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About Stupidness: The Gameshow


Stupidness: The Gameshow places you as a contestant in the most thrilling gameshow to come out of McKeesport, PA.  Choose from five different characters to compete against your friends or the computer.  Each time you are successful in answering a question correctly, you gain money.  However, every time you are incorrect, you lose cash.  The winner is the contestant with the most money after the final round.

Stupidness: The Gameshow features:

  • 1-3 human players can compete against each other.
  • Variable difficulty levels ranging from easy to hard.
  • 5 characters to choose from each with unique animations.
  • Over 100 questions.
  • Likeable host and co-host duo :)

Stupidness: The Gameshow Requirements


Since I used the DirectX API directly to program Stupidness, some of my coding might not be optimal, thus the game has some fairly large requirments.

  • Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
  • 450MHz or faster processor (needs experimentation)
  • 8MB of hard drive space
  • 64MB of RAM (128MB is recommended)
  • DirectX 8.1 and a DirectX compatible video card.

I believe the game will work with video memory as low as 8MB, but I've only tested it with a 32MB video card.  Also, I'm not exactly sure of the bare minimum processor speed required to run the game, its only been tested with 450MHz - 1.6GHz.


Instructions


Starting a new game:

When you run the game, you may first want to configure it in the options screen.  Choose options in the first menu to access it.  Here you can change the computer's difficulty level as well as how many human player are competing.  The last option will change the screen resolution.  The options for this are 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768.  It is recommended  that you restart the game once the resolution is changed.

Choosing a character:

Next, you will choose your characters for play.  If you playing against other people, they will also choose their characters.  A computer character must be chosen by the player if there is less then 3 human players.  Use the left and right keys to scroll through the characters, and press enter when you want to select the character.

Playing the game:

The current player must first choose a category from the board on his/her turn.  This can be done by using the directional keys and enter when a desired category and dollar value is selected.  Next, a question will be asked in this category to all the contestants.  If you feel you can answer the question correctly you must buzz in within the 7 second time limit..  Depending on the amount of human players, buzzing in is different.  For example:

Human Players Player 1 buzz in key Player 2 buzz in key Player 3 buzz in key
1 SPACE BAR - -
2 A L -
3 A SPACEBAR L

Once you have buzzed in to answer a question, you must type in your answer to the question within the 30 second time limit.  If your answer is wrong or you run out of time, you lose the amount of money chosen on the board.

Cash Crash:

Sometimes you will chose a special location on the board to reveal a Cash Crash.  This question will allow the player to gamble his/her own desired amount of money on the question by typing in the dollar value.  If the player currently has no money, there will be a set amount of money to choose from by pressing the directional keys and enter when you are happy with your choice.

Final Round:

First, to enter the final round you must have a positive amount of money.  The host will present you with the final category and ask how much each contestant will want to wager on the question.  This is done by typing in the dollar value.  Finally, you will be asked to answer the final question.  Good Luck


Known Bugs


The reason this game was delayed so long was because of the bugs.  I spent a lot of my time successfully fixing most of the game bugs.  So far there is just 2 known bug.

  1. After correctly answering a question correctly, the game may sometimes crash to windows or freeze.  The reason for this bug is unknown right now.  For the life of me, I have tried to find what was causing this bug to randomly occur.  Perhaps I'll fix this soon.
  2. Changing the screen resolution causes some problems sometimes if the game is not restarted.  Please restart the game after changing the resolution.

Stupidness: The Gameshow Download


Just go to the download page.

Download Stupidness 1.0 (2.6MB)
Download DirectX 8.1a for Windows98/ME

Download DirectX 8.1a for Windows2000/XP


Review this game on www.madmonkey.com

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