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"From Sony studios in Burbank, California....it's JEOPARDY!"

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 31 / 31
Date: November 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Offering the most realistic adaptation of Jeopardy you can get, Atari faithfully re-creates the game in complete detail. Besides the fact that you can play alone and with others (much more fun this way), some other mildly interesting options were thrown in the mix.

Players can take sample exams that are given to prospective contestants vying to be on the show. Although not connected to game play, it will surely test your basic knowledge. During your progress through the game, your statistics will be recorded to include wins and losses, total earnings, best and worst game scores, and your totals of correct and incorrect answers. After achieving a specific amount of winnings, you qualify to participate in Tournament of Champions contests.

Although Jeopardy doesn't have difficulty settings as to the trivia questions, they're not really needed. There is a nice mix of questions that range from relatively easy to moderately challenging. For those looking to gain an outright advantage from the start, you can adjust the buzz-in time, response time, and computer I.Q. in the options area.

The game designers appeared to have a good plan in mind when they put this game together and it all flows pretty smoothly. Aside from a couple of slow load screens and a mildly annoying full motion video clip of Alex Trebek jumping in and out between question selection screens, game play is straightforward and fun. My only reservation with Jeopardy is the listed 5,200 or so answers. If you play for long, consistent periods of time, you're bound to see repeats of the same categories sooner than you'd like. So far, I'm happy to report that after playing the game with my wife for many hours (we're trivia hounds), we have yet to see any repeated categories or answers.

Jeopardy is quite entertaining and is recommended to anyone who likes trivia and thinking games and, of course, to those who are fans of the game show itself.

Character selection and misspellings

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 11
Date: January 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I have enjoyed Atari's version of Jeopardy for years and was excited when they came out with a version for PS2. I purchased it and was dismayed with two aspects of the game.
The first and biggest problem, in my book, is that with all the technological capabilities of PS2, there is no character selection. Other versions have you, the player, choose to be male or female and sometimes different races and clothing options. There was nothing like this with PS2's version. You can either choose a cheesy symbol or draw your own.
The other problem is the spelling accuracy aspect is inconsistent. You can accidentally, or on purpose, put "ton" instead on "tion" in words like action or constitution and have it be incorrect but blatantly misspell other things and have them be correct.
Also, be careful when typing in an answer. I had a problem where the answer asked for a type of "tape" and I typed the question to be "what is duct?" but it was marked incorrect, so answer each question completely, no matter how tedious (e.g. duct tape).
Good luck but I would not pay the $30 for it if I had known, so wait until you can get it cheaper or at a used dealer.

Not worth the money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: January 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

In my opinion, this game is badly designed. Atari have put no effort into this. There are too many "glitches." I don't know how a previous reviewer can state that he has "yet to see any repeated categories or answers." My husband and I encounter repeated categories/answers every time we play, which is definitely getting less frequent!

Another problem is a question being judged "incorrect" when it is obviously correct. This happens nearly every game.

The game is worth about $10.

Sorry, Alex.

I hope they put out another one soon

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: April 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Overall, this game is a lot of fun. The only complaint I have with it is (as another reviewer mentioned) there have been instances where I typed in a correct response and it was judged as incorrect by the game. An example would be typing in "Thames River" and the game just wants you to type in "Thames"... irritating to say the least. That said, I have played the game numerous times and it's only happened to me maybe twice. I'm ready for version 2!

Best JEOPARDY! Game Ever, Buy NOW!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Ok. If you look at my Wheel Of Fortune review, I'm not happy with Artech's (the Designer) work.

Apparently they were spending all their time in Jeopardy! This is the best. The new set look is there, and everything is dead on. Even the Category Showing sequence looks exactly like the show. It's great! Looks good, acts good, and overall is the best JEOPARDY! game anywhere.

Great Job Artech/Atari!

Pros:
Looks Great
Plays Great
Sounds Great
Faithfully Puts the Show on your TV

Cons:

Ok, so there's one little bug in which you hear the "Daily Double" sound effect before Final Jeopardy!, no big deal.

Buy it now. Worth every penny.

A wounderful game!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: November 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I loved this game! I am a big Jeopardy fan(even though I only get about 50% of the answers correct:) I still enjoy playing it.The great thing about this game is that I have played it about 100 times and there have only been a few times that I have had repeat questions.The only bad thing I can say about this game is typeing in the answers can be tedious.You definately have to know your spelling for this game,but my husband and I enjoy playing this game even though I always lose:)

A suitable challenge of trivia (and sometimes spelling)

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: January 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

It's not exactly like being on the show- you'll notice that some categories tend to be exceptionally easy (I'll never forget the $2000 clue in State Capitals: Boise. Thanks to a Daily Double, I managed to earn 20k on What is Idaho?). Overall, there's a good blend of difficult and challenging with intermediete to easy questions. The categories are exceptionally diverse, and I could be wrong, but the player profiles keep track of which categories you've completed, so no repeats (whenever I play with my main profile, I never see the same category).

