Retro Roulette #40: Jeopardy! (N64, 1998)

I’ll take, uh..,Retro Roulette, for 40 weeks? God, that’s terrible. Let’s just get this over with.

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Pretty much every generation of video game consoles has had its own version of Jeopardy!, and I can definitely confirm that this is one of them. It has questions, answers, and Alex Trebek. Here he is in all his 64-bit glory.

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He’s always just up in that corner. It’s weird. What’s he afraid of?

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Ahh, that makes sense.

I’m a big fan of Jeopardy! – I’ve watched it for decades and once auditioned to be on the show. As an enthusiast, I appreciate versions of the game that don’t resort to multiple choice questions (or answers, I suppose). Thankfully, this version of Jeopardy! can do just that. Like other recent versions of the game, it has a sometimes helpful method of “auto-completing” possible answers to save time:

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Did I say helpful? I meant “brain hurting.” The game also doesn’t seem to check for redundancy in categories in any particular game – for instance, I got 3 geography-related categories in a single round once. I also found at least one case of a typo that prevented me from getting credit for a right answer. The AI (which is a weird thing to do correctly in a game like this, to be fair) can be painfully stupid at times, often handing you the game. In this instance, the correct response was “Merry Christmas”:

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If you like Jeopardy!, you’ll probably like playing it as a video game, too, even if this isn’t the best adaptation out there. Not unlike Video Checkers, I’m unsure how else to elaborate. It is indeed Jeopardy!.

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On a kind of sad note, this was the last game ever released by GameTek, who released numerous versions of Jeopardy!, as well as adaptations of Wheel of Fortune and a bunch of other game shows. Their most notable non-game show releases might be the ultra-violent 90′s racing game Quarantine and the remarkably unnecessary fighting game Brutal: Paws of Fury.

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Christ, that’s weird. I can’t end on that note – here’s another screenshot, in which I forgot what escargot was and the auto-complete thing asked an important question:

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When you really think about it, what are egg?

Next week, we’ll be staying within the N64 library for a third-party classic of early 3D platforming. See you then?