Jeopardy! | Cheerful Ghost

Alex Trebek Was Never More 8-Bit!

Recently I was retro game thrifting with one of my friends Will and I spotted Jeopardy! on NES for $4 on a discount shelf. Young Jon Dodson would never have picked up Jeopardy! and would have always preferred Zelda, Metal Gear, Mario or nearly anything else to a classic game show game. Not to say I haven't enjoyed game show video games, I have very fond memories of Wheel of Fortune on DOS, I just wasn't a big Jeopardy fan when I was young. Times change and as luck would have it I've been watching a fair amount of Jeopardy on Pluto.tv. I've also really enjoyed watching Jeopardy with my girlfriend. As we watch we try and answer the questions and the good news is we both... Read All Recently I was retro game thrifting with one of my friends Will and I spotted Jeopardy! on NES for $4 on a discount shelf. Young Jon Dodson would never have picked up Jeopardy! and would have always preferred Zelda, Metal Gear, Mario or nearly anything else to a classic game show game. Not to say I haven't enjoyed game show video games, I have very fond memories of Wheel of Fortune on DOS, I just wasn't a big Jeopardy fan when I was young. Times change and as luck would have it I've been watching a fair amount of Jeopardy on Pluto.tv. I've also really enjoyed watching Jeopardy with my girlfriend. As we watch we try and answer the questions and the good news is we both can answer a fair amount, but she nearly always gets more answers than I do. Date smarter people folks, it's not a bad strategy! With that, between us were a fair trivia pair and because of this when I saw NES Jeopardy! on the discount shelf, I bought it.

NES Jeopardy! came out in 1988 and contains questions forever frozen in time from that area. Good news is my girlfriend and I do know quite a bit about that time or earlier, so we're not too bad as a pair up against the computers. I think my only negative thought on Jeopardy! for NES is that because of the limited way you can enter data into the NES at times you have to hunt and peck to type in the answer and that can take quite a bit of time. The good news is they give you A LONG time to answer the question, but answering questions on a d-pad when it's long is annoying. Still, it's not too bad and the game is very quick and the character graphics are charmingly campy.

So far we've played Jeopardy! a handful of times and haven't gotten any duplicate categories yet, but at some point I expect to. Because we've had so much fun playing Jeopardy! I plan on buying out the rest of the series on the NES through Super Nintendo. These games don't seem to be any kind of rare so if you wanted to play it on retro hardware it's only going to cost a few dollars.