While there exist good board games or video game adaptations of Game Shows, these aren't any of them.
- Ludia developed a reputation among game show fans for developing and releasing the worst game show adaptations for video game consoles (specifically Wii) in decades during the late 2000s, with many questioning if anyone at the company ever watched the original programs:
- Press Your Luck 2010 is an inexcusable shell of the popular game show, with computer opponents that don't know how many months are in a year, glitchy sounds and graphics, a boring and repetitive emcee, and a Big Board that is easily exploitable thanks to it only rotating between three screens (yes, you too can be like Michael Larson
). - Family Feud Decades was a grand idea to celebrate the show's 35th Anniversary, but isn't without its share of missteps. While the four sets all look great* , the Louie Anderson theme/cues are used no matter which era you pick. You only have 20 seconds to input answers, and you can only use the Wiimote to do so...an unforgiving, clunky setup that you can't change. The predictive text also helps break it; if your answer doesn't show up after two letters, 9 times out of 10 it's not on the board.
- Family Feud 2012 is even worse. It uses a set that looks only superficially like the current one, music that only vaguely resembles the theme tune and doesn't even play at the right times, an obnoxious stereotypical-game-show-host-type guy, and some of the worst graphics Ludia's ever done. There's large periods of silence while the ugly characters (though at least you can use your Miis) perform overy-long and repetitive actions. They couldn't even get the show's graphics or sound effects right, and the reveal in Fast Money is done in completely the wrong way. At least the 2010 version is passable.
- The $1,000,000 Pyramid managed to do an even worse job — idiotic computer AI, extremely slow gameplay, and a massively broken payout structure (the Million is awarded for every Winner's Circle victory, which is done by way of the front-game format). The biggest mistake is using the classic 1982-91 logo style with the Donny Osmond version, and pre-release screenshots clearly show the Osmond logo on-set! Naturally, the fanbase wondered what the hell Sony programmers had been inhaling.
- Their 2010 Hollywood Squares game does a fine enough job replicating the set and format of Tom Bergeron's final season, but that's where the good stuff ends. Bergeron's voice acting shows zero enthusiasm. There's only four actual celebrities in the entire game; the rest are generic people who don't tell a single joke. The questions they ask are really easy, and the bluffs are often head-slappingly stupid (JLo's real name is Tom Hanks?!). The only unlockable rewards are wardrobe items...which you won't even get to see most of the game, since your contestant avatar is rarely shown. It says something when the NES game from 1988 is a more faithful and fun adaptation!
- The home versions of The Price Is Right are passable, if cheap (the Big Wheel skews heavily in favor of computer players for some reason). While the first version was released in 2008, the graphics and music heavily suggest it was two years late.
- The Price is Right Decades was supposed to be essentially a love letter to the fans, but turned out to be mediocre — pricing games are still played for cash, the Carey-era theme is used in all years, Hurdles is completely botched (rather than the three hurdles being sets of two products where you must guess which is lower than the Hurdler's price, it's a higher/lower game), and the Showcase Showdown is even worse (you have to beat a preset "leader", and are forced to go again if you tie on the first spin).
- Worst of all, many very superior fan-made renditions, such as those at BigJon's PCGames, were yanked off the internet by cease-and-desist orders so these abominations could be released. The fanbase, who had been consulted by Ludia about the PYL game and provided more than enough resources to let it surpass Curt King's unofficial PC rendition, became very disgusted at Fremantle Media...which doesn't exactly have a good reputation with them as it is.
- Press Your Luck 2010 is an inexcusable shell of the popular game show, with computer opponents that don't know how many months are in a year, glitchy sounds and graphics, a boring and repetitive emcee, and a Big Board that is easily exploitable thanks to it only rotating between three screens (yes, you too can be like Michael Larson
- Blockbusters: The Milton Bradley game had gameplay faithful to the TV show, but the red and white stickers didn't always stay in place on the game board. The Timed Mission bonus round used the same single-word questions as the main game, forcing the host to leaf through the question book to find each letter as the contestant called it.
- Deal or No Deal inherently suffers at home because the entire game amounts to lots and lots of clicking on briefcases with no skill involved:
- Averted with the arcade ticket machine version, if only because you actually slapped buttons for your choices instead of clicking on cases. And you actually get a tangible reward afterwards.
- The DS version somehow manages be a Porting Disaster of such a simple concept: the numbers are not random, but based on predetermined patterns. Read GameSpot's take here.
