The Price is Right

In the some 35 years Price is Right has been on, it has never changed. I mean, they still use the same cards, backlit transparencies, and light up numbers from the 70s, instead of updated digital whatsits. Even Bob is still up and looking pretty good, while people still manage to be ridiculously excited when they make it on the show.

I did not know there was a PiR video game, though I shouldn’t be surprised. GameTek, as is the case with seemingly every gameshow-to-videogame conversion, is behind this one. And as is the case for most GameTek conversions, they do a reasonably admirable job. The show is covered faithfully, with pricing games, the wheel, and the showcase showdown et al. If you can rummage up four players, you can each play on Contestant’s Row, with the computer filling in for players that haven’t made it to the stage.

All the pricing games I can remember are here, including favorites like Safe Cracker, the Range Game, Danger Price, and the Grocery Game. If you’re not familiar with one, you’re given the option to read instructions first. Regardless of their nuances, they will all be some variation of correctly guessing the price of an item. Should the computer win on Contestant’s Row, you have the option of watching them play the pricing game, or taking over for them yourself. The games are the real fun of PiR, after all, so it’s nice that you don’t have to sit back and watch the computer amuse itself.

After three pricing games are played, we head to the big wheel. If you were selected off the Row, you get to take a spin – basically selecting the power of your spin and leaving the rest to fate – against two other players. If you win here, you’ll go to the showcase later. After the wheel, there is the second round, where you can choose to type in a new name and play again, or invite four new friends over (for a total of eight possible players… hey, I could see it happening in a college dorm).

The Showcase plays out as expected, with the two wheel winners betting on a collection of prizes – always involving two shitty items and a cruise. Whoever bids closest to the combined retail price, without going over, takes home the non-infringing goods. You can look forward to a stereo from Pony, an alarm clock from Radio Shed, and a genuine leather football from Wilton.

These are some pretty simplistic CGA graphics, but they look nice enough. All screens have a light blue background with contrasting text. In many of the pricing games, you’re first shown a screen of prizes you’re bidding on and their accompanying description, but the screen for the game itself shows only the prize graphic. No text. This requires some memorization on your part, but the prizes are drawn clearly enough to be distinguishable from each other. The only real disappointment are the eight character options who, like all GameTek games, look like goobers. None of them look like someone you’ll want to associate with your own name.

Everything is menu-driven, using the arrow keys to move a bracket around and selecting anything with Enter. You’ll have to type in your guesses; giving exact prices as you would have to on the show. Sound comes only from the PC speaker and is thankfully sparse. There’s a pretty good rendition of the show’s theme, a couple of beeps and boops when you select things, but that’s about the whole concerto. I figure this is a good thing. If your audio is coming out of the PC speaker, it should probably be as underused as possible.

The biggest unexpected foe is going to be inflation. It shouldn’t be surprising, but it wasn’t something I considered going in. You need to play the game with late 1980s prices in mind, which means that something like a king size bed is going to be cheaper than you’d expect, but a “new” technology like a Walkman is going to be more expensive. I suppose this can offer some unintended challenge, but I always figured PiR was about gut-feeling guesses, which are going to be way off when playing this game decades later.

Also, like all game show games of the time, PiR suffers from a limited pool of prizes. A guess would be 100 different ones, but when you consider all the pricing games and showcases that draw from that pool, you start seeing a lot of repeats quickly. If you have a solid memory, you can nail the price from being told it the last time. The game sometimes even helps you out by putting the same prizes one after the other – randomization works both ways, ya see. But essentially, after a handful of play-throughs, this game is going to get real easy, real fast.

However, for the times you play that you can’t ballpark or recite prices from memory, PiR can be a pretty fun run, especially for fans of the show. There’s no attempt at recreating Bob and the Beauties, but this is pretty par-for-the-course. I assume that they would have to pay extra for the likeness of Bob, or they simply understood they’d never be able to pull off a convincing replica of either him, or of any woman at all. Otherwise, as far as “replicating the gameshow experience,” GameTek has done a pretty commendable job. If you happen to have friends that enjoy PiR as well, so much the better.

 

The Good

It helps that its the only PiR video game, but it’s an excellent simulation nonetheless. Plinko is here, which is all that really matters.

 

The Bad

Inflation between then and now will throw off your guesses, but this is offset by being able to remember the exact prices of the limited number of prizes.