I hope for this to be the first of several reviews of video games based on game shows, all of which I have for the Wii, and nearly all of which are only for the Wii. If you like game shows, you’ve probably bought a video game of one, or maybe a bunch.
We’ve come a long way since the NES crudely gave us Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune games. Those games were incredibly accurate to the gameplay of the time. Unfortunately, by the time I was playing them in the early 1990s, the WOF ones were already outdated when it came to the rules of the game and the money values. The Jeopardy! games were not so outdated but didn’t have much value as they contained enough info for maybe only 4 or 5 games of Jeopardy!
Now games have the processing power to give you 3D graphics of accurate sets, as well as sound power to have the real music and the announcers. However, something is still around that was around in the late 1980s – laziness. If a company wants to make a quick buck, they can put out a lackluster version of a game show video game, and hope that people still snap it up.
To start the series, I’ll go with the first one I bought – a recreation of the game show Press Your Luck from the mid-1980s. I never saw the show during its original run, then when I saw it during the late 1990s in repeats on the USA Network, the questions were outdated. Yet it was one of the most fun game shows of all.
Press Your Luck is like Wheel of Fortune without the puzzles but with more Bankrupts. Instead of spinning a wheel, you’re “spinning” a board, with 18 squares of either cash, prizes, or “Whammies”, which are Bankrupts but with animations of little red goblins that amuse the viewers. Whoever racks up the most money wins. Simple game, but lots of excitement.
It is a cult classic game show, one that has appeared in anime conventions in the eastern half of the United States by the great host Greggo, as well as CBS’s “Game Show Marathon” a few years back (where game shows were played by a bunch of celebrities, including the late great Leslie Nielsen). It still has a large fan base.
How would game maker Ludia fare in its version of this game? Would it strike “BIG BUCKS” or would it Whammy out? Find out below.
I thought about retiring the 0-4 star system, but I decided against it. So once more, everything is graded on a 4-star scale, with 0 being very poor and 4 being excellent.
Graphics: **
Why do I still
start with graphics? Well, that’s where every gamer starts when seeing
a game for the first time. You may not be able to play it or even hear
it right away, but you can see what it looks like. If it looks really bad,
you may not even think about playing it.
This game is all right when it comes to graphics of the actual set. The board looks fairly accurate, and the stage on which the contestants sit also looks quite like the original. However, the contestants themselves are poorly-made avatars that show little emotion and in general just don’t look that great. More on those later when I get to a later section, but graphically they just aren’t that good.
Sound: no stars
Most of us Press
Your Luck fans have found a copy of the original theme song and have it
on our mp3 players. Then how come the makers of this game, fully backed
by PYL rights owner Fremantle Media, could not get a real version of the
theme song? Instead of snagging the mp3 off one of the many places where
it’s available, or, I don’t know, getting it from the company that owns
the rights to the show, they decided to produce a cheap, generic theme
that sounds remotely like the original. Really? That’s the best you can
do?
To make matters worse, the game totally failed when it came to one of the most important sound effects – the sound of the board “spinning”. That sound effect – a “boop boop boop” that is supposed to play throughout the entire time you’re spinning the board – starts up for one second every time you spin the board, then abruptly stops. Imagine a Mario game if the Starman music played the first three notes, then stopped and left you in complete silence. That’s what it sounds like. I don’t know if this was a programming failure or a matter of laziness. Probably both.
Finally, the announcer who is doing this game is terrible. He says cheesy, repetitive phrases that you’ll get sick of the first time you play the game. I know they couldn’t get the original announcer of PYL (Rod Roddy died in the early 2000s), but they could have found someone who is better at this.
Gameplay:
Very tough to
grade the gameplay. On one hand, the game does play like the original game
show did. You first answer questions in order to win spins, then you use
those spins on the Big Board. The actual gameplay of the game remains basically
the same.
But “basically” is the key word. To start off, let’s go with the Question Round. In the original game show, the host would start reading a question, and you’d buzz in when you thought you knew the answer. The reason for this is that if you were the first to answer, you’d win 3 spins. The other two contestants would then have the question in multiple-choice form, featuring the first contestant’s choice and two other choices. If they got it correct, they’d win 1 spin each. More spins is good – you may not think so because you can Whammy out, but keep in mind that you can pass those spins at any time and force the person to play every single spin passed to them and hope not to Whammy on any of them. In short, you could give someone an almost-guaranteed Whammy.
In this game, however, if you buzz in first, you are given multiple-choice with 4 choices. The other two contestants get the question then with 3 choices, one incorrect choice taken away. There really is no advantage to the other contestants for waiting, the answer is usually obvious at that point. So each question becomes a race to get just enough of the question that you can answer it, then buzz in and get the extra spins. Contrast that to the original game, where you had to come up with a guess all on your own. A lot easier when you’ve got 4 choices to go off.
You can argue that the game had no choice but to use multiple choice, but I beg to differ: other games that I’ll review later have text boxes with autocomplete after a few letters, where you have to type in your answer instead of getting an easy multiple-choice situation.
