Jackal / Wheel of Fortune / Jeopardy! retrospective: I'm givin' up, Don Pardo | NES Works

The prevailing theme for NES games in 1988 has been multiplayer. From Contra to Life Force to Jackal, many of the best games for ’88 played best with friends. (That was probably also true for games that weren't published by Konami, even.) Fittingly, episode 88 sees not but three games that uphold that trend. First, there's Jackal, a widely overlooked but danged enjoyable co-op shooter, followed by two pretty decent game show adaptations by Rare Ltd. for the sake of newcomer GameTek. Don't despair, though: The NES has some fantastic introvert-friendly single-player titles coming up before long.
Production note: NES footage captured from ‪@analogueinc‬ Nt Mini Noir. Arcade footage captured from MiSTer (special thanks to ‪@MiSTerAddons‬). Video upscaled to 720 with ‪@retrotink339‬ 5X.
Video Works is funded via Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its KZbin debut! Plus, exclusive podcasts, eBooks, and more!

[@doctorwolfman5221]

Jackal was the ultimate game for post school 4:00 pm Nintendo sessions with flav-r-ice and best friend in tow.

[@gevdarg]

Amen!!

[@suedeface]

That is exactly what this was for me.

[@ClexYoshi]

Jackal is legitimately my childhood friend's favorite NES game.

[@hyper_vyolet]

Oooh no!!! R.O.B. really did vaporize Jeremy and that's why we're back to voice overs now huh?

[@Jinx_Skeel]

it's a secret to everyone

[@jessragan6714]

Nah, it missed and destroyed his VCR.

[@kennethchia4194]

Did not know until now that Not-Vanna White might be the best-animated character in NES history

[@ValkyrieTiara]

I'm pretty sure there are better ones later but she almost certainly takes the top slot at the time of release lol

[@Choralone422]

Bubble Bobble next week!? YESSSSS!!! I'll have that song stuck in my head for days after watching it!

[@jessragan6714]

I'd like to know why Taito felt it was necessary to replace the fruit prizes in the NES version. I think one of the fruits became a green pepper, for reasons that still mystify me.

[@GameplayandTalk]

I didn't get to play Jackal much as a kid, but it turned into one of my Konami favorites as an adult. Has all the fun and polish of Contra and Life Force and definitely deserves some attention!

[@LeoFan93]

Jackal *almost* got a rerelease back in the early 2000's. At that time, Konami released a compilation of Contra and Castlevania games for PC, basically an emulator with the NES games from both series on it. For some odd reason, a ROM of Jackal was found hidden away in the game's executable files. According to TCRF, it could only be run if you modify the game's memory with a cheating device.

[@KrvaviAbadas]

It’s the “Konami Collector's Series: Castlevania & Contra” collection, to be specific. Konami even put it in GOG at one point, meaning it’s TECHNICALLY still available. Just requires the same hack to be applied.

[@DomTarason]

There are some people still holding a torch for Jackal. Avalanche - the Just Cause developers - especially. if you haven't checked out Renegade Ops on PC/360/PS3, do so. It's basically Jackal 2011 and great in co-op.

[@NoxiousLynx]

That was the main appeal for me when buying renegade ops, it just felt/looked like jackal.

[@nicholasschumacher5020]

"AT THIS TOWER, *THE LORD DID CONFOUND THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE EARTH*" Jeremy Parish: "What is Druaga?"

[@thejackal007]

Jackal certainly isn't forgotten to me. :)

[@absolutezeronow7928]

And thus ends the September 1988 releases for NES. Definitely an evenhanded take on the Gametek duo of Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Nice to see Bubble Bobble on the next NES Works, that will definitely get the nostalgia going for me (another game that's better with another player).

[@RadikAlice]

Heh, that's funny. I've heard nothing but praise and love for Jackal. The difference another community makes

[@MissAshley42]

I never thought about how much space all that text had to take up on an NES cart before. Good work, Rare!

[@JeremyParish]

It's funny-text is the most trivial form of content to store these days, but in the ’80s when data capacity was measured in KB, it was the most expensive and demanding.

