Makes Screwing with Your Friends Even Funnier!
You Don’t Know Jack has been one of my favorite games for a long time, and is easily, in my opinion, the only trivia-based video game ever released to actually “get it.” My siblings and I would gather around a computer keyboard for hours, doing our best to out-think and out-guess each other through round after round of You Don’t Know Jack. When I heard the game was getting a much deserved next-gen release, to say I was excited would be an understatement. Luckily, unlike so many other sequels and reboots I’ve clamored after in the past, the Wii You Dont Know Jack game actually ends up living up to the original.
The game is pretty much your standard trivia game, and hasn’t changed much from it’s roots, which is most assuredly a good thing. The game plays one to three players, giving each a buzzer, and subjecting them to round after round of silly questions, stupid puns, and irreverent wit via the smarmy-but-not-unlikeable host. The game works just as well as it always did, and the questions are funny and easy to understand without actually being too easy, so competition in this game has remained fierce. I’m glad to say that the YDKJ Wii game keeps many of the standards of the franchise, such as the option to “screw” another player, forcing them to answer a question.
However, there are a few downsides. One of the best parts about the original game is that you could play it over and over again and never get the same questions twice, or at least rarely. The unpredictability of the game was part of the charm, yet the YDKJ Wii version has 73 distinct episodes to play, meaning you’re only getting 73 variations on the same ten minute game. While this can make the game predictable and boring, there are enough episodes to give the game some replay value, but I feel letting questions come randomly would have made the game a lot better, and it seems like this latest iteration is actually smaller than the YDKJ title that debuted way back in 1995. Also, no online play? Come on, this is 2011, and I want to screw my friends.
Don’t get me wrong, the Wii You Don’t Know Jack game has plenty of fun to go around. Developers didn’t skimp on any of the voice acting or writing, which makes the game actually funny instead of just grasping for the laughs. The questions are witty, often challenging, and tons of fun to answer, and the D-Pad controls make selecting your answer quick and easy.
In the end, the game is at least worth renting, if not buying. If you’ve got a group of people you can play with on a semi-regular basis, or you have a habit of busting out the Wii at parties, then this is probably worth the thirty bucks. Heck, it’s even worth a purchase for single player play, a rarity in trivia games. It could have come with a few more questions, and we could have done without the neatly organized “episodes” that serve only to limit gameplay and add another factor of achievement to the game in the form of the “Wrong Answer of the Day”, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that the game is just as well-made, well-voiced, and well-written as it was fifteen years ago when I first got hooked on it.