Sometimes you gotta do something simple once in a while.
Introduction
Trivial Pursuit is a board game first designed by Chris Haney and Scott Abbott in 1979. I ain't gonna recite the entire history so this Wikipedia entry on the board game should suffice for a general understanding.
Trivial Pursuit: Genus Edition is a 1992 Sega Master System version of the board game developed by Teque London and published by Domark. This supports four different languages and was a European exclusive. The goal is to answer a question correctly on each wedge on the outer wheel and return to the center. Victory is achieved when a question is answered correctly at the center while having all of the wedges. Most likely due to technical limitations and multiple languages, the answers are confirmed via a trust system. This makes a bit more sense if you're actually playing with other people at the same time but at the same time players could also just lie to the game.
Run notes
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.9.1
- SMSHawk core
- Single player game
- Some RNG manipulation
Mechanics and techniques
- Dice rolls
- Dice roll RNG is determined by the frame the dice roll is made. It's a simple matter of testing frames until the desired roll comes up.
- Board movement
- It takes 7 questions to finish the game (6 wedge questions, 1 final question). To go from the wedge to wedge it takes 7 spaces. Thankfully there are two roll again spaces between each wedge at 2 & 5 spaces away, respectively. That generally means that it takes an initial 6 roll to a wedge, a combination 2-5 or 5-2 to each wedge, and a 6 back to the center.
As the board is bigger than the screen there's waits on the camera to scroll around. For the initial roll of 6 it's faster to go with the first option available to avoid extra screen scrolling. When moving between wedges it's important to choose the order of the 2 & 5 rolls to minimize camera movement.
- Questions and the question pool
- The questions in the question pool are on their own RNG where it's called when needed. Questions are determined by their category and the question RNG. The length of each question is variable depending on the amount of text to display, as the host "talks" out the text, as well as any possible elements such as graphs or music that need to be shown off. This means that getting questions that can be answered quicker is important. This is mostly relevant to the last question as the fastest overall question is selected.
- Name entry
- It'd be faster to go with a shorter name. I just thought the one I went with was funny, considering this is a game built around the trust system. No, I didn't know the answer to all of the questions. I'll leave it up to the viewers to figure out the ones I didn't know before seeing the answer.
nymx: Claiming for judging.