Beluki / MovieWar

A terminal trivia game. Guess movie release dates. Includes local multiplayer.

About

MovieWar is a small terminal game. It's similar to "The Price Is Right" but players guess movie release dates.

Here is a screenshot:

Interesting features:

• Singleplayer or multiplayer (any number of players supported).
• 7600 movies in the included database.
• Two game modes: random movies or each player chooses a movie for the rest to guess.
• Optionally uses OMDB to find unknown movies and updates the database with them.
• Optional color support (on Windows uses Colorama). No other dependencies.

Usage and command-line options

To play just run the script with the player names as arguments:

$ MovieWar.py Player1 Player2 Player3...

The following options that can be used to change the behavior:

• --colorama enables color support on cmd.exe or other windows terminals when the colorama module is available.

• --ansi-colors enables color support on linux or terminals that already support them (without needing colorama).

• --challenge runs MovieWar in challenge mode. Each round, a player chooses a movie by name and the rest try to guess the release date. MovieWar will offer similar movie names as suggestions if a movie can't be found.

• --omdb-search allows MovieWar to find unknown titles from OMDB when a movie can't be found. It will also merge suggestions with the local database ones.

• --roundlimit limit sets the number of rounds a game will last. The default is 10 rounds.

• --favor older|newer makes MovieWar choose older or newer movies in normal mode. Use this if you find the game too hard. It's easier to remember recent movies.

• --favor-tests number sets the number of tests that MovieWar will do when picking movies in normal mode. With 3 tests, MovieWar will choose 3 random movies and pick the oldest/newest depending on the --favor argument.

• --no-auto-update does not add new movies to the database when searching OMDB. Alternatively, press CONTROL + C to exit MovieWar. It adds all the movies in one go before exiting, not while playing.

• --filepath path sets the current movies database to use. Useful if you want to have a different file for say... animation/cartoons.

Scoring

An exact guess is worth 50 points.

An error is (20 points - distance to the movie release year). For example, if you guess 1990 and the correct release date is 5 years apart you get 15 points.

Note that it's possible to have a negative score.

When a movie has multiple release dates (e.g. there are like 7 different movies titled "Jane Eyre"), players get the best score according to the closest release date to the guess.

Notes on the movies database

The MovieWar.json file was generated using MovieWarDBGen. It contains 7600 movies.

All the release dates were verified using two sources: Freebase and OMDB. The movies that didn't match exactly on title and release date were discarded.

Portability

Information and error messages are written to stdout and stderr respectively, using the current platform newline format and encoding.

The exit status is 0 on success and 1 on errors.

The MovieWar.json file is encoded using UTF-8 without BOM.

MovieWar is tested on Windows 7 and 8 and on Debian (both x86 and x86-64) using Python 3.4+ and Colorama 0.3.3+. Older versions are not supported.

Status

This program is finished!

MovieWar is feature-complete and has no known bugs. Unless issues are reported I plan no further development on it other than maintenance.

License

Like all my hobby projects, this is Free Software. See the Documentation folder for more information. No warranty though.