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Dara O’Briain’s Go 8-Bit reminds us it’s been a long time since we have seen any type of videogame TV show, but Dara O’Briain dares to take a tackle at it, and what do you know… it’s a huge success, funny and great competition showing some great titles with two teams of celebrities, duking it out in various videogame battles.
The show has Dara as the host with Ellie Gibson, a Game Expert, giving videogame knowledge with some jokes while introducing the games about to be played. True to form, the show has a few regulars as team captains: Sam Pamphilon and Steve McNeil. The teams then talk about their experiences with the game, if any, and the audience vote on which team will win .The team with the highest percentage of votes determine the points won that round, i.e. if the votes 48% and 52% the team who wins the game challenge win 52 points.
The first game chosen was Tetris, which the players had to play blindfolded while their partners told them where to move the piece and land it. This was fun to watch as one team did very well, while the other were struggling and shouting, giving a good laugh to us watching at home as well as the audience, who really got behind the competition, adding to the atmosphere of the show.
Second up chosen was Chuckie Egg, an old Donkey Kong(ish)-style arcade game. After the opener, all games are selected by the guest celebs, and the one who chose this was, ironically, the one who ended up the worst at it; she took ages to learn how to jump and kept making the same mistakes over and over… which was a lot of fun to watch.
The next one was Tekken 2. The celeb in question talked about a particular move he used against the computer to keep winning, which was crouch-kicking constantly, but he could never use that against real life opponents as he would always get beaten. The irony here, is that the opponent was the one to use this move, and the game was so tense and came to a final bout, where the opponent’s neck looked like it would go into his chest, resulting in the audience making ‘ooh’ and ‘woah’sounds as they were feeling the tension, as were my other half and I at home. Then, they went from retro to modern with a deathmatch on EA’s Star Wars Battlefront: Luke Skywalker VS Darth Vader, an entertaining match, if nothing else, watching the teams talk about everything they kept doing wrong, especially with the underdog team winning the bout.
The final round was a very interesting one where the contestants had to use humans dressed as game characters, and D-pad controllers with the team captains as the action button in a game they called Bust-a-moob – a Bust-a-move clone with coloured bubbles showing Dara’s pixelated face. I think Sam’s teammate got a bit zealous with slapping his head to shoot the bubbles, which got some laughs.
All in all, a very entertaining show that I wanted to watch more of as soon as it ended. The contestants and hosts gave lots of laughs, while having some tense competition, as well as having the audience in studio and at home engaged the whole way through. This was a great watch and I plan to keep on watching weekly.
Score: 9/10 a must watch for gamers and lovers of comedy, especially if you like Dara O’Briain.
Dara O’Briain’s Go 8-Bit continues next Monday on Dave at 10pm, and you can also watch episode 1 online.
Score: 9/10 – a must watch for gamers and lovers of comedy, especially if you like Dara O’Briain.
Cast:
Host: Dara O’Briain
Games Expert: Ellie Gibson
Team captains: Steve McNeil and Sam Pamphilon
Contestants: Susan Calman and David James
Titles/graphics: Dave Brain
Retro game fan, comic book reader, board game lover and film fanatic. I have loved videogames since I was 5 years old after visiting my first arcade, I have grown up with gaming since having my Atari 2600 then Commodore 64. I ended up building my own career crafting pixelised characters and have had the pleasure of meeting many of my retro gaming heroes who developed some of my absolute favourite games.