4. Wheel of Fortune, New Third Edition
All this serious computing stuff is kind of bland, don't you think? Perhaps we'd all be well-served to kick back with a game or two.
I decided to aim for a shorter selection that could be completed in an evening and landed on Wheel of Fortune: New Third Edition, published by Sharedata in 1988. As the name suggests, this is the 3rd Wheel of Fortune game released on Commodore's 8-bit platforms. Despite having been developed a few years after the C128 made it to market, the game utilizes the C64 mode for reasons of backward compatibility.
Taking the game out of its now-dilapidated cardboard box and placing the floppy disk into the C128's 1571 drive, I immediately noticed that the load times were pretty brutal. I clocked 2 minutes and 50 seconds from the initial "Loading" message to the "Choose number of players" menu, at which point control was passed over to the player.
If you've seen the show, you know what to expect in terms of rules. The game supports a total of 3 human or AI players and it plays identically to its television namesake, sticking with the pre-1988 bonus round rules of letting you choose 5 letters and a vowel, rather than the R-S-T-L-N-E + 3 consonants + vowel of later seasons. I also found that the pace feels really slow compared to modern Wheel of Fortune games, which was kind of nice. I'd be easy to slip in some conversation in a multi-player game without having to maintain full concentration at all times.
The graphics are decent (with the exception of a horribly under-executed splash screen at the beginning of the game) and utilize a bright and tasteful color palette ("tasteful" not always being a given in some games of this generation - maybe I'll touch on a few examples in the near future).
The music and sound effects are acceptable, but not exactly spectacular by any stretch of the imagination. None of the SID's chip's unique character is reflected in the monophonic-sounding rendition of the show's theme. The bass line also feels particularly "out" and jazzy, and I'm not 100% certain that this is by design. Beyond this, we get some generic bleeps and bloops to serve as sound effects, as well as a small snippet of Stars and Stripes Forever once a player wins a around. I don't recall this music ever being a part of the show and it feels out of place in this context.
Based on my few play-throughs, the puzzles unfortunately seem a bit dated, with lots of references to 60s-80s pop culture. You'd also swear this was a sports-specific edition by the volume of football puzzles I got. Ever hear of Sonny Jurgenson? I have, now. I did manage to correctly guess John Madden as an answer, at least.
The game is a bit frustrating in that it's insistent on 100% proper spelling, which would not be an issue in the show itself. I lost an early round due to typoing with a "go ahaed, make my day". My word processor has a nice spell-check to help me out - Sharedata software in the 80s, not so much.
Overall, I had a great time with Wheel of Fortune: New Third Edition despite some flaws in its presentation. The show's absurdly long run on television is a testament to its universal appeal, and a bad Wheel of Fortune port is still more-than-playable. (To be fair, this one is far from the worst of the show's 1980s video game adaptations - I'd certainly rank it over the IBM EGA or Nintendo Entertainment System ports in my collection). I don't consider the game particularly challenging and had beaten the bonus road by the 3rd play-through, but it holds replay value until the puzzles start repeating, and I'd recommend it as an easily-accessible opportunity to burn 15 minutes with a couple of friends and introduce them to some classic 8-bit gaming.
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