Jeopardy for Windows: What Is a Horrible Implementation of a Great Game?

I've been playing Jeopardy on my Mac for years. While I have some issues with my implementation (circa the early 90s), it's a reasonable fascimile of the trivia game show. I recently picked up a newer Windows implementation of the game. I'm sorry to say that it's far inferior to my older Mac version.

The basic game is exactly what you'd expect: you pick answers from a game board with five questions in each of six categories. You're asked to match the answer with a question that fits its information and the category in play. The game progresses through one board of regular Jeopardy with dollar amounts from $200 to $1000 in each category and one board of Double Jeopardy with dollar amounts from $400 to $2000 followed by a Final Jeopardy question with freeform betting.

That's where the similarity between this game and the television show ends. The game only supports a single player and doesn't provide any computer opponents. The questions are all given as multiple choice options rather than in freeform format. The categories are reused fairly frequently (although they often have new questions) and every time you restart the game the categories and questions reset to their initial starting point.

This last is unforgivable in my mind. I expect to get new categories and new answers when I start a new game. I shouldn't have to replay games I've already played in order to reach new games I haven't seen before. That alone would be enough to earn this incarnation of Jeopardy a very low rating in my book. Unfortunately, there are many other things to dislike about it.

New answers are chosen from the board by clicking on the grid square corresponding to that category and dollar amount. The questions are chosen by either clicking or hovering over one of the choices. There are about six answer slots where one of the questions is automatically selected as soon as the text appears unless you move your mouse out of the board space as soon as you click on the answer square. This is really irritating as it results in incorrect answers most of the time.

As expected, the regular Jeopardy round includes one Daily Double square and the Double Jeopardy round includes two of them. These are answers where you can bet up to your current earnings rather than trying for the dollar amount actually assigned to the square. Similarly, the Final Jeopardy question allows you to bet up to your current earnings. In all of these questions, you can bet the maximum by clicking on a single button. You can also write in a value, but that's not obvious in the Double Jeopardy screens (it's a bit clearer in Final Jeopardy). I think it's so hard to catch on because this is the only place in the entire game where you type information into the game.

The options screen allows muting and playing full screen (the game seems to play in full screen mode regardless, though). You can also type in your name and select one of about eight characters to represent you in the game. They're somewhat fuzzy and not terribly appealing, but you can at least choose an avatar of the correct gender. You can also do some basic customization of the avatar if its appearance is important to you, but none of the options really make the characters look any better. Aside from the generic fuzziness of the characters, I find them irritating beyond belief during the game. Basically they celebrate every correct answer as if it were worth a million dollars and bemoaned every wrong answer as if by getting it wrong someone was about to die. They jump wildly into the air, pump fists, pound their heads against the desk, and are just unbelievably over the top.

I've only ever made it to the third game in the sequence. In that set of answer and question combinations, one category was duplicated, several categories were uncomfortably similar to each other, and one answer and question combination was worded badly and incorrect as presented (they essentially state that Fresnel invented all lenses, not just the Fresnel lens). The categories I've gotten in my three games are primarily a mix of history, literature, and, to a lesser degree, pop culture. I've gotten one science category, but I didn't feel like there was a lot of variety in the question and answer combinations I saw. It may be that there are science, sports, and a wider view of the entertainment world within the full database but they simply don't sample widely in the first six sets of categories.

My old Mac version of Jeopardy supports three players including computer players, expects freeform questions from the players, changes the categories every time I play, uses a wide range of subjects, and has few duplicates from game to game. The experience of playing that version of Jeopardy is superior in every way to this Windows version. Unfortunately, there's no visual cue that the two games are different - they both are simply called Jeopardy with no version numbers or other indication that the two have almost nothing in common. It bothers me a lot.

This version of Jeopardy is one of the worst games I've played. It retains the basic premise of the television game show but presents everything so poorly that the game becomes unplayable. For some reason, the game doesn't randomly select categories and answers for each round, but rather has a set order of presentation that resets each time the game is launched. That means that you get the same categories with the same questions and answers over and over and over again. That's unforgiveable. Toss in the decision to use multiple choice and the autoselection of questions before the answers are even displayed and there's simply no hope. Avoid Jeopardy for Windows at all costs.