Jeopardy! Junior Edition

"Tedious and Insulting"

Jeopardy is one of America’s favorite pastimes. Families across the nation, middle-aged single men in their underwear, and teenage boys who are walking useless trivia encyclopedias that can’t get a decent grade point average (like me) love to spend a half hour every day shouting answers at the TV. No other game show can evoke so much audience participation, so it is of endless curiosity to me why it doesn’t translate well to video gaming, the most interactive of all forms of media. Jeopardy games for the older consoles really only appeal to the most patient and best-spelling trivia nuts out there. Well, in their infinite wisdom GameTek has brought the same gameplay, with all of the quirks intact, and questions aimed at a younger audience to bring us Jeopardy Junior for the NES.

The fundamental flaw with these games is that answering is just plain tedious. To answer a question, the player must move an icon across a grid of letters and punctuation marks, and spell out every single letter of an answer. It isn’t too painful if the answer is something like “Cat” or “Roll,” but when there are answers like “Indiana Jones,” playing the game becomes a total chore. I love to watch Jeopardy, and I would love for a game to be true to the spirit of the show that inspired it, but I would be infinitely grateful if GameTek implemented a multiple choice system or something similar as opposed to the installed answering system that recalls the joys of hunt and peck typing the first time I tried to use a keyboard.

Bad spellers will surely hate this game too. The game is very unforgiving when it comes to accepting answers. If the answer to the question is “Graffiti” and you say something to the extent of “Grafiti” or “Graffitti,” then you’re going to be counted wrong. If GameTek was so insistent on keeping the game true to a real game of Jeopardy that they make you hunt and peck on an awkward letter grid, they should have realized that a real game of Jeopardy doesn’t require impeccable spelling for every answer that you give.

Then there are the questions themselves. They are an oddball bunch that range from incredibly easy to so off-the-wall that only the most twisted mind would be able to wrap their minds around it. Take, for example, one question that asked, “A baby learns to do this before he walks.” I think that me and just about any other semi-normal person would answer, “What is crawl.” But for some reason unbeknownst to me or anyone, the answer was “What is creep.” Who the hell has ever said that babies creep before they walk? The rest of the questions are so simple that even Jeopardy Junior’s target audience laughs in the face of them.

In the end, Jeopardy Junior is just an overly easy and sometimes confounding installment of the series of 8-bit and 16-bit Jeopardy games that caused more tedium than joy in gamers across America. Stay away if you actually care to finish a game of Jeopardy in a half hour, if you can’t spell, or if you want to be challenged. I’m not unfairly judging this game because I totally rocked a game aimed at little kids, it’s just my honest belief that even the grade school bunch would feel that their intelligence is being insulted.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/17/03, Updated 06/17/03