[@nekononiaow]

Yes, there was a complete inversion of the relative sizes of text and textures between the 8bit and the 32 bit era. A NES 32x32 character sprite required exactly 32x32x2/8 = 256 bytes (without counting the attribute table) which is only slightly higher than the amount of bytes used by this very sentence that you are currently reading. So, even just one full screen of text (1000 bytes) would be eating four frames of animation of that character. Nowadays, the size of all combined textures in a game weight several orders of magnitude more than the sum of all texts, all languages combined. In the live game I am currently maintaining one just needs to add a few images together to obtain a size bigger than the English texts for the whole game.

[@DaneeBound]

Description: „The NES has some fantastic introvert-friendly single-player titles coming up before long.“ We’ll gotta wait for that tho.

[@sofubisamurai]

I actually played through Jackal a few weeks ago on a rainy Sunday. It’s still great.

[@sonicskillz]

I loved Jackal back in the day. I was terrible at it, but I loved it.

[@videogameobsession]

I'd never forget Jackal. It's always been an excellent 2-player co-op game. "Konami quality" at it's best here.

[@Musicradio77Network]

“Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” are the two NES games and it became the first two games made by GameTek and IJE, and as you know, IJE was the company that started in the late 1970’s as IJE Distributing where they put out a series of junk food children’s albums under the Kid Stuff record label, and by the 1980’s, they put out a series of albums based off of licensed characters including Care Bears, Fat Albert, Strawberry Shortcake and others. When Kid Stuff Records folded by the end of 1986 following the soundtrack to the infamous “My Little Pony: The Movie” where it critically bombed at the Box Office, IJE formed GameTek and started making video games based on the two most successful game shows created by Merv Griffin. Kid Stuff was a record label also made by IJE when it was a low budget label at the time.

[@gevdarg]

Jackal: Contra/Ikari Warriors with Jeeps. Loved it.

[@unoclay]

I'd have to disagree with the assessment that Jackal is mostly forgotten. Its one of the carts in my collection that friends always get psyched to see and play. I think it remains fairly famous and fondly remembered among those who played NES in its day.

[@TanookiSuit]

Well said about Jackal, discovered this one around 1995 and never let my copy of it go all these years. It's easier than some Konami fare but not by much, it's just so well designed it's worthy of a play now as much as it was back then too.

[@Wyldfyre.84]

The music on the NES version of Wheel of Fortune unnerved me as a kid.

[@joshuadillhunt8707]

Jackal was my favorite game to rent when I would go to visit my dad. We would spend the first night playing this and eating pizza. Oh to be 8 again...

[@TheWacoKid1120]

I live for these NES Works videos! 🙌

[@zachadams4310]

It's interesting that Jeopardy feels very much like a port of the C64 adaptation by Sharedata, but Wheel looks completely different, when both C64 games were made by the same studio and both NES games were made by the same studio.

[@rodneylives]

I'm one of the people who thinks Jackal is pretty keen. Keith Burgun agrees with me. I think its problem might just be that it's not really that difficult? Back in the day I finished it on one credit on my first attempt, and it doesn't seem to get much harder on successive loops. Also, arcade Jackal, once you get to its final stretch, disables continues! Right when the game is hitting its hardest, suddenly, and unannounced except for the removal of the "insert coin to join" message for the other player, the game decides you're done if you lose your last life. It's a dirty trick. Another thing about the arcade game is its powerup system is a bit more extensive than the US. It goes a couple of extra levels, with the final level being a huge X-shaped explosion. It also has this interesting feature where, if you unload a lot of POWs at a helipad, you get more and more points for it, and if you take a full load of them (which nearly always results in a plane zooming over to bomb you _right_ at the end) you're immediately granted the highest power level.

[@allnamesaretakenful]

I played Jackal again less than a year ago and it is still fun.

