Ah, trivia: great heaping piles of useless esoterica, stuffed into the corners of my mind like so many dusty holiday fruitcakes--and there I was without any unsuspecting visitors upon whom to foist them. At least that was the case until Sony's new trivia game, The Joker's Wild, hit my cell phone and divested me of all my accrued knowledge in a whirlwind of multiple-choice transactions. Blessed relief! And a darned entertaining game to boot!
The Joker's Wild was apparently a TV game show back in the 1980s, but I never saw it. I guess I was too busy trying to beat Kid Icarus one-handed. Fortunately, JW is supereasy to pick up--it's a basic trivia game with categories presented in the form of a virtual slot machine. The virtual one-armed bandit displays three category choices when it stops, allowing you to choose whichever you are strongest in, be it sports trivia or television. This element adds an interesting wrinkle to the gameplay: Occasionally the same category will pop up in two or three of the choices, limiting you to some truly awful category like "romance/comedy" in which you know exactly none of the answers. Ignorance is indeed a terrible thing.
I found the questions to be mostly fair, with a few exceptions primarily located in the sports sections (can anyone tell me how many goals were scored in the last World Cup? Bueller?). I also found some of the categories themselves rather quizzical: "Rock/urban" may have been a valid classification at some point in the past, but it sure isn't these days. The vast majority of the questions revolve around sports, TV, movies and music, which is all well and good, but a greater variety of questions would have been nice. Where are all the geeky categories, like "computer/video game lore," "ancient history," and "Lord of the Rings errata"?
All of that aside, the game looks and sounds great. It features a cartoony light board straight out of Press Your Luck and appropriately jaunty music and sound effects throughout. The two-player mode is really a kick in the pants, despite the really silly bonus round that seems to raise or lower scores at random.
All in all, The Joker's Wild is a great trivia game with enduring replay value--you will inevitably run out of questions, but you can seamlessly download new question packs through the opening menu, ensuring unlimited throughput of tidbits and factoids. Better start dusting out those brain nooks.