Watch out for spelling though- the auto complete helps, but sometimes they will judge 'What is pope?' wrong when they want 'what are popes?'.

Be warned you need a multitap to play with three people, and there is no way to play with less than 3 (whenever its me and a friend, I just add a 3rd player and leave it alone rather than play the computer). Speaking of, the AI is not very difficult or fast on the buzzer, and only comes in 3 skill levels.

The game does has several upsides- good mix of questions, realistic style game play, a version where you can play solo (the only thing I hate about solo is that it doesn't give you the right answer if you're wrong/don't guess), tournament play, and it tracks statistics. Bottom line- an excellent version of the game with minor glitches. It'll keep you coming back.

A huge step backwards

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: August 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

It's not every day that I advocate video games becoming more derivative, but in the case of "Jeopardy!", I'll make an exception.

I've played a lot of video-game versions of "Jeopardy!", which has gotten easier to adapt as video game technology has improved. In the early 90's, the Sega Genesis version was a nightmare to play, as you had to spell out answers in their entirety with just a D-pad and three easily-confused buttons (for "select letter", "delete letter", and "accept"). Games took well over an hour to play and punished players who accidentally submitted incomplete responses by pushing the wrong button. Worse, there was no way for the cartridge to remember which questions had already been used, so you always risked getting repeat questions, which killed the fun and novelty of the game.

The CD-i version (of all things!) in 1995 was a breakthrough by substantially solving these problems. First, it had a list of "completions", so after entering a few letters of your response, you could see it matching an alphabetical list of possible answers, and just arrow over and pick the completion. This dramatically sped up game play. The other fix was that the game could use the small (8KB?) built-in memory of the CD-i player to log which questions had already been used, effectively eliminating repeat questions. With the copious CD storage, it was also possible to read the questions aloud -- while not necessary, it was a nice touch. The only flaw was that the controller 1 had a clear and obvious advantage over controller 2 when ringing in.

The PlayStation "Jeopardy!"s polished the "completion" system of the CD-i version, and saved the question usage stats to the memory card. In other words, it didn't fix what wasn't broken... it just took "Jeopardy done right" to a wide audience than would have seen the CD-i version.

And now, the PlayStation 2 version arrives with this history of "Jeopardy!" video game evolution behind it... and promptly proceeds to ignore it. While it uses a sensible completion system for entering answers, it makes the stunningly boneheaded move of NOT saving stats about question usage to the memory card, allowing repeat questions to appear at potentially any time (at least the Genesis version allowed you to reject categories you knew you'd already seen - Atari's PS2 version isn't even that smart). What the heck were the Atari engineers and producers thinking? Apparently, they were too focused on features nobody really needs, like having CPU contestants answer with actual audio replies instead of on-screen text (memo to Atari: nobody cares).

Increasingly powerful systems should allow "Jeopardy!" to become more like the actual game show with each generation -- eventually, the game should be able to use a microphone and speech recognition technology to let players speak their answers aloud. But more important than the technology is a basic competence and awareness of gameplay issues, of fun, that this game screws up with the single avoidable mistake of not logging question usage to avoid repeat questions.

Fun but frustrating

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 01, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The kinks definitely need to be worked out of this game. The concept and graphics are top-notch, but there are some very frustrating aspects to it. The "judging" programming needs help, since several of my answers were correct, yet were ruled incorrect, for reasons which were not always clear. Players must be spot-on with their spelling of words, due to the fact that the computer judge is extremely literal (e.g. "first star" was not allowed for the answer to "Twinkle, twinkle." "Star" was the correct answer). Also, the spelling prompt at the bottom of the screen actually allows for unintentional "cheating", if you will. That is, I had intended to type in the answer "Sheldon," when actually I meant "Shelley." Once I saw Shelley on the prompt screen, I buzzed in with it. I have no doubt version 2 will be far better, but until then...

All these other negative reviews are just way off...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: April 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This PS2 version of Jeopardy is great fun, and worth every penny. There are hundreds of categories, and yes some do repeat more frequently than others, but then it becomes a good test of one's memory. The spelling accuracy of your responses can be adjusted in the options menu, and you can save multiple careers (players) by writing your name or choosing from a selection of designs (who cares about choosing a character? It more directly engages you this way, instead of designating you as a "puppetmaster".) My wife and I have become junkies, and you'll be sucked in by it's seductive intellectual appeal, too. This is perhaps the best game-show to video-game conversion I've ever seen. I also recommend Atari's "Wheel of Fortune", but this is the superior of the two. Now go get JEOPARDY! and discover just how smart you are!!!

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