[@burr1aj]

As a Game Show Video Game connoisseur, I would definitely say that this game, for the time, would've been amazing. Looking at the entire NES Library, there are FAR better versions of both Wheel and J! out there. I recommend the Vanna White edition for wheel and believe it or not, the Super Jeopardy! Version for J. Even though it is odd and was a forgotten mid-summer fill in. Believe it or not, the Weird Al song was a huge reason for the revival. At least according to Game Show Historian Adam Nedeff.

[@burr1aj]

There was a six month long version of Jeopardy! From October 78 to late March 79, hosted by Fleming. But they messed with the format and it stinks. I believe an episode exists on the interwebs.

[@burr1aj]

Finally. My opinion is that the lack of the RSTLNE is what does this original version in. A good find for $5 in the loose bin. The AI is stifling too.

[@NoxiousLynx]

Jackal is one of those classics konami games i had the pleasure of playing and beating with my cousin as a kid in 95/96. Such a great game. Oh and the music was fantastic! p.s. i had no idea there was an arcade version of the game, wow.

[@MaidenHell1977]

Another fantastic episode and an excellent reason as to why I have no FOMO what so ever about current gen console gaming. Always loved Jackal. Again, this is one we first experienced on a multicart, but by that point we straight up new it was a qaulity game by Konami based on the game's soundtrack alone and even more oblivious, the Konami Pause sound.

[@abraveastronaut]

I've heard of Top Gun, and now I've heard of Top Gunner. Can't wait to learn about Top Gunnest.

[@Technosphile]

NES Works. Been a minute.

[@nekononiaow]

I like how the Jeopardy developers felt the need to draw the exterior bezel of a television set twhen displaying text based screens to represent the idea that this was shown on a television set ... when all NES of the era were precisely already displaying on a ... television set.

[@pentelegomenon1175]

The NES cast its net extremely wide in terms of intended audiences, with a lot of its licensed adaptations being aimed at older audiences in the baby boomer range, notably those of game shows, pinball machines, PC games, and "classic games" (these older audiences were not necessarily actual old people, baby boomers weren't yet that old, there was literally a popular boomer-targeted TV show at the time called Thirtysomething).

[@SuperSmashDolls]

It's really odd to think about, because Nintendo otherwise fought *very* hard to keep all NES games entirely "kid friendly" within the mold of Japanese businessmen wondering what American soccer moms in the 80s might get pissed about. One half of the company was vigorously erasing anything shaped like a cross while the other was trying to license a data modem attachment to the Minnesota State Lottery. A real Family Computer, that.

[@pentelegomenon1175]

​@@SuperSmashDolls Ironically people who are actually mature have little interest in "mature" rated things, it's mostly teenagers who are interested in that stuff.

[@straightupanarg6226]

Jeremy's tactic of levelling up one player first is also the best strategy in Altered Beast.

[@70smebbin]

my buddy had jackal and we played the hell out of it

[@christopherjackson2157]

I used to have jackal on, I think, the apple 2? It was definitely on a computer And every time I ran over the enemies it would make such a satisfying crunching sound. I couldnt get enough of it. I didn't even care if I won I just liked running over the adversaries. And the crunch sound it would make on the crappy 8bit computer sound. In hindsight, I wonder what my parents thought lol

[@davidwebb3407]

You didn’t need to pay Joe. I’ll pretend to be your friend for free.

[@TKFTGuillotine]

Worth a note, the wrong questions from CPU players in Jeopardy! are *not* random garbage. They're actually clues to the correct question. The letters fall into the correct spaces and the symbols cover up the rest. Miss a few clues you know and you'll start to see the correct questions in the garbage text. 12:37 for instance is VIOLIN, or as the CPU incorrectly guessed, *!OL!?

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

I'll admit, Jackal failed to grab me due to a seeming lack of personality. Seeing it as a ground based Choplifter is the best argument I've seen for its existence. And hey, it's 1988 Konami. But it seems to be a game built for two players. I'll give it a chance, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

[@jasonblalock4429]

Yeah, I remember it kind of felt generic. Not bad, but without as much personality as something like Gradius or Castlevania.

[@kashnomo]

The neighborhood kids and I played so much jackal.

