Jeopardy! Deluxe Edition

Genre: Game Show Developer: Park Place Productions Publisher: GameTek Players: 1-3 Released: 1993

So, first we got Jeopardy!, and then we got the… sequel? Truth be told, this is more of a primitive DLC add-on, a Jeopardy! 1 & 1/2 if you will. By that, I mean there is almost no difference between the two games, save for a different bank of questions.

And boy, are there some doozies in here! You’ll be quizzed on everything from furniture to fashion, from sailing ships to mockingbirds, from European politics to ’60s TV shows. I found myself quite stumped by a lot of the more obscure questions but was still able to win competently against the dumb AI, who loves to gamble and fail. There is no option to increase the difficulty, so you’re stuck with tough questions and easy opponents, which tends to get monotonous after a while.

The game’s presentation does nothing to keep you excited, either. Almost nothing was improved or added upon from the original except for some slightly better – but no less creepy-looking – characters to choose from. There is almost no animation to speak of – no music outside of the opening riffs, and the few sound clips tend to get repetitive very quickly. Now I’m not saying I was expecting parallax scrolling and explosions and Sonic speed, but come on, GameTek! It’s like they didn’t even try. At least give me some ambient background tunes. Nope, radio silence is the order of the day.

The gameplay works as expected. Pick a question and you get 10 seconds to buzz in your answer. Make sure to use the spaces, though, as the parser is a little finicky. That would be Mark_Twain. Not “marktwain.” It’s a little nitpicky, but they had better parsers on text adventures back in the ’80s. Once you get used to it, though, you won’t have many problems.

If you’ve played the original to death and want a fresh batch of questions, you might consider picking this up. This is a common game and extremely cheap, so if you find a copy somewhere, you might as well grab it. But it’s destined to be one of those “rainy day” games that gather dust on the shelf most of the time. It doesn’t do anything particularly wrong but does little to justify its existence.