Sunday, 16 February 2020
You Say Potato, I Say Potatoe
On the 15th June 1992, then-Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle, on the campaign trail for that year's presidential election, visits Muñoz Rivera Elementary School and commits one of the most famous political gaffes in history when he "corrects" a 12-year-old pupil's spelling of 'potato' to 'potatoe'.
Ten days later, Fox airs a repeat of The Simpsons; appropriately enough, the episode is "Two Cars In Every Garage, Three Eyes On Every Fish". The blackboard joke in the opening sequence is usually "I will not xerox my butt", but for this repeat, a new joke is hastily added: "It's 'potato', not 'potatoe'". (On the 18th June there was a repeat of "Bart the Lover", which uses a shortened intro with no blackboard gag; presumably nobody had thought of the joke at that point, it was deemed too much work to completely re-edit the opening, or there wasn't enough time to do so.)
Sunday, 2 February 2020
Humongous Replay Value
"Play again and again. New puzzles, new friends and new challenges await each time you play!"
Those words, or something along those lines, appeared on the covers of the large majority of Humongous Entertainment's point-and-click adventure games for children (latterly known as the Junior Adventures range), released between 1992 and 2003. But just how much replay value was there to be had? How many times could you hypothetically play the same game and not get the same set-up twice? How many unique configurations did each game have? Shall we go through each game and find out?