[@goldenphonautogram6141]

You’ve gotta play as Merv Griffin for the home field advantage.

[@Housestationlive]

jeopardy was never popular in france. it was a thing in 80s, then the program was ended at the end of 80s and never came back.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

We Americans never stopped.

[@MarginalSC]

I rented Jackal a lot. Never quite felt like owning it outright.

[@Larry]

As it's a Rare game I wonder if any of the British version of Wheel of Fortune seeped into the game?

[@LeoFan93]

I'm imagining the folks at Rare bingewatching a bunch of American Wheel of Fortune just get an idea of what our version is like.

[@guspolly]

Their version only began in mid 1988 and it was probably mostly developed before then

[@Daryoon]

It's a shame no one ever asked them to make a video game of Catchphrase...

[@glennmanifold6345]

@@Daryoon I know, I feel like they pissed on my Mr Chips.

[@eelobrian6727]

How does the euro version spell aluminum?

[@ldsviking]

I don't have hard figures, but I feel like most people have no idea how successful Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune were on the NES. Even if they weren't popular among kids, they must have been popular among the parents. They're common carts and begat multiple sequels. GameTek must have made bank.

[@tekkensentai]

Against a plumber and an architect..

[@beelzeburbia]

Both with a Ph.D.!

[@jessragan6714]

Well, at least one of those was on the NES.

[@milkcarton6654]

I never knew Jackal was a forgotten game? Rented it a few times and then a friend actually bought it. Quality konami game that sure made an impact on me and i never forgot that first stage tune and in fact a few yeas ago i ranked my definitive top 5 NES tunes and it was in there. Btw because you could control konami games of the time with either controller (i mean even in single player.... who never stealthily grabbed the second controller in Contra while someone else was playing just to have them jump at the wrong moment and kill them?) once or twice my brother and I decided to play the game single player but one of us would only use the directional pad, so they'd be driving, and the other would only shoot. Of course being that you can only shoot in the direction the jeep is facing, this actually is of limited interest.

[@MattoMakesLetsPlays]

Actually, the two shows were made by Merv Griffin Enterprises, which was owned by Columbia Television, who was owned by Coca Cola... and later Sony.

[@gfhrtshergheghegewgewgew1730]

i had no idea rare did wheel of fortune and jeopardy on nes

[@jessragan6714]

They did a lot of things, including many of the Sesame Street games. Truly a game developer for hire, like TOSE, except with more enthusiasm in their designs. (Except Beetlejuice. Yeech.)

[@VahanNisanian]

Patreon, right? I think that's why I haven't seen your WOF episode on Game Boy Works.

[@MattHall]

Excellent game

[@gimballock5106]

Speaking of Konami, hadn't they produced their NES port of Circus Charlie by then?

[@bobrocks95]

One detail I'm awfully curious about Jeremy- were Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy multiplayer titles, or were you always forced to play against the computers? I don't believe any sort of multitap attachment allowing for 3 controllers has been covered on NES Works thus far (NES Satellite appears to be a 1989 product), though maybe controllers could be swapped between players?

[@Blazer1988]

I liked Jackel but found it to be very easy. I got it for Christmas, put in my NES and beat it the first time through without to much trouble. That to me is different than say Contra which isn’t really that hard either, but it is at first, at least till you get idea of what each level is like.

[@NoxiousLynx]

Its because you used the konami code lol

[@tsvtsvtsv]

just tell me now what i didn't win, yeah, yeah

[@Elshiki]

I will honor Armed Forces Daz

[@punchabunchabuttons]

is Thumdercade ever going to get any love by someone other then myself? wink wink!

[@jessragan6714]

Thunder! Thunder! Thundercade, NOOOOOO!

