TIDUS: The Son of JECHT (tentative)

[Mike Bentley]

I really liked this tournament and thought it was a nice improvement from JECHT.

A few minor complaints:

I don't recall hearing any tossups on videogame hardware.

I would have liked to seen a few more questions from the early days of videogaming, but perhaps I'm in the minority here.

Also, a few pet subjects probably came up a bit too much in the tournament (Kingdom Hearts, Smash Brothers), but whatever.

[MLafer]

Will this set be posted somewhere?

[Mike Bentley]

I can post it on Wastebin tonight.

[Papa's in the House]

I greatly enjoyed this tournament and look forward to future iterations. There was one question I walked away with, though: What should happen when you give no incorrect information for a video game title but you don't give complete information? In one case I gave both the game series (Call of Duty) and the subtitle (Modern Warfare) but was negged because I didn't give the number that this game was in the series (4). The answer I gave clearly contains only correct information and it clearly identifies just one game in the series, but I did not provide complete information. What should happen in the future for these types of answers?

[Golran]

Is the 4 part of the title? I see this as the same as literature where the title must be exact, and is unpromptable on partial answer.

[dtaylor4]

Is the 4 part of the title? I see this as the same as literature where the title must be exact, and is unpromptable on partial answer.

As one of the staffers in the room where that neg occurred (I was switching off with Matt Hart), we ruled that the answer was yes.

[Jeaton1]

As a note, I probably would have accepted "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" as correct -- I should have given better moderator notes on this one. I believe as written I had instructions to accept "Call of Duty 4" or "Modern Warfare". In retrospect, I see no reason to not accept n amalgamation of the two that doesn't include the series number. Sorry about that.

As for distribution and skimping out a bit on old games, I think the overall distribution can be seen roughly as a bell curve centering on the 64-bit era and i probably skewed slightly towards more recent games due to the ability to find new answer space in games that had come out after JECHT. That being said, after focusing pretty heavily on the 16-bit and 8-bit eras in the first tournament, I think it is fair that they may have been relatively neglected in this tournament in terms of finding new mostly accessible answers that weren't covered in the first games. There were a quite a few tossups on old PC, 8-bit and Arcade games (Bubble Bobble, A Boy and his Blob, Zork, Moon Patrol, Battlezone, etc).

The reason Smash Bros seemed to come up a lot is because I believe that adding such a clue toward the end of a tossup on a certain Nintendo character or concept will allow players with tangential knowledge of said topic to get it before the giveaway. Since many more people have probably played Smash Bros. Brawl than Kirby Squeak Squad or Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, I feel that placing a clue about Ike or Metaknight's role in SSBB a clue or two before the giveaway helps to increase the pyramidality of the question and furthermore makes the question more accessible to someone who may not be a die-hard Nintendo fan. The overabundance of Kingdom Hearts (and probably Zelda and Final Fantasy...just..well...happened).

[theMoMA]

From a reading standpoint, the questions seemed awkwardly constructed. There was one particular grammatical construction that kept happening despite defying all conventions ("At the end of one game that he appears..."). Sentences were mashed together with "and" for no good reason, usually without commas to tell you that a giant independent clause was coming. And sweet god, the questions were long. I rarely have much sympathy for "poor moderator" arguments, but the only merciful thing about this set from a reading perspective was that it was only six packets long.

[Mechanical Beasts]

The best reason for making people take foreign languages is so they don't fuck up relative pronouns in ways that make no sense.

[Cheynem]

Comix Zone came up. Yessssssssss

[dtaylor4]

Yea, some of the character tossups were worded very poorly. Outside of that, this was a good, if hard, set.

[Auks Ran Ova]

This tournament was excellent. My only real moment of dissatisfaction came on the Gauntlet: [whichever] tossup, which was at many points a massive hose for at least one other Gauntlet game.

[stevebahnaman]

I support hard things in specialty subject tournaments. Doubt "krogan" got to the end, for example, though it's a terrible answer for a regular trash event. Difficulty was fine; distro would've been more fun with more old things.

[DumbJaques]

Hey, I actually have stats from the free for all we played with the remaining 8 rounds in one of the conference rooms of Eric Mukherjee's apartment complex. Highlights include a massive Chinese food dinner platter in between buzzes, me getting into a 15 minute discussion with Tony the Doorman about the joy of reading Alain Locke, and Eric violently destroying all of us.

In true UTC fashion, some copy/paste stat action:

P T N PTS
Ben Cohen (Brown): 2 1 6 10
Logan Anbinder (Maryland): 0 4 4 20
Will Wieprecht (Maryland): 3 3 1 75
Andrew Lim (State Dept): 1 4 1 50
Alex Gran (Maryland): 1 3 2 20
Paul Marchsteiner (Maryland): 4 4 4 80
Eric Mukherjee (Penn): 14 8 4 270
Chris Ray (Maryland): 2 7 4 80
Aaron Rosenberg (Brown): 0 1 1 5


This set was a blast to play, thanks Jeremy!

[Mechanical Beasts]

62 tossups answered in eight rounds? Hard!