Question: What is Jeopardy!?
Sony Online Entertainment Senior VP of Development Shalom Mann announced today via the official PlayStation Blog that a video game adaptation of Jeopardy! will be coming to the PlayStation Network on September 11, 2008.
Sadly, the game will stray from the TV show’s format by following a multiple choice strategy, a design choice of SOE to make inputting answers — or rather, questions, in Jeopardy! format — easier on players.
We made this design decision so that single-player and multiplayer games would have a quick pace to them. I have played the PS2 version of the game where players had to use the DualShock to type in responses. This input mechanism felt tedious in single-player games and would be just downright painful in multiplayer games. We looked into the idea of using voice recognition, which would have been a lot of fun. The PS3 has the power to do it, and we saw great middleware that would have made it all possible. However, we felt that by making the game require a Bluetooth headset, it would limit its accessibility. Maybe in the next version… — Shalom Mann in the official PlayStation.Blog
Other features of the game include more than 2,500 clues, single and multiplayer capabilities, voice chat in multiplayer mode and the promise of expansion packs sometime in 2009.
Interestingly, no mention of Alex Trebek making an appearance in the game. Does that make or break the game for anyone?