[@straightupanarg6226]

Just tell me now what I didn't win, hey, hey

[@XanthinZarda]

Once Rare stopped making the game shows for Game Tek, those games immediately slammed to the bottom in quality. Nobody remembers or plays the SNES version of Jeopardy, which was chasing the FMV trends of the time. They don't have iconic music or sound design, they even downgrade the selector to a lazy letterbar. Sure, they have the themes, but due to having to have parity with the Mega Drive (whose sound chip I would simply have replaced with an OPL2) forces a massive downgrade in audio fidelity. Heck even the _Featuring Vanna White_ version is a downgrade, in spite of the insistent glitz. It just goes to show that when Rare goes to bat, even for something that should be a bunt, they swing fully.

[@jessragan6714]

Mark Goodson?! Arrgh! No, no! Merv Griffin! Don't you know anything about game shows? (No, because unlike you, he has a life.) (Shut up.) Er, anyway. Jackal (or, uh, Top Gunner) beats the pants out of the closest Capcom equivalent, Speed Rumbler.

[@steven.events]

Due to the glitch, Jeopardy was the worst NES game of all time. Play this game a third time..fourth time... and you'd see nothing but the same clues over and over again. There should've been an apology and a recall.

[@jessragan6714]

I think there was a DS version of Deal or No Deal where the most valuable (or least valuable, I don't remember which) briefcase was always, always, always 13.

[@TheMakoShark90]

If you have not seen Weird Al perform "I lost on Jeopardy" on The Merv Griffin show, I highly recommend giving it a watch. Merv does say part of Jeopardy's return was due to Weird Al's parody.

[@DSMTheEditor]

It's just amazing that Weird Al has been around so long that I Lost On Jeopardy predates the Trebek/Olson era.

[@jasonblalock4429]

Aaaannnd the Bubble Bobble theme is already stuck in my head. Also, props to Rare for the animation of the Wheel of Fortune spinning. That's some of the smoothest pseduo-rotation I've seen on NES.

[@DSMTheEditor]

Ah yes, I'm always excited with the Gametek game shows pop up. I feel like I was the only kid back in the day that had all of these. In fact, I think this is the first tri-title episode where I owned, and still own, all of them

[@sonicmario64]

I actually loved "Wheel Of Fortune" a lot more than "Jeopardy!", mainly because I am much more skilled at solving word puzzles than I am with trivia questions involving random stuff that I don't always know.

[@rowtow13]

Mmm, love that Konami NES sound.

[@SatoshiMatrix1]

Jackal is one of the best Arcade-to-NES conversions there ever was. The NES version doesn't look as good but it plays just as good, and controls just as good. The NES version also has larger areas than the FDS version Green Baret, presumably because of RAM limitations on the FDS build. It's a fantastic game and one of the reasons to keep an NES hooked up, even in 2022.

[@jamesmoss3424]

Wheel of fortune and jeopardy are still fantastic game shows. 😀👍🎮

[@melon3109]

The wheel of fortune game's sound effects are forever etched in my brain. The whir of the power meter, the spin of the wheel, then not-vanna white's clap... I can still hear it.

[@cerberus144]

I love me some Jackal. YEAHHHH!

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

According to KZbin's addition to the video description, this video is about Adventure Island!

[@childofcascadia]

LOL. I remember when Jeopardy was a wall of CTVs and was orange like the clip @8:31. I played the damn wheel of fortune game as a kid and remember getting frustrated af with the letter input when solving. Id know what it was but had trouble with the stupid letter bar and the timer. Id have to think how to spell it as like a 7 year old and then use my tiny little kid hands to enter it on a laggy controller. And yeah, my friend had the jeopardy game and as a kid we were like "the what? Where? Whos that?" Really missed their target audience.

[@JeremyParish]

My mom loved the original run of Jeopardy!, so we watched the Tribeck version from day one. Wild how easy those early season questions were.

[@MooseheadStudios]

Loved this game as a kid played it with my brothers. BTW clean and well produced content i dig it.

[@billcook4768]

I for one am shocked, shocked to hear that Jeremy is a big fan of Alex Trebek and the Jeopardy tv show.

[@jessragan6714]

Fun fact! Alex Trebek actually hosted the pilot of the video game game show, Starcade, before the keys to that car were handed to Geoff Edwards. I can't really see Trebek in that role; he was no Phil Moore, that's for sure.

