Right then, as I suggested yesterday my copy of the new You Don’t Know Jack! arrived in the post so I spent a large amount of time playing it last night – 13 of the 73 episodes in fact as it turned out across two play sessions. The first one I felt something was missing, the second one started as “a quick game” and turned into seven or eight, so make of that what you will. I haven’t had the chance to play it properly with other real life people in the same room, which is how it is meant to be played really. Nonetheless, I wrote a sort of mini-review on Twitter last night and think it would be good to summarize it here:
- It needs more question number animations – what’s there is quite good, but it’s the same animation in the same place for every game, except occasionally a quirk happens.
- The Wrong Answer of the Game is ingenious – sometimes cryptic but always fair – you’ll kick yourself when you realise you’ve missed it, which you’ll do quite often now speed is the determining cash factor in each question.
- I’ve not had much difficulty finding games online on the Playstation Network, and not in matches against people who have learnt all the questions either.
- Dis or Dat wrks slightly differently depending on whether you play online or off – off the worst scorer plays and the other people can steal answers they don’t get right. Online everyone plays it privately.
- The Jack Attack feels tougher than before, and not merely because of the US bias. In previews I thought the $4k a question seemed really unbalancing, but the reality suggests it works fairly well. HOWEVER, doing a buzzer quiz online is brave, and the Jack Attack doesn’t feel quite convincing in this regard with noticeable lag between button being hit and getting a response.
- Whilst I’m happy with the more scripted episodic nature, locking all but five new episodes off at any one time is very annoying – if I want to take this round a friend’s house, which I will want to do at some point, I’m going to have to sit out and watch them play because I will know the answers in advance. Silly.
- The questions are as well thought out as ever, I’m not really laughing out loud but smiling on the inside (that may change with alcohol and chums) although the commercials are funny (especially the Racist Doctor TV show) and I’m a miserable bastard at the best of times.
- There’s quite an amusing recurring gag in the green room regarding sound checks, and I’ll be disappointed if there aren’t 73 of them.
- Hopefully a second edition will add some more question types – even the ones with special animation (“Funky Trash” – rooting through the bins of celebrities and working out who they are, which is just a rehash of something they did years ago anyway, “Who’s the Dummy?” – a question asked by a poor ventriloquist’s doll, “Nocturnal admissions” guess the thing from an allegorical and graphically represented dream – good fun these, “Cookie’s Fortune Cookies With Cookie ‘Fortune Cookie’ Masterson” – answer a question based on a fortune cookie and “It’s The Put The Things In Order And Buzz In And See If You’re Right Question” – put three things in order) are all four-way multiple choice. They’ve had some great variations in the past (Bingo and Roadkill/Coinkydink being faves), it seems a shame not to have the variety.
- OK, the important stuff – in the UK you’re best off importing the PS3 version as that will work, although you will need a PSN account from the location you bought the game from to download the 4×10 episode question packs due to come out. The XBox 360 is region locked to US NTSC consoles. The PC version will work but you’re limited to two players and no DLC or online (bafflingly), the Wii version won’t work in the UK, and won’t have the DLC either. Or you can pick the DS version which only has half the episodes. The choice, as they say, is yours, but Videogamesplus will the PS3 one to you all in for just over £22 and get it to you in about a week or less (or I got mine at any rate).
- It sold a shade under 23,000 copies in the US in first week of release on XBox which probably isn’t too bad considering how little advertising it was getting – lots of embargoes until the day of release. It will be interesting to see if it becomes a word of mouth success. Don’t know how much it sold on other formats.
