Jeopardy! (SNES)

Jeopardy!

SNES - USA - 1st edition.

Developer Imagineering Publisher GameTek Published 1992-12-?? Platforms SNES Genres Licensed, Trivia Themes Game Show Series Jeopardy! Multiplayer Alternating versus Distribution Commercial

Jeopardy! is a video game version of the television trivia game show. It was developed by Imagineering and published by GameTek in December 1992 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as part of the Jeopardy! franchise.

The game simulates an early 1990s version of the Jeopardy! television show.

Personal

Own?	No.
Won?	Yes.
Finished	2021-11-16.

Being a fan of Jeopardy!, and wanting to add another video game to my list of victories, I played this game several times until I finally beat two other AI opponents.

Review

5	3	4	4	6

Best Version: SNES

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The game has decent photos of Alex Trebek and accurately represents the Jeopardy! studio.
• The game competently recreates the Jeopardy! theme song and has adequate digital audio samples of Trebek's speech and the show's sound effects.
• Of the player avatar choices, one is a person of color and two are women.

Bad

• The game is sometimes very specific about the wording and/or spelling, and sometimes far too lenient. For example, some words can be spelled totally wrong, but, if the game's is expecting plural, you need to respond in plural.
• The length of time before you can buzz in seems to be constant regardless of how long the answer text is. For short text, you have a long delay before you can buzz in, but, for very long text, you might not finish reading it before the AI buzzes in.
• Unlike most Jeopardy! games which came before it, the game doesn't have a way to adjust the difficulty of the AI. So, if the AI is too hard or too easy for you, it will always be that way.
• The game handles the final Jeopardy! round in hot-seat fashion; other players are expected to not view the screen while the active player answers so they can't see their answer or have more time to ponder the question. However, the game does this even with AI opponents, which lets the player see the question prematurely.
• All of the player avatars look awful.
• Alex Trebek's eyebrows raise at the end of each question, which annoys me. Some variety would have been nice.

Ugly

• Putting all the letters on a single line in the text entry really slows down input. The developers should have used more of the screen's real estate so you don't have to jump back and forth along the alphabet.
• Despite boasting over 3,500 questions, I encountered a repeated category on only my fifth play-through and saw the same category (but with different answers) about every third play-through.

Media

Box Art

• 

  The competent SNES box with a then-young Trebek.

Documentation

• 

  Manual - USA.

Play Online

SNES

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	The second contestant is always a woman, but she's just a template.
Bechdel test?	Fail	There is only one woman.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	The third contestant is always a black man, but he's just a template.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no queer characters.

Videos

Longplay.

Taking advantage of the parser.

Links

   

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!_(franchise)#Video_games - Wikipedia.