Jeopardy! is itself an American game show institution. Its borderline-insane longevity and popularity mean that eventually someone somewhere is going to have to cash in on it and bring the game to homes in whatever way possible. Ways that, since the 1980s, include the home video game market.
Jeopardy! is an example of a game that takes the absolute bare-minimum concepts of the thing that it’s based on and comes just shy of failing miserably at it.
Jeopardy!, in accordance with the television show, allows you and up to one of your friends to compete to provide the question to a series of answers that are provided to you. The harder the answer, the more points the question is worth. Answer wrong and you lose points. Nothing too out of the ordinary here.
This game also features the hypnotically-addictive Jeopardy! theme song (apparently titled “Think!”) that plays during key moments, and it even had a picture and the voice of Alex Trebek! For the Super Nintendo, this was quite the feat. Even if Alex Trebek sounded like he was bound, gagged, and locked in a closet full of packing peanuts, you got to hear his ACTUAL VOICE saying: “The answer is…”.
The problems are few, but very important.
There aren’t very many categories. I played through this game three times, and was already seeing repeats of categories. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, but you had the same answers in the same positions every time the category came up. So the first time you saw the $600 answer for the category ‘European Leaders’ you were always going to know what that answer is. Plain text should have been trivial to put into this game, but I have to believe that most of the space on the apparently budget cartridge was spent on the ridiculously ‘high-res’ pictures of Alex and your character avatars and the super-amazing voice sample.
Perhaps more of a glaring issue is Final Jeopardy!. In Final Jeopardy! you and your opponents take turns answering the same… answer. The problem here is that you have to answer by selecting letters with the control pad, and you have to be able to see what you’re typing in to check for typos. The problem with that is that everyone in the room that can see the television will get to see what you put in for your answer is. Unless you play the game ‘no peeksies’ style, the first person to put in the correct answer will give everyone else the correct answer.
Oh, but the game does allow you to set the number of players to zero and watch the computer play a game of Jeopardy! against itself. And it’s not as boring as it sounds. It’s much, much worse.