- High Rollers: The original 1975 box game issued by E.S. Lowe (a Milton Bradley subsidiary), all because of the poor question writing that, according to Matt Ottinger's Game Show Home Game Page, had questions that didn't even make sense (e.g, "What is to gossip?" Answer: Reach) or were hopelessly vague (e.g., "Who was a famous Olympic star?" Answer: Owens). After getting complaints, the company immediately released a new version, which contained a question booklet whose writers knew what they were doing, with mostly true-false questions or multiple choice that the show came to be known for. The dice-rolling portion of the game was faithful to the rules in use at the time (simply the Big Numbers bonus game, rather than the more famous setup of three columns of three numbers each scattered randomly on the board).
- The Hollywood Squares:
- Many of the board game adaptations have been prone to this, in large part due to this really being a 12-person game — nine people to be "celebrities," a person acting as host and then two contestants. Many other quirks have been identified through the years: Meager amount of questions (each with a predetermined "bluff" answer and a correct answer) and awkward rules for the 1967–68 home versions issued by Watkins-Strathmore; the lack of correct answers for a good share of questions in the 1974 Ideal version (particularly galling for now-obscure and forgotten news/current events and pop culture questions and trick questions; ergo, those questions only had incorrect "bluff" answers); and more awkward rules for the 1980 and 1986 Milton Bradley adaptations. Only the 1999 version by Parker Bros. got it close to being correct.
- Video game adaptations have also been prone to this, especially the 2010 video game, which is no surprise considering that repeat offender Ludia developed it. However, the 1988 NES game (by GameTek) is said to have played reasonably well.
- Jeopardy!: The game itself was not necessarily the point of criticism; all versions of the home-game adaptation – and there were several – are playable. But critics often point at these as faults:
- Milton Bradley and Pressman: Between 1965 and 1976 and again in 1982, the board game company responsible for so many game-show conversions recycled the board from their adaptation of Concentration. While playing with five categories per game didn't detract from gameplay, some critics preferred there have been six, just like on TV. The other irk was that one of the Double Jeopardy! spaces had to be reserved for a Final Jeopardy! Daily Doubles not included, this resulted in just 22 clues for Double Jeopardy! Another point of contention was that contestants could never have a negative score (possible on TV through incorrect answers), thanks to the presence of play money. (Although here, the emcee could simply keep track of scoring using a pad and pencil and disregard this suggested rule.)
- Pressman, which took over releasing home adaptations of "Jeopardy!" in 1986, carried on Milton Bradley's process at least through 2003.
- Tyco/Mattel released a somewhat unusual version in the early 1990s, which had all six categories, but were cards placed on stands so as many as six players could participate, each acting as host for his or her own category. Final Jeopardy! was completely absent here. Not only that, Daily Doubles were randomly placed among the categories so you might have as many as six, or none at all. (Although a counter-argument could be that the "host" could designate the proper number of Daily Doubles per round by randomly selecting a question; and by drawing another category card play Final Jeopardy!).
- Parker Brothers released an adaptation in 1999 which many feel is the best, having a single game board with six categories and a reserved space below the board for Final.
- The 2016 version from Outset Media takes a cue from the Tyco version, having category cards placed into holders mounted to stands, but has the typical three-person play pattern akin to the other versions (probably because a lot of people decided to play the Tyco version by the normal rules).
- For video game adaptations that fall into this category, earlier releases are bogged down by sluggish game play caused by moving between characters when entering responses, especially if the letters, numbers and punctuation marks are all on one row. Later games alleviate this by offering an auto-complete feature that will give different options after the player enters a few letters. The GameTek ports have notorious Rubber-Band A.I. which will allow computer players to prevent you from running away with the game, and in the older games, having no judges obviously means they'll only accept one particular response: Did your question use "Dr." instead of "Doctor", for instance? Too bad, you lost that one. The Rare NES Jeopardy! games, however, are an aversion, because they follow the show faithfully and avoid the problems the other versions tend to have.
- The Game Boy adaptations were among the worst of the Jeopardy! video game adaptations. Unlike the others, which were developed by other companies, these were developed by Data Design Interactive. Not only is there a noticeable delay between inputs, but answering the question could take about thirty seconds to do. These led to an already sluggish game taking longer than it should, not helped by the awkward user interface. There were four Game Boy installments, and not one addressed any of these problems.
- The Joker's Wild:
- Milton Bradley's adaptations used cards numbered 1–5 to represent the categories in the main game, instead of the pictures on the TV show.
- In the Phillips CD-i game with Wink Martindale, the winner of the main game answers one last question, "The Joker's Challenge", instead of playing a proper bonus round.
