The Question That Must Never Be Asked (Jeopardy Games)

Now, where were we? Ah, that's right. Jeopardy. We're back in that improbable fantasy from Hollywood Squares. The dream of being on a game show. Big money. Big prizes. Jeopardy is a different class, though. It's the "smart" game show. What always struck me as a child was how simple Wheel of Fortune seemed. 300 dollars was a lot of money as a child, and you could earn that on Wheel of Fortune just by saying a letter of the fucking alphabet. Jeopardy required smarts. Real smarts. You had to know things to question the answers on this show. I do not watch Jeopardy often, but it makes me feel smart to know the answers to these things.

So here we have some NES games made by Rare Ltd, those purveyors of fun from jolly old England. There's no high speed here, only high learning. Rare and Game-Tek also found the best solution they could to the Problem Of Game Shows. You remember this one, right? We brought it up in Hollywood Squares. Game shows have writers on staff to come up with questions and answers for every new episode. Jeopardy is a constantly happening thing, and it's had millions of questions and answers. I would estimate that an NES cartridge could hold hundreds of answers. Again, the unlimits of imagination meet the limits of technology. The solution? Make more cartridges. I briefly played through Jeopardy 25th Anniversary and Jeopardy Junior Edition. They are the same game. Same engine, same music, same controls... only the questions differ. It's a novel idea, I suppose, but who was starving for more Jeopardy on NES in 1990? Very few. If you liked Jeopardy, you picked one. If you liked Jeopardy and were a small child, you picked Junior Edition.

They've done it. They've gone and done it. After all my zipping along the galaxy, after all of this talk of Valya and Yin, after darting into a possible future and defeating my insecurities with the power of friend love... I'm spent. I've got nothing. These games are unremarkable. It's Jeopardy on NES. You question answers and earn fake money and maybe learn something. Eventually you learn all the questions and you either put the thing away or shell out for another cartridge. This is not heaven. This is not hell. It's a purgatorio of trivia from a time when 8 bits were all we could handle. For the love of god, give me something new!

wait

wait this isn't what I

oh




Oh no, now what have I gone and done? My wails have summoned a creature from the future. The tinkerer. The corrupter of both Valya and Yin. The Trickster Beast, ROMHACK. We weren't supposed to dance with him at all! We were supposed to play on the straight and narrow, but the remnants of the Nightmare Vortex have led to... rips in the fabric of reality. Anything could happen. Any

1989 and 2013 are leagues apart; two years separated by that impasse we call the past. 24 years. 8,760 days(roughly). I was four years old in 1989. I have no memory of the year, save a fuzzy one of crying outside a grocery store after being stung by a bee. That might not have even happened in 1989. The memory cheats. The memory, dear reader, straight up lies. Of course, thanks to 2013 and its Internet, I can decipher a history for 1989. A secret history; the history that happened while I was a small child, just barely sentient. The Cold War was beginning to crumble. Reagan was out, and Bush was in. Doctor Who died. The Simpsons was born. Indiana Jones went on what looked like his Last Crusade. It is a time of The Bangles and Madonna, of Miami Vice and ALF... and oh yes, the Nintendo Entertainment System. The grey box was still a year away from influencing my life, of course. For now, it remains lurking within the secret history, waiting in the wings. A lot of games were put out for the thing in 1989, but only on

e has managed to create a solid link with the present; Ducktales. 

thing. Oh god we need to get out of here before it's

Alright then. Let's go back to the past. The year 2004, to be precise. Hell of a year, as far as known history goes. Facebook was born, the Olympics were in Athens, and Janet Jackson flashed her nipple to the world and caused a hoopla. All of that is the known history, but there's always the secret history; the important things that few are around to witness. In 2004, a filmmaker from Philadelphia named James Rolfe made a short film; a hobby of his. This particular short film was little more than him complaining about an old video game. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. A game I happen to like, thank you very much. He swore at the game for wasting his time with text boxes, and invisible platforms, and an easy final boss. You probably know this already. I mean, you are on the Internet, after all. This history isn't so secret any more because of 2006. Many things happened, but the birth of Youtube is the one we want to look at. Someone in the secret history must have convinced James Rolfe to put his short films on this newfangled video site. He did, and that included the two short films he made bitching about old Nintendo games. They became popular, and he kept making them. For better or worse, The Angry Video Game Nerd was born.

too late. Run. For god's sakes, run. I'll see you on the next planet. First, I have to deal with these hacks.