorithm you used, and whether you needed to set a flag so you didn't get caught in a loop. It sounds like it was pretty tricky to write. Well done, and thanks for sharing! :)

I think "The Who, What or Where Game" would be amazing in PC form.

Might be a problem with finding music, although I'm sure one could use a clip of the open from the one existing episode.

But the game itself is fantastic.

I'm liking this different concept with the Blockbusters game, even with the 5x5 board. Everything seems to be in order, except with one massive flaw.

Playing the gold run: I had 90 seconds, and I clearly made two connections (diagonal and vertical lines), and yet I still didn't win my $15000 (the money means nothing, but you see what I mean here). did the program in the end game include all possible connections to where I should've made the connection and the fanfare was to be played?

Strikerz04, when did you download the game? Did you download it before Friday, because if you did, it was an error in the program I had to correct and it should be ok now. I'll try it myself.

Yeah, if any of you guys downloaded Blockbusters before March 31 (last Friday), re-download it again, but save your .DAT files to another folder if you want to keep your contestant information and then paste/overwrite it when you have downloaded it again. Then the gold run will work CORRECTLY, as many who e-mailed me with the same problem have found out.

I should explain what went on with the problem, whenever somebody clicked on a block, an integer value would become a value of anywhere from 1 to 25, dependent on which button/square was picked. It used to be 0 to 24. The problem was 0 is always the default value of an integer, so if the bonus round was lost, the first square (the very top left), would always disappear and act like it was tried and not correct. So I had to make the values 1 to 25 instead and I forgot to change the numbers in an "IF" statement, which determines if a connection has been made or not. Just wanted to kind of explain so everyone understands.

Wow, a guy who takes ideas/problems/submissions in stride...and not as a personal slam.

The SP game is incredible!!! Nice work. I've never seen a Password computer game that was so faithful to actual game play. That cannot have been easy to do.

Great stuff!!

Bryan
itsbry@juno.com

Sorry to sound like an echo, but I also felt the need to post and take my hat off for the obvious labor of love that is the Super Password game. Nice work, for lack of anything more creative to say.

I have one very minor complaint about Scrabble, for whatever this is worth: The clue is shown only once. Somehow being able to see it through the whole game, or just having it pop up between letter placements, would make the game considerably easy. (If you forget the clue after just the one opportunity to read it, the whole thing is basically reduced to a game of Hangman.)

Other than that, yeah, I'm impressed. Bring on a few more, if/when you ever can.

Actually, when you are in the game with the game window with the word on it, you can switch between window from the word to the scrabble board window and throughout any round, the clue will still be displayed on the window with the Scrabble board on it as well as the amount of letters. All you have to do, if you forget the clue is switch to the other window in the game, and it will always be there at the top right. That's why I have it there always for a bit of convenience.

I don't take very many things personally when it comes to these games I made, I like to satisfy everyone and make everybody glad with the games. I know there might be some complaints, but I'm ready for them and I do my best to help out anyone. A lot of APPLE computer users love them since I did program them in Java, and some say they haven't seen anything like that in their life.

I'm taking a brief break from programming, though, right now, but I am planning some more games and I'll let you all know when I start work on them and maybe send some pictures as a preview.

These games really are terrific.

I have a couple of questions, though. When playing Scrabble in the two-player mode, how does "Speedword" work--are there buzz-in keys I haven't seen, or is it "first one to grab the mouse and click wins"?

My wife got a little frustrated with her "celebrity partner" when we tried Super Password last night, but, hey, who hasn't had that happen?

Seriously, though, would I be correct to assume that when we give "them" clues, there's a database of clues that will elicit correct responses? (Surely there isn't AI built in that would allow her "celeb" to "hear" the clue I gave and add it to the clue she gave.)

Those questions aside, these are terrific games. Thanks!

A really interesting (and at least programmatically simple) way to build the clue database would be to make it three-tiered, like this:

1) "Money" clues: Really incredible clues, worth six Clue Points.
2) "Quality" clues: Fairly good clues, worth three Clue Points.
3) "Marginal" clues: Not-completely-stupid clues, worth two Clue Points.

