TUAW first look: JEOPARDY! for iOS
Duly licensed from Sony, this JEOPARDY! game (with mandatory caps and exclamation point, of course) brings the same branded detail as many of the previous versions while completely missing the point of what makes Jeopardy fun.
It's multiple choice.
I don't know why I keep expecting something better, because natural language recognition and pattern matching is a big burden to place on any game company. Unlike its game-show sister Wheel of Fortune, which translates easily to a computer-driven game (and yes, I have my issues with the Sony/App Store version of that title as well), the fun in Jeopardy is having the tantalizing "I know that I know that I know that" feeling, while struggling to remember exactly what it is that you know that you know.
Multiple choice kind of ruins that.
Face it. You can't do multiple choice in the form of a question, Alex. I guess the game itself is okay if you force yourself to come up with an answer before being presented with the multiple choice answers, but how you do that is up to you.
Moving beyond the multiple choice quibble, how's everything else? The animation is cheesy, the interaction feels a lot like 1994, but the core challenge database is pulled from some decent trivia. So that's the saving grace.
JEOPARDY! for iOS is not a terribly fun game, but it's not going to be the worst way to spend two bucks you've ever encountered. I bought Wheel of Fortune a while back, and it got played with for a day or two and then quickly ignored. I suspect that JEOPARDY! will meet the same fate.
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I'm not one to give up on hope. I've been trying out various incarnations of branded Jeopardy games since dinosaurs roamed the earth (I...
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Some of the console versions of Jeopardy did the very sensible thing of providing a list of auto-completion answers with each character that you entered with the D-pad. Coupled with the iOS virtual keyboard, this seems like it would have been an ideal UI for Jeopardy -- easier to for the game engine parse than free-form answers, without putting the answer right in front of you like multiple choice. Until someone finally decides to do voice recognition, this is probably the best we can hope for.
FWIW, I think the best version of Jeopardy I've ever played is on the long-forgotten CD-i console. Aside from good presentation (for underpowered 1994 hardware), it also made the very sensible decision to keep track of which categories and questions had been used in previous games, and not use them again. Nothing kills the novelty and balance of Jeopardy like repeated questions (and considering that Jeopardy consumes up to 61 question-and-answers per game, keeping this element fresh is critical).
The game is terrible. I bought it about 9 months ago. There are only 3 categories per round, instead of 6. It's not like the original jeopardy at all.
September 22 2010 at 6:49 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyApparently, this is a new version called JEOPARDY! Platinum. AppShopper reports that this app was initially released on September 4, 2010. The screenshots for this app appear to have six category columns to select from.
http://appshopper.com/games/jeopardy-platinum
The version you're referring to, simply called JEOPARDY!, was initially released on April 3, 2009, and has since been removed from the Store.
Gordon Freeman... is that you? (picture, top right)
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TUAW (or The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is a website devoted to tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple.
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