Full Feed
Special Features
Live from Macworld 2009
The Appletell staff is working their way through the show floor at Macworld 2009 to bring you the latest Apple products and accessories. Hit the Macworld page for non-stop coverage...
Live from CES 2009
We're live from the world's largest tradeshow. Hit up our dedicated CES page for keynote coverage, product announcements, interviews, and photo galleries from the show floor. We're excited... are you?
One of the perils of being a fake Mac journalist is that every four or five years you have to review new versions of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Together, they’re the death and taxes of Macintosh gaming. Now it’s Freeverse’s turn with them, and I’m afraid they’ve gone all ironic on us. Freeverse games, you see, are normally all about personality. Well, not all about, but the personality of the Freeverse cast of characters is often enough to drive fans to purchase one of their games even if they have no interest in the genre. So, it’s ironic that Freeverse would be the company to publish the most personality-free versions of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune to date.
And this isn’t just because Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak and Vanna White are nowhere to be found. The video snippets of Alex and Vanna killed the MacSoft versions of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, respectively. The load times were annoying, and the live motion video overtop of the computer animations were disjointed and kind of creepy. Even though technology has progressed since then, I’m still quite certain I wouldn’t want live video of these people in the game, but CGI characters or even voiceovers could work. Instead, we get nothing.
As I mentioned, though, that’s not the real problem here. The problem is that the games are just dull. With no money to actually be won, the focus falls mostly on the puzzles, with the remainder shifting towards the characters. I’ll deal with them, first.
In both games, you get to customize your character, to a certain extent. You get a few options for shirt color, hair style, complexion, etc. The choices fall short of what you see in other games, but I’m not sure they should be more robust. These are casual games, after all, and most casual gamers aren’t interested in tweaking character skins. Once this is done, you can choose to play a few different single player or multiplayer games. In single player Wheel of Fortune Deluxe, for instance, you can go against computer opponents or just play by yourself, solving puzzles without competition. It seems odd, but considering the fun in Wheel of Fortune is doing just that, computer opponents can actually get in the way if you’re playing by yourself.
There’s no such feature in Jeopardy! Deluxe, and there shouldn’t be. Jeopardy! without opponents is just trivia; at least Wheel of Fortune offers the random luck of the spinning wheel. So, the Jeopardy! version is more cut and dry, and having at least one other person to play with is pretty much key to enjoying the game. Yes, you can track your progress and save your scores and so on, but considering there’s nothing you can do with this information other than…well, have it, these features really don’t bring anything to the game.
So, we look specifically at the games themselves. Both play exactly like their TV counterparts: Wheel of Fortune starts you off with a couple quick puzzles before getting to the wheel, offers the same style of gameplay, and places the same style of rewards/traps on the wheel itself. It’s familiar and it’s fun and fans of the show will have a good enough time. In fact, even if you don’t watch the show, Wheel of Fortune Deluxe can be a pretty fun time killer or party game with the right crowd. Because it’s played in turns, for the most part, you don’t have to crowd three people around the computer for 15 minutes.
But Jeopardy! Deluxe…oh, man. Jeopardy! is easily my preferred show of the two, but the developers here made a decision that kills—absolutely kills—this game. The problem with Jeopardy! games of the past, you see, is that you had to type in questions, and the games were never very forgiving. If you misspelled a word or phrased something differently from what the computer wanted, you’d be considered wrong even if you were right. It was very annoying, but Encore’s method of removing this problem is just terrible. Rather than force you to type in your question, they present you with multiple choice options.
That’s right. Multiple choice Jeopardy!
It’s not just that you’re no longer rewarded for actually knowing stuff, which is the main appeal of Jeopardy!, it’s that multiple choice totally kills the gameplay and strategy. With multiple choice, there’s absolutely no reason to not immediately buzz in on every single question. Don’t even read it, just buzz the moment you can. It’s multiple choice. You’ve got a 25% chance of being right on everything…possibly higher, considering many of the questions couldn’t possibly be right. And so, Jeopardy! becomes 80% speed, 10% luck, and 10% knowledge. It’s exactly what the show isn’t, and that makes the game somewhat pointless.
A better solution would’ve been to just offer a manual override. If the game thinks you’re wrong, but you and your opponents know you’re not, you should just be able to hit a button to tell the game that one misspelling doesn’t make a correct answer wrong. It may slow things down, but at least it wouldn’t strip away Jeopardy’s very soul.
Also, why has nobody figured out how to add online multiplayer to these games? You’d think the networks would be able to offer these games online, throw in some commercials, make some real prizes available, and watch the money roll in.
Instead, we get games that look much prettier each time they roll out, but that really offer nothing that wasn’t in the versions we played back in the late 80s on the Apple IIGS (aside from more content: over 2,000 puzzles in Wheel of Fortune Deluxe and 3,000 clues in Jeopardy! Deluxe). Wheel of Fortune Deluxe is serviceable; fans of the show will be entertained and casual gamers in general will be able to kill some time with it. But Jeopardy! Deluxe is best left alone. You’ll have more fun just watching the show, and you’ll feel better rewarded for having done so.
There. I’m done with these games for another five years. By then, maybe the developers will finally get them right…or perhaps bring us something new. The Gong Show, maybe? One of those crazy Japanese game shows?
Perhaps not.
Appletell Rating for Wheel of Fortune Deluxe
Buy Wheel of Fortune Deluxe
Appletell Rating for Jeopardy! Deluxe
Buy Jeopardy! Deluxe
Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! -
Subscribe to our feed