Anything else gives no Clue Points. When six Clue Points is reached, the GiveTheRightAnswer subroutine is triggered. If I did the math on this right, that should take one Money clue, or two Quality clues, or any combination of three Marginal and Quality clues.

Then the AI opponent uses some kind of random (or not-so-random, depending on how smart you want to make it) algorithm to determine what level of clue it gives on their turn, keeping a running tally across both player's clues to see if the conditions have been satisfied for the computer partner to "get it".

It would, granted, be a LOT more work to piece together a clue database. But it's an interesting notion.

(Massive overquoting deleted. -DZ)

Clay,

When you are playing in 2-player mode in Scrabble, the first player's buzz in-key is the SPACEBAR, I don't know if I mentioned that in the Scrabble page or not and the second player is the MOUSE on the PLAYER 2 ANSWER button. I guess maybe I should re-write the instructions on the SCRABBLE page, although it does say what the BUZZER buttons are.

The way it works it that for each clue on every puzzle, there are seven words that the computer will recognize as a clue, and then when a clue is given, it chooses from one of three possible answers at RANDOM. However, on OBVIOUS answer clues, most of the time, like opposites, or places, stuff like that, the computer will always get it. Depending on how many clues have been given that the computer recognizes, it will increase its chance of getting the word right, also depends on the difficulty of the word as well. So, there is some RANDOM involved, just to let you know. There are a limited amount of words the computer will recognize as a clue for the word.

As you can see, it takes a LONG TIME to make each puzzle, each one is stored in a notepad file.

I just hope your wife didn't have a HUGE FIT over the game. Sometimes, celebrity partners do get passwords mixed up and not get them. I try to make the game as realistic as possible and I hope I did a good job of it. Try it again and see what happens, now that you know.

Well, nothing personal, but I'd rather she had a FIT GRANDE over the "stupidity" of an imaginary celebrity partner than over, say, me forgetting to take out the trash.

(Which, by the way, I did not forget to do.)

Thanks for the explanation!

minor nitpicking again...

sometimes in SP, when the 3rd or 4th clue is given, the game freezes and just doesn't progress forward...I take it that its not an empricial issue, but maybe something's just not clicking?

You're not nitpicking at all, Strikerz04,

When did you download the game? If you downloaded it before March 31st, re-download it, because I had correct that same problem (with the game freezing after 3 or 4 clues) and now it should be working fine. What happened there was a number went out of range sometimes, depending on how many clues were given.

Also, I wanted to add Clay Zambo, that the way I look up some clues for the words in the puzzles, I research the meaning of the word and I take synonyms or anything obviously associated with that word, and then I use them as clues, so I do my research as you can see.

But for people who don't know how to play it, Password can be a tough game. But once they know how to play it, it gets easier.

If anybody has any problems with the game, e-mail me: rjs_bird@yahoo.com, and I will be more than happy to assist you.

BTW, I have starting working on my newest game, WHAMMY! The All New PRESS YOUR LUCK. I'll put up a page about it later.

Is there any way that a person can submit their own SP Puzzles to the game alone?

-Matt

I can't speak for anyone else, but when I'm playing a game, it really sucks the fun out to get to the bonus round, be chugging along and then get docked for a correctly spelled answer, when an incorrectly spelled answer is the only one acceptable.

And then to have it again.

I don't know who else has had this problem, but "Ante Meridian" and "Olivia Newton-John" were called wrong. I can see the second one as a bit of a gray area since there's no hyphen on the square, but "ante meridian" is absolutely the correct spelling, and I was shocked to see "anti" as the 'right answer.

Oops, my bad, sorry about that. I gotta get working at the part where it will accept hyphenated and non-hyphenated answers as well. Just another mistake I made, I guess. I'll get it resolved right away. Even I have spelling mistakes, lol! I just hope it doesn't totally ruin your fun times or anybody's for that rate.

