Wheel of Fortune is celebrating its thirty years in the game show biz with a new app that is available on several platforms, including iOS. It kills me to admit it, but not only was I alive for all thirty of those years, I remember them. I still remember back before Pat Sajack and Vanna White were on the show, and I remember back to before the show became about the money, when the winners would spend the amount they won in different “rooms” decorated with assorted treasures.
Now that I have dated myself, I did it for a reason. While playing this new app, I still felt like it was 1982, because that graphics were that dated. Okay, maybe not that bad, but at least ten years past the time when that seemed to be the graphics du jour. While we do get to hear Pat Sajack utter a few lines, many things said are in talk bubble texts. It seems with an app like this that we should hear the people actually talking and playing the game. Vanna is always silent, but she's not even visible in the game.
The Wheel of Fortune game also seemed like it