A week ago, for reasons too boring even for this weblog, I found myself briefly in a video arcade in Westwood — one of those places where you put in money, win tickets and later find out that no matter how much you played and how much you won, you don't have enough tickets for any of the good prizes. Out of curiosity, I took a crack at the Deal or No Deal game I found there.
It's not a bad replica of the TV game. There are sixteen cases which are opened on the 36" high-def video screen by sixteen models. The models are not the ladies from the TV show and the unseen announcer/host is not Howie Mandel but they have the graphics and music…and of course, you're playing for prize tickets, not money. It costs two bucks to play and top prize is two hundred tickets which, at this arcade, could get you a package of bubble gum worth (I'm guessing) fifty cents.
I got lucky and won the 200 — a futile achievement since when I went to the prize redemption booth, I decided there was nothing there I wanted, even for free. So now I was stuck with the 200 tickets. Last time I was in this situation — Marv Wolfman's birthday party was at a Dave & Buster's — I gave my tix to a random kid to add to his already-formidable accumulation. I think he had enough to get a new Lexus Hybrid.
There was no one else in the arcade so I wandered to the back and played a pinball machine, partly because I hadn't played one in a decade or so, partly because I was hoping some worthy person would come in. By the time I'd run out of quarters, no one had…so I still have my tickets.
What was interesting about the Deal or No Deal game was the pace. The TV version has become excruciating, even when watched on TiVo and fast-forwarding from the first case or so to the last five. It can take up to an hour to play one game, opening 26 cases. I opened the sixteen in my game in well under two minutes. If I'd brought along three friends to consult with me and insist that they knew for sure the million was in my case, it might have taken four minutes.
That pace is the main thing killing the TV version. It's probably not as lethal as the fact that after all these months, no one's won the million dollar prize. On the new prime-time Price is Right, they've given away seven figure checks something like three times in six weeks and the whole hour isn't even about trying to win that amount. They also don't have the problem Deal or No Deal has, which is a tremendous number of games where the big dollar prizes are knocked out early and you have 20-30 minutes of someone playing to maybe take home ten (yawn) grand.
Obviously, winning $10,000 is no small cause for excitement but on a show that's all about winning a mil, it seems like an awful uninteresting consolation prize…especially with Drew Carey over on Price is Right handing out the big checks like they were cases of Turtle Wax. So that's one problem Deal or No Deal has. Another is that though they may try to dress it up with banker stunts and surprise reunions and doing the show from other nations, it's still the same basic game every time. And being on opposite American Idol ain't helping, either.
I don't know why this show interests me at all but it isn't because of the game any longer. It's because I like Howie and I like the way the producers initially put the program together. There was something primal and fascinating about the basic game. At least, it was kinda fun for two minutes at that arcade, even if all I got out of it was a string of near-worthless tickets. (Hey, don't laugh. There are people who've been on the show, played for a million and gone home with about that much.) But all that's gone away now and I'm kinda watching, albeit with mucho Fast Forwarding, just to see if they can figure out how to make it interesting again. Aside from having the models work nude and covering Howie Mandel with bacteria just to see his reaction, I don't see how.