Or not. "Ante meridiem" is the Latin term abbreviated a.m. "Antemeridian" is an adjective for an event that occurs before noon, as "antediluvian" is an event before a flood.

http://www.answers.com/topic/ante-meridiem
http://www.answers.com/topic/antemeridian

Even so, the right answer was not the one given. I've always seen it as "Ante Meridian." "Anti" is wrong too. And if two answers have wrong spellings, how many other ones are there?

And I'm not denying that. Due to the high probability of either ambiguity or misses nearly indistinguishable from the right answer, it was definitely a subpar question and shouldn't have been used in that format.

But alas, subpar seems par for the course. With just a few exceptions, it seems that fan/programmers take great care making the set and sound effects perfect, then completely overlook major aspects of game play. I've tried two Scrabble games in the past week: one with mostly un-punny clues that look more like SAT questions than Scrabble material, and the other that makes you pick a letter before you can ring in. And neither had a dedicated, working plunger key for the Sprint (using the space bar to stop the clock seems like the obvious thing to do - gives that great buzzer feel).

When par for the course is poor material, unrealistic game play, and awkward controls, I see anew why I hadn't been playing any internet recreations for a while.

(This is not intended as a dig on anyone personally. I appreciate the effort that people do put in, and having done some very basic programming, I have some idea of how difficult these things are. I'd just much rather see attention to detail put on game play instead of sets. I'd play a text-only game with good material over a slick-looking production with ambiguous questions and spelling gaffes, any day of the week. And I don't think I'm alone in that.)

You're not, but that goes back to conversations we've had in the past about just how hard it is to craft quality material for game shows, whether they be questions or puzzles or clues. Any number of talented programmers can duplicate the look and sound of a show and recreate the basic mechanics of a game, but that's a completely different skill set than composing original material to actually play the game, and that's where a lot of noble efforts fall short.

I know some of my writing is terrible beyond mediocre. I did the best I could to make the clues as ambiguous as I could in SCRABBLE. I thought I did a decent job in writing some of the material along the way for all the games. It's difficult to do. As the case usually can be, mistakes are made, and those are just a few of them.

The answers are all on text files, believe it or not, and if you want, you can correct it, by going into the text files where the goldRun answers are and replacing it, hopefully that will work. But in the mean time, I guess I'll have to go over all the answers again and see if all of them are indeed spelled correctly, and work on the allowing of hyphens/no hyphens and other punctuation marks, I seem to be getting just a few complaints about it, there are only a few answers in the gold run game that could use punctuation marks, so that shouldn't be too hard to correct. That's for BLOCKBUSTERS. For Ante Meridian, I heard that question on "Win Ben Stein's Money", and sometimes in Canada, we pronounce Ante as Anti. But in all fairness and to save the agony and ambiguity, I may totally remove that question.

For SCRABBLE, and I will admit, I was being kind of lazy here, I'll work on the giving a reserved key on the Keyboard for both the ENTER and SPACEBAR key for the BUZZ IN button at the Scrabble Sprint Round.

Also, you don't have to pick a letter before you ring in with an answer, you can guess the word literally anytime you want, I think.

As well for LINGO, I'll work on a CLOCK for 5 minutes for each round so, that way a point limit of 400 is not necessary, and just to have the most points at the end of two rounds.

I just really hope these games aren't causing too many headaches.

Thanks for coming out and being honest with your opinions, everyone. What they do is that it can help me please all who want something different about all or some of the games, I appreciate all of your suggestions, and I'll get to work on them all ASAP. Whether it's to improve the material and game play or graphics and stuff (in this, it's more about the game play), I'll try to work on it, it won't be easy, but I'll give in an effort so that way there is no ambiguity and so that SCRABBLE doesn't become a re-incarnation of an SAT test.

GSNFAN3000, yes there is a way to submit your own puzzles for SUPER PASSWORD, but it's very hard, you have to edit a txt file, where the SP game puzzles are read from in the "puzzles" folder and change one of them, I intend to add more puzzles, though. Is that what you meant, or did you mean submit puzzles to me for use in my game, possibly. If that is the case, you can simply e-mail me, rjs_bird@yahoo.com.