Jeopardy
by Atari Inc.
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List Price: Category: Video Games See more product details |
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Video Game Reviews of Jeopardy
Customer Review: A huge step backwards
Summary: 1 Stars
It's not every day that I advocate video games becoming more derivative, but in the case of "Jeopardy!", I'll make an exception.
I've played a lot of video-game versions of "Jeopardy!", which has gotten easier to adapt as video game technology has improved. In the early 90's, the Sega Genesis version was a nightmare to play, as you had to spell out answers in their entirety with just a D-pad and three easily-confused buttons (for "select letter", "delete letter", and "accept"). Games took well over an hour to play and punished players who accidentally submitted incomplete responses by pushing the wrong button. Worse, there was no way for the cartridge to remember which questions had already been used, so you always risked getting repeat questions, which killed the fun and novelty of the game.
The CD-i version (of all things!) in 1995 was a breakthrough by substantially solving these problems. First, it had a list of "completions", so after entering a few letters of your response, you could see it matching an alphabetical list of possible answers, and just arrow over and pick the completion. This dramatically sped up game play. The other fix was that the game could use the small (8KB?) built-in memory of the CD-i player to log which questions had already been used, effectively eliminating repeat questions. With the copious CD storage, it was also possible to read the questions aloud -- while not necessary, it was a nice touch. The only flaw was that the controller 1 had a clear and obvious advantage over controller 2 when ringing in.
The PlayStation "Jeopardy!"s polished the "completion" system of the CD-i version, and saved the question usage stats to the memory card. In other words, it didn't fix what wasn't broken... it just took "Jeopardy done right" to a wide audience than would have seen the CD-i version.
And now, the PlayStation 2 version arrives with this history of "Jeopardy!" video game evolution behind it... and promptly proceeds to ignore it. While it uses a sensible completion system for entering answers, it makes the stunningly boneheaded move of NOT saving stats about question usage to the memory card, allowing repeat questions to appear at potentially any time (at least the Genesis version allowed you to reject categories you knew you'd already seen - Atari's PS2 version isn't even that smart). What the heck were the Atari engineers and producers thinking? Apparently, they were too focused on features nobody really needs, like having CPU contestants answer with actual audio replies instead of on-screen text (memo to Atari: nobody cares).
Increasingly powerful systems should allow "Jeopardy!" to become more like the actual game show with each generation -- eventually, the game should be able to use a microphone and speech recognition technology to let players speak their answers aloud. But more important than the technology is a basic competence and awareness of gameplay issues, of fun, that this game screws up with the single avoidable mistake of not logging question usage to avoid repeat questions.
Customer Review: I hope they put out another one soon
Summary: 5 Stars
Overall, this game is a lot of fun. The only complaint I have with it is (as another reviewer mentioned) there have been instances where I typed in a correct response and it was judged as incorrect by the game. An example would be typing in "Thames River" and the game just wants you to type in "Thames"... irritating to say the least. That said, I have played the game numerous times and it's only happened to me maybe twice. I'm ready for version 2!Customer Review: just like the show
Summary: 3 Stars
youll do about as good here as on the show.that is until you get the same old questions over and over again.theres a part where you and the others compete for the right to answer first.thats a pain in the butt.the other thing that stinks is that they make you spell everything right.there is a loose spelling option butits useless. Customer Review: A suitable challenge of trivia (and sometimes spelling)
Summary: 4 Stars
It's not exactly like being on the show- you'll notice that some categories tend to be exceptionally easy (I'll never forget the $2000 clue in State Capitals: Boise. Thanks to a Daily Double, I managed to earn 20k on What is Idaho?). Overall, there's a good blend of difficult and challenging with intermediete to easy questions. The categories are exceptionally diverse, and I could be wrong, but the player profiles keep track of which categories you've completed, so no repeats (whenever I play with my main profile, I never see the same category).
Watch out for spelling though- the auto complete helps, but sometimes they will judge 'What is pope?' wrong when they want 'what are popes?'.
Be warned you need a multitap to play with three people, and there is no way to play with less than 3 (whenever its me and a friend, I just add a 3rd player and leave it alone rather than play the computer). Speaking of, the AI is not very difficult or fast on the buzzer, and only comes in 3 skill levels.
The game does has several upsides- good mix of questions, realistic style game play, a version where you can play solo (the only thing I hate about solo is that it doesn't give you the right answer if you're wrong/don't guess), tournament play, and it tracks statistics. Bottom line- an excellent version of the game with minor glitches. It'll keep you coming back.
Customer Review: The best Jeopardy game in all time period
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the first "Jeopardy!" game released on Playstation 2 and I believe this and "Wheel of Fortune" are the first two games released on Playstation 2 in 2004. Clearly, this is a perfect game with a real experience and some challenging answers. Also, it includes a real Alex Trebek speaks before, during and after the game show. On the whole, this is fantasic and absolutely recommended to all people in all time period.