- Match Game: Very much in place with the 1970s adaptations. Like The Hollywood Squares, this is a game that really requires more than just an emcee and two players. All of the questions (four per game, two per round, just like on TV) had predetermined answers from the six "panelists" (all fictional celebrities) printed in a game booklet, which critics said made the front game a pointless, boring exercise, and Matt Ottinger's website on home board games suggested that to make this game work, they needed to find "celebrities" ...and that even with fewer than six people on the panel, it was much more fun having real people write their responses and then have the players compare their own responses. The first part of the "Super Match" was more-or-less simple interaction with the emcee, which played OK, but the trope went back into effect for the Head-to-head portion of the game; the player had to pick a "celebrity" and won if his answer matched that printed next to the name of the "celebrity"; again, this part of the game really worked only between two actual people, and not trying to guess what the question writers at Milton Bradley said a fictional celebrity would say.
- Name That Tune: Milton Bradley's board-game adaptations came out in the late 1950s, during the original version's run on CBS daytime and primetime. The gameplay itself was not the issue here; this was a rather creative game marrying Bingo to the "name the song" concept; players simply listened to the song (on a record that was included with the game) and if they recognized the title and found it on their Bingo card, they placed a token over the title, and you won if you got five-in-a-row. The trope kicks in, then, with the songs included. While a number of songs over the two editions are still well-known today – namely, children's, religious, patriotic, folk and traditional, holiday and classical – a large share of the songs were popular songs (pre-rock era, meaning prior to 1955) and many show tunes that almost nobody younger than their late 70s – short of genuine musical experts – would reasonably be expected to know today. This is, then, a case of time dating a game and making it a major problem with playability.
- The Price Is Right:
- Board games: The first two 1970s adaptations (issued in 1973 and 1974) replaced the Contestant's Row one-bid game with a complicated "Strategy Game." The pricing games themselves were fairly similar to the TV show; the 1976 edition replaced the "Strategy Game" with the Contestant's Row game. The 1999 Endless Games adaptation had some new prizes for the late 1990s, but for some reason did not inflate the prices of cars. All of the cars were prices from the mid-1980s, with one car worth less than $5,000. In 1999. The game was otherwise faithful to the show.
- Video game adaptations: The GameTek version, published for Commodore 64 and MS-DOS in 1990 and Amiga in 1991, was a critical disaster, with many wondering if the game designers had ever watched the program. Major faults included games and prizes being associated at random (for example, Card Game was likely to be played for a $600 appliance rather than a car) and execution of several of the games, such as having to guess a car's price in Cliff Hangers.
- Pyramid: With the Milton Bradley versions issued from 1974 to 1981. The front game played fairly similarly to the front game of the TV show, other than the fact that all eight words in a given category note were visible to the clue giver at the same time (perhaps allowing him discretion insofar as choosing which words to play first). The big difference, and one that drew strong criticism, was the end game, which played just like a regular round on TV. Matt Ottinger, in his online review of board games, wrote that there was a suggestion that one of the powers-that-be feared there was a finite supply of Winner's Circle categories possible (which, to be fair, is plausible, as the show repeated many categories through the years) and that a savvy contestant-to-be could use the home game as a study guide note .
- All versions from the 1986 Cardinal Games adaptation onward are an aversion of this trope, and play identically to the real show.
- Tic-Tac-Dough: Ideal's home game from the late 1970s has a game board with a dial marked with numbers 1–9, corresponding to categories on question cards, and the scoreboard only goes up to $1,000. Each game of nine categories is split between two cards, for Player A and Player B (why not Player X and Player O?), and each card has only two questions per category. The bonus round is somewhat like that on TV, played with cards of various dollar amounts plus a dragon. Curiously, the TIC and TAC are replaced by $200 and $350 cards.
- While most video game adaptions of Wheel of Fortune avert this, a few releases still count. The common denominator tends to be slow gameplay (usually caused by a slow walking animation for Vanna that bogs down the game's pace), a lack of either host, a short game where only three rounds tops are played, or a repetitive databank of puzzles. About half of the GameTek ports qualify.
- The SNES version of Wheel of Fortune feels extremely sluggish and slow, compared to the faster-paced versions on the NES that were developed by Rare. You have to navigate letter inputs with a cursor that sometimes doesn't work, and playing the game itself is a convoluted mess thanks to an overly complicated control scheme. The Updated Re-release did remove the cursor, but it still suffers from a lack of polish.
- The Game Boy version, one of the versions made by the aforementioned GameTek, might be the worst one. Right out the gate, the game is brought down by very lousy sound design, with some extremely weak renditions of iconic tunes from the show, and perhaps most notably, the pace of the game is agonizingly slow thanks to long pauses between every action in the game and the Vanna Expy's walking animation that takes an eternity to finish. The game also still uses the five-consonants-and-a-vowel bonus round rules despite the current three-and-a-vowel rule (where RSTLNE is supplied) having already gone into effect more than a year before this version came out.