Okay, you’ll argue if you’re a PYL fan, the Question Round really doesn’t matter much. And you’re right; no one watched PYL for the Question Round. It was the Big Board everyone wanted to see. Is this an accurate depiction of the Big Board?
The answer is no. PYL fans will notice that yes, the values on the board are very similar to the values of the 1980s, with no inflation. Whether that’s good or bad is up to interpretation, in my opinion the game is just as playable with old values as it is with new values. There are similar squares to the original game, such as “Add a One” (adds a 1 to the front of your score, making a score of $500 turn into $1500) and “Double Your $$ + 1 Spin.”
However, there are also some big failures with the board. A minor flaw is the failure to mark a direction on the “Go Back 2 Spaces” and “Advance 2 Spaces” squares. PYL fans know that “advancing” is going clockwise, while “going back” is going counterclockwise. Modern-day fans may not know this, and may wonder why they’re being taken to a $500 space instead of a $750 + 1 Spin space.
Another flaw is the failure is with the “Big Bucks” square. When landing on the “Big Bucks” space, always 4th from the left on the bottom row, you’d always go to the space that is 4th from the left on the top row, always containing the biggest cash value on the board. In this game, if there is a “Trip” space that contains a higher-priced trip than that space, you’ll go to the “Trip” space instead. While that may be to the player’s advantage, it also is inaccurate in how the game is played.
Okay, but maybe that’s just being too much of a purist, you may say. The rules can change, and sure, I’m fine with that. But how about the biggest flaw in the entire game, the “Trip” space. In the first round of spinning, every “Trip” is worth exactly $3000. In the second round of spinning, every “Trip” is worth exactly $4000.
How is that bad? Well, let’s look at the original, or any game show for that matter. Are all prizes the same? Absolutely not! On the original show, you’d have prizes varying from the dreaded Flokati Rug to a Bumper Pool table to a trip to the Bahamas. They all had different values. You weren’t getting $4000 added to your score with every one of those. Same goes for any other game show; The Price Is Right doesn’t offer 1,000 trips to New York City, they offer trips to all over the place, as well as other prizes such as spas and off-road motorcycles.
With all “Trips” being the same, generic “You’ve won a Trip! Valued at $3/4000!”, it really takes a lot of strategy out of the game. What if you land on “Pick A Corner,” and one of the corner squares contains a “Trip”? You’re going to take that “Trip”. knowing it’s worth $4000, rather than taking a chance on whether the $2500 in another corner is worth more or less than your “Trip”.
Now I will again say that the game makers got it basically right. You can play the game and it will resemble a basic game of Press Your Luck. The rules are still the same for the most part, with the exception of some bugs with ties. I won a game once just because of a bug that forced an opposing player to pass his spins to me instead of the other player who was tied with me. The real rules would allow that player to choose which player he wanted to pass his spins to. In short, I got an advantage just for sitting to the left of my opponents. (I will admit that there is a crazy scenario in the original game show’s gameplay where sitting to the left is a disadvantage, however, it takes two 3-way ties – in money and in spins - for it to occur.)
Presentation:
½
The game does
not offer much to the game player. The only thing it really offers is slightly
customizable avatars. These avatars can be customized more if you win more
games, but not even close to how much you can customize a Mii. In addition,
if you play a 2- or 3-player game, only Player 1 can use a customizable
avatar, the other players must choose from 12 generic avatars.
Why not allow usage of Miis? Import your Miis into the game, then allow players to use them instead of avatars that may look like humans but still look nothing like the players themselves. Especially considering the game was originally available exclusively for the Wii! (They later added it to the PlayStation 3 store, and probably took about 2 seconds to do so since the only difference in gameplay would be the lack of motion control to buzz in/stop the board.)
Replayability:
*
The game’s nice
for a little 20-minute diversion if you’ve got a couple of friends to play
with. Playing yourself is as boring as it gets. But with others involved,
you can have a bit of fun. Unfortunately, the game gets old very quickly.
You’ll play a game of it, then take the disc out and move to something
else more fun.
Fun Factor!: **
Do I still include
this? Wow, I guess I do. It can be a bit of fun to play with other humans,
as I just noted. But it doesn’t last long. The gameplay of the original
game show remains mostly the same, so you’re going to still be able to
enjoy the basic game. Of course, the flaws in the game will show themselves
even to those who have never seen PYL (as they did to my sister’s boyfriend,
who got sick of the game quickly).
OVERALL: ½
Shovelware. That’s
what this game is. It could have been good, if made right. It wasn’t.
Two notes on the game: one, I paid full price for this thing when it first came out, a whopping $40. It’s worth $5 in my opinion, maybe $10 if you’re a huge fan of the original show. The only reason why it’s even worth buying is because of my second note.
A while back, a programmer named Curt King developed his own version of PYL and made it freely available to anyone to download. It was completely accurate to the original game, as well as customizable. It was everything you would ever want in a PYL game.
Fremantle Media got it taken down due to copyright infringement, forcing anyone to buy their game if they want PYL. The sad thing is, some random programmer was making nothing off the game, yet somehow managed to make a better version of the game than Ludia did, even with their financial interest. Now they can make money off idiots like me who thought they’d actually get a quality game.
In short, do not buy.
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