Customer Reviews

Jeopardy

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Offering the most realistic adaptation of Jeopardy you can get, Atari faithfully re-creates the game in complete detail. Besides the fact that you can play alone and with others (much more fun this way), some other mildly interesting options were thrown in the mix.

Players can take sample exams that are given to prospective contestants vying to be on the show. Although not connected to game play, it will surely test your basic knowledge. During your progress through the game, your statistics will be recorded to include wins and losses, total earnings, best and worst game scores, and your totals of correct and incorrect answers. After achieving a specific amount of winnings, you qualify to participate in Tournament of Champions contests.

Although Jeopardy doesn't have difficulty settings as to the trivia questions, they're not really needed. There is a nice mix of questions that range from relatively easy to moderately challenging. For those looking to gain an outright advantage from the start, you can adjust the buzz-in time, response time, and computer I.Q. in the options area.

The game designers appeared to have a good plan in mind when they put this game together and it all flows pretty smoothly. Aside from a couple of slow load screens and a mildly annoying full motion video clip of Alex Trebek jumping in and out between question selection screens, game play is straightforward and fun. My only reservation with Jeopardy is the listed 5,200 or so answers. If you play for long, consistent periods of time, you're bound to see repeats of the same categories sooner than you'd like. So far, I'm happy to report that after playing the game with my wife for many hours (we're trivia hounds), we have yet to see any repeated categories or answers.

Jeopardy is quite entertaining and is recommended to anyone who likes trivia and thinking games and, of course, to those who are fans of the game show itself.

I have enjoyed Atari's version of Jeopardy for years and was excited when they came out with a version for PS2. I purchased it and was dismayed with two aspects of the game.
The first and biggest problem, in my book, is that with all the technological capabilities of PS2, there is no character selection. Other versions have you, the player, choose to be male or female and sometimes different races and clothing options. There was nothing like this with PS2's version. You can either choose a cheesy symbol or draw your own.
The other problem is the spelling accuracy aspect is inconsistent. You can accidentally, or on purpose, put "ton" instead on "tion" in words like action or constitution and have it be incorrect but blatantly misspell other things and have them be correct.
Also, be careful when typing in an answer. I had a problem where the answer asked for a type of "tape" and I typed the question to be "what is duct?" but it was marked incorrect, so answer each question completely, no matter how tedious (e.g. duct tape).
Good luck but I would not pay the $30 for it if I had known, so wait until you can get it cheaper or at a used dealer.

In my opinion, this game is badly designed. Atari have put no effort into this. There are too many "glitches." I don't know how a previous reviewer can state that he has "yet to see any repeated categories or answers." My husband and I encounter repeated categories/answers every time we play, which is definitely getting less frequent!

Another problem is a question being judged "incorrect" when it is obviously correct. This happens nearly every game.

The game is worth about $10.

Sorry, Alex.

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!

The kinks definitely need to be worked out of this game. The concept and graphics are top-notch, but there are some very frustrating aspects to it. The "judging" programming needs help, since several of my answers were correct, yet were ruled incorrect, for reasons which were not always clear. Players must be spot-on with their spelling of words, due to the fact that the computer judge is extremely literal (e.g. "first star" was not allowed for the answer to "Twinkle, twinkle." "Star" was the correct answer). Also, the spelling prompt at the bottom of the screen actually allows for unintentional "cheating", if you will. That is, I had intended to type in the answer "Sheldon," when actually I meant "Shelley." Once I saw Shelley on the prompt screen, I buzzed in with it. I have no doubt version 2 will be far better, but until then...

The game itself is okay as far as the questions and stuff, but theres something wrong mechanically with the buzzers......and you get something wrong if you don't spell it almost exactly. Oh, and Trebec is soooooo annoying!

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.

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.

I loved this game! I am a big Jeopardy fan(even though I only get about 50% of the answers correct:) I still enjoy playing it.The great thing about this game is that I have played it about 100 times and there have only been a few times that I have had repeat questions.The only bad thing I can say about this game is typeing in the answers can be tedious.You definately have to know your spelling for this game,but my husband and I enjoy playing this game even though I always lose:)

I got the two Jeopardy editions for PS1, so I was looking forward to this. It pretty much follows the format of the show. You can play solo or with up to two other humans or A1 players. You get ample time to type in your answers. If you start to pull ahead, the A1 players will start buzzing in more often. Like the PS1 versions, Alex lets you know if you're right or wrong, and announcer Johnny Gilbert reads the questions. The memory of the game will often pop in possible answers for you to click on, so most of the time, you will not have to type in the entire answer. You can scroll up and down to see different possible answers.

The game allows for mistakes, you can back up and retype answers before pressing "done." There have been a few repeats of categories, but after five years, that's probably to be expected. One thing I don't like is that the game will only save your score if you play against human or A1 opponents, not if you play solo. I even called Atari about this. The PS1 versions saved solo scores, it's hard to believe the PS2 version can't do this.

Other than that one drawback, this version of Jeopardy is pretty good and true to the format, with updated amounts on the board.