[@MrMegaManFan]

RIP Alex Trebek.

[@jkiller404]

I love the Rare gameshow NES games I was just playing Wheel’ the other day

[@burr1aj]

LOVE The Mark Goodson reference!!! That's awesome.

[@MrButttime]

WoF is the reason i clicked. got 30 secs of down punching. it carts better imo

[@mattandsarahrose]

My cousin and I played a ton of Jackal when I was a kid. I have very fond memories of seeing the "Here?" screen.

[@charliepalmer3244]

The Konami code doesn't work for Jackal.

[@guspolly]

Uhm ackchyually Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune were Merv Griffin productions, not Mark Goodson. This egregious error invalidates your entire review. I actually didn't know anything about the history of GameTek. It makes sense that they were willed into existence just for these games but I hadn't thought about it before

[@jessragan6714]

I think they became Take-Two years later, aka Rockstar Games.

[@game-sheriff]

Jackal is so much fun. Definitely a family favorite at my house back in the day. My younger brother and I used to play it constantly along with contra and bubble bobble.

[@cliffbogard9546]

Ahhh good old Jackel such an underrated gem

[@ColbyePresents]

*Jackal and Blaster Master are the two most underrated / undervalued games , I feel.*

[@childofcascadia]

Blaster master is amazing! One of my fav NES games. I cant say I like Jackal. Im not really a fan of most top down arcade shooters. Have you checked out the recent releases of blaster master? I only have the most recent one on PC. Name escapes me, I think its the most recent zero release. The story didnt make much sense because I havent played the others but they did a really good job with the nostalgia while still having QoL upgrades and lots of expanded weapons and powerups. I liked it. But the original one will always have a special place in my heart.

[@reyvgm]

"interstitial graphics"? I can always count on Jeremy's Works to learn new words.

[@ericjenkins2737]

What is Pikes Peak?

[@ChrisJohnson-lp3hc]

My blood is boiling

[@jacksonvandyke]

What is Babel?

[@MichaelOKeefe2009]

It's not called Jackal, it's called EL CHACAL DE LA TROMPETA!!!!

[@WhoIsSirChasm]

Next time on NES Works, I'll have that song stuck in my head for a week. This week, I'll just have "Weird Al" stuck in my head instead.

[@andrewkaye2108]

Jackel was a fun one. I was always amused how a helicopter, deep in enemy territory, was waiting to ferry out the P.O.W.'s you rescued, complete with a heli pad! Lol At least in Choplifter, you had to bring the hostages back into friendly territory to unload them. :)

[@devmas]

I've been playing quite a bit of Rare's NES Jeopardy! games with friends online during the pandemic via emulators. It holds up well enough. Though we often prefer to play the later released Junior's Edition, lol.

[@rabiroden]

Jackal is a top 5er for me. Perfectly compact and replayable. Some people complain you can't aim the gun, but its entire purpose is to be able to attack while evading. Also, Blades of Steel is another one that was cut down for FDS. It didn't even have the fighting minigame!

[@spacemammoth3334]

It's always interesting to see how much other people know games that, for me, were a huge part of being a kid. I felt like every other person with a NES I knew had Jackal. I've found over the years that it had less actual attention than I thought. It's an excellent game and fun to play through to the end. My friends and I loved saving the POWs, blowing up the buildings, etc. And then you get to the weirdness like the giant shooting marble heads... Loved the music too. I personally never liked any of the game show conversions on consoles.

[@OnslaughtSix]

The Jeopardy wrong answers aren't actually all nonsense. The real letters in there give you a hint to the real answer!

[@nullvoidzero]

Wheel of Fortune Answer: "ARMED FORCES DAY"

[@PaulSoth]

Man, back then the idea of porting these game show adaptations from home computers to something that didn't even have a keyboard just seemed... odd.

[@bluespaceman7937]

Jackal was a fun game. It scared me a little as a kid, especially the bosses, but I enjoyed it.

[@dumpnchase]

Jackal is totally underrated. Fun game.