Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column the 47th of its kind, the one where we let the freeloaders back in after last week’s edition; the first that was solely for PAID PALS. Needless to say it was the best Purple Column ever. Oh, man! I had proof of Alien Life. I discovered where Elvis had been hiding. Led Zeppelin AND the Beatles reformed, I cured cancer, and we did a brand new proper GamesMaster show with all your original favourite people.
And you missed it.
Never mind. I’m sure I’ll do all those things again. Theme tune!
Is this the hardest computer game ever? Even harder than that Flappy Birdle game that combines Flappy Birds and Wordle? Remember that one where you had to keep typing words into the computer to stop your bird falling so basically it was like High Speed Wordle and I never guessed as much as one word while playing it?
Well now I give you…
CONTEXTO - THE HARDEST GAME EVER!!!
They have an AI computer. And it has selected a word at random. And you have to guess it. It giues you no clues whatsoever. All it does is give you the ranking of how similar your word is to the word. And that ranking is also sorted by an artificial intelligence algorithm according to how similar they were to the secret word.
That is impossible. Literally impossible. You could maybe have a chance if it was a human being thinking of a word because you could take what you know about that human being and use that to make a more accurate guess.
In my case it would be “sex” and in my wife’s case it would be “no”.
That’s not actually true. I was just saying that so I could provide a class set up and punchline. Because that is what a content generator has to do every day from dawn til dusk.
So here is an experiment. I am going to think of one word. And I am going to concentrate really hard on it. And you are going to picture me and concentrate really hard and, in as a tribute to Uri Geller’s ground-breaking appearance on GamesMaster you are going to draw what it is you think I am thinking of. OK. Off you go.
I am thinking of a word. It is an object.
Can you see what it is yet?
I am concentrating really hard. Do the same. Harder. Harder. HARDER! CONCENTRATE LIKE YOUR VERY LIFE DEPENDED ON IT!
OK. Did you draw pants. Yay. Hashtag true fans.
But fair play to all those people sitting there with a picture of a penis they’ve just drawn. What does THAT say about YOU?
(PIC: I ran some GamesMaster-flavoured words through Contexto. And didn’t get remotely close.)
Most interesting statistic from the Domments section of LAST week’s Little Old Purple Column (the 46th of its kind)?
While two people leapt to the defence of the 3DO – namely Ash from the splendid Under Consoletation Zone GamesMaster podcast and Colin Bell from the Best Day Ever Master GamesMaster Kickstarter Reward thing who got a tour of the Series 2 location with me last year– no one, repeat NO ONE leapt to the defence of Terry Coldwell from East 17. Poor chap.
Of course, if you want to find out why I was comparing retro consoles to boy band members you will have to pony up your hard-earned and become a PAID PAL subscriber. That way you not only get access to the aforementioned comments section and the full version of this that is at least 4 times the size of the free teaser every week, but you also get access to the archive: The Little Old Purple Columns that are the 45th, 44th, 43rd of their kinds etc going back further and further into the annals of leftfield self-indulgent videogames and tech podcasts of yesterweek. Basically, for less than a quid a week you get the gift of laughter, engagement, community AND time travel.
Also, next week? Is going to be another PAID PALS only affair. I have five weeks until I hit the one-year anniversary of this column podcast colcast thing and I am exploring different options, one of which is that I stop the free version entirely. The other is that I stop the whole THING entirely. When I started this 11 months ago, I didn’t have a networked radio show which takes up a lot of time and pays the bills. This takes up nearly as much time and… er… doesn’t. You have 5 weeks to become a PAID PAL subscriber before this possibly becomes nothing more than an arseprint on the sands of time,
Actually? Now I think on it? That 3DO v East 17 statistic may have only been the second most interesting aspect of last week’s Domments Section. The most interesting being John Kiely’s contribution to Rudest Gamertags You Have Seen with a particularly choice one he came across on Call of Duty. I cannot mention the tag in the free version because anyone can get their hands on it. And it is most choice.
And yes, that sentence contains some very deliberate wording that relates to said Gamertag. Because no word I write or say is ever truly wasted. Which is ironic given that I have just let you have 800 of the buggers for free. Ah well. You live and learn. I am saving the other 3400 of them for the PAID PALS after the jump.
Bye.
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #47 FREE TEASER