You Don't Know Jack

"You Don’t Know Jack ‘cause he’s too cool for you!!"

All right I’m gonna flat out say it, THIS GAME ROCKS! And any game that I can get my 50 year old mom to play must rock!! Not only that, but sometimes SHE will suggest playing it instead of doing something else!!!

But be forewarned, if you are easily offended, or someone in your household is easily offended, then this is not the game for you.

Graphics: 9.7
What? You expect a trivia game to have graphics??
Okay I’m kidding, it does have graphics, just very little of them.

What graphics it does have consist of the intro to the game(playing around with letters), the intros to each question number(playing around with letters), the animations when you get a question right or wrong(playing around with your player number), and of coarse the trivia.

The intro to the game is nothing special, it’ll display some funny one liner and then the title You Don’t Know Jack, which then gets sucked into the corner. Nice, but not original.

The question intros are far better, basically the letters to spell out the question number as well as a question mark are run around the screen(with sound) in various extremely entertaining ways. They’re short but sweet, and extremely high quality.

The player number animations are pretty good too. When you get a Q right or wrong, it has your player number at the bottom of the screen do something funny. Can’t put it better than that.
The only complaint I have with it is that sometimes the animations can be a bit gritty. For example, the one that has you number start to dance on a disco floor can be really grainy just from being a low quality animation. But then again, this complaint might be unwarranted since I’m playing it on my PS2, which as we all know can make PlayStation games look worse than if you were playing it on a PlayStation.

The questions and answers, well, what do yah want? They’re words. Words are words.
But here is where my biggest complaint comes in. The entire game has a VERY low resolution. Now this isn’t a problem for about 95% of the time because of everything being the same size. But when you get to the end of a game at the Jack Attack (for those of you who don’t know, the Jack Attack is where you try to match one word to another according to a clue, one word stays in the center of the screen and then other words fly by on the sides of the screen) when the first word is far away before it moves closer, you can have difficulty reading it because of the large jagged lines on the edge of it. And many times the Jack Attack is what decides the winner in a multi-player game.

And last but not least, just today, when I put Disc 2 in for the first time… I was sadly disappointed. I had been expecting new animations on Disc 2, after all they have to re-write them onto Disc 2 anyway, why not make new animations!?! With over 1400 non-repeating questions, there’s only so many times you can listen to an opening animation such as “Yodolo-hee-hee Yodolo-hoo-hoo, Yodolodolodo Number Two!!”

Sound: 9.8
The sound is fantastic, everything is read by the game show host… and he always has some smart ass comment ready at the end of the question. Many times you’ll actually laugh that you got it wrong after he’s had his say in it.

The sound in the animations is fantastic.

After the game is the best part… the fake commercials are enough to make you pee your pants if you’re not careful.

I would have given the sound a perfect score except, again, I expected new commercials on Disc 2… but I guess not?
Also, every now and then there’ll be a sound error that causes the question or answer not to be read. But this is a rarity, I’m half through the game and it’s only happened to me 4 times so far.

Gameplay: 10.0
You select a category, you buzz in with one of the R or L buttons, then you use the Triangle, Square, Circle, or X button to select an answer.
If you get a high score you enter your name.
And the mini-games such as Dis Or Dat and Three Way are quite nice.

What else is there?

Well, there is one extra neat thing about the Gameplay. Your player number and position on screen is in relation to your position in real life.
If you’re playing a friend, your controller is plugged into Slot 1, but you’re on the right side of the T.V. That would make you player two.

Also, this has a VERY long play time, having 1400 non-repeating questions. I’ve had it two months now and I’m just starting Disc 2, I’m only halfway through!!

Replay Value: 7.5
You’d think that once you got through that that’d be it right? Wrong!
This game has some crazy analogies and metaphors goin’ on, you have to actually know about something to get it right (unless you remember something simply because of it’s craziness).
With over 1400 questions there’s no way you can remember even a quarter of them.

Overall Score: 9.3
This is a must own for every PlayStation owner! Unless you’re not that smart… lol.

But PLEASE don’t buy this for or let anyone under the age of 12 or 13 play this… it has far to many sex jokes in it to be appropriate for them, not to mention that it would be way over their head as far as the questions go.

This is without a doubt a game for late teens to adults.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/29/02, Updated 01/29/02