Jeopardy
Reviewed by Dale Kulas
The Game
Based on the hit television show that has been on CBS
network for decades, Jeopardy! finally comes home to the
Playstation, courtesy of Hasbro Interactive, the folks who
picked up the Jeopardy license shortly after GameTek (the
previous publisher/developer who had the game show license
to use in their games) went defunct in early 1998, shortly
after releasing their N64 version of the game. Quickly,
Hasbro bought off the Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune
licenses, and within months after GameTek's last version of
the game, it comes to the Playstation. Will this game do as
good as the N64 version? Let's get onto the review and find
out. Oh, yeah, and lets get one thing straight, in the world
of Jeopardy! questions in the game are called answers, and
vice versa. This is because if you watched the tv show,
people answer in the form of a question (I. E. : What is
Butter?) So don't get confused when reading the review, just
a forewarning.
Graphics
Fantastic, the video board, looks exactly like off the
television show, and they even have a 3-D interactive
studio, that looks great, except for the noticeable minuses
being no audience whatsoever, and no contestants at the
podiums (which is really odd, considering how all of the
other versions of the game had it), one really unique
addition in the visuals which I didn't expect at all, is the
ability to 'write' in your name on the podium using a
generic type paint program, this can take a while to do, but
it looks great, and gives a more realistic tone of you being
in the game. The interface used to spell out your questions
looked odd at first viewing, (where the letters you have to
pick by rotating a circle, and your answer cue being
displayed in the center but after a few minutes of using it,
I started to prefer it way more over the old interface,
because it seemed faster to type in your answer.
Also, another great unique addition to this game, is the
addition of the Video Daily Doubles (based off a unique,
recently, added feature to the tv show) where you get a
picture, or brief FMV helping you figure out the answer.
Also Alex Trebek (The actual TV host of the game for the few
of you who don't know) pops in all the time in great FMV,
letting you know when it's your turn, introducing the
rounds, and it looks great. Overall, a really great job in
the graphics department.
Sound
The ever familiar Jeopardy! tunes or in here, from the intro
music, to the final Jeopardy music. This is just amazing on
how well this reflects the television show. Alex Trebek
throws in loads of comments, and says in several different
variation when it's your turn ('The board's all yours
Player 1', 'Take it away Player 1,'), or his many ways to
tick you off by letting you know how you got the answer
wrong ('s orry, that's incorrect,' 'Not what were looking
for this time,' 'Good Guess, but not for this one'). Even
though Mr. Trebek does have a wide variety of things to say,
he does get quite repetitive. Also the game show voice over,
Johnny Gilbert is here to take you through an easy setup of
the game, and he reads all the answers for the game too. The
back cover of the game says, 'Over 3500 Challenging
Answers,' man do I feel sorry for how much time he had to
do on that, so you can easily tell, that a lot of effort was
put forth in this game. Also you get little appraises from
the invisible audience when you get a correct answer.
Game play
If you don't know how Jeopardy! works, there's 3 rounds,
each round has 6 categories, with 5 questions in each
category. In the first round, Jeopardy!, the values for each
question you get correct is in multiples of $100, from
$100-$500, you get positive dollar values for questions you
get correct, and money taken away from you when you get them
wrong. There's also one hidden answer that is a Daily
Double, where you can wager up to all of the money you
earned on a certain question that only you get to have a
shot at. After that round, you move onto the second round,
Double Jeopardy! The difference here is that the answer
values are in multiples of $200, ranging from $200-$1000 per
answer, plus there's two Daily Doubles instead of one, and
then you move onto the third and last round, Final Jeopardy,
where only players with positive amounts of money can play.
You can wager any amount of the money you earned, and each
player takes a turn at taking a crack at the answer. Person
with the most money at the end of the game, wins. The game
actually moves along at a fast pace, unlike the N64 version
of the game, in here the average game for me takes about
35-45 minutes to complete, where in the N64 version, it took
about 55-75 minutes on average for me to complete a game.
Up to 3 players can play the game, with the use of a Multi
Tap accessory, and if you only pick 2 human players, the
game will automatically toss in a 3rd computer player to go
against, and even on a normal difficulty setting, I did find
the computer a very tough opponent, but I do wish I could've
just went two people playing with no interference from the
computer (the older versions of the game would let you have
this setting), to see who's the smarter man, because mostly
the computer rings in right away, and you seldom get a
chance to get a shot at the answer. The game has two modes
to play in, Classic or Speed, Classic mode was the basically
the mode I described in the first paragraph of the game play
section of this review. Speed mode is where you play on a
Double Jeopardy! game board, and you're the only player,
where you take a crack at each cue, one by one, you don't
even have to respond, your main goal is to just attain a
high score to save on the memory pack. The game has a nice
amount of extras, like a optional, high-res mode, plus an
option where if you start to type in a word, the game will
finish typing it out for you so you can avoid spelling
errors (say, you stared to typing 's oftware' and you
typed, 's -O-F' the game would finish spelling it for you,
and by simply pressing a button you can have that be rang in
as your question). The game does have lots of options for
tinkering, like setting how good the computer AI is,
Response time, Buzz-In time, Skill levels etc.
Replay Value
Up to 3 people can play the game at once, so you can battle
over your friends to see who has the best I. Q. Or if you're
just a lone player, you can keep on going against the
computer seeing if you can beat them, or see if you break
your high score in speed mode. Plus high scores for Classic
and Speed mode are saved on your memory card for future
bragging rights. Also the option for Question Completion
comes in handy real nice, and don't worry about being a
terrible speller, because you can tinker around by accepting
how loose a question can be. So lots of replay in this game.
In Brief
+: Nice use of FMV of Alex Trebek and Video Daily Doubles,
Great Speed Mode for one person, save your high scores
-: Trebek does get repetitive after a while, An audience and
actual contestants at the podiums would've been nice
The Final Ratings Rundown
Graphics: 9. 1
Sound: 9. 2
Game play: 9. 5
Replay Value: 8. 7
Overall: 9.1 out of 10
Comments
Jeopardy! is a great translation of the actual television
show. I'm amazed by how fast the game runs by compared to
older versions, and how good it looks on a 32-Bit console.
There are just loads of answers in this game, and the
innovative speed mode is something that made Jeopardy! a
game worthy to buy for just one player! So if you don't feel
like shelling out the extra $10-20 for Jeopardy! 2nd
Edition, go and buy this game right now, it's probably
marked for clearance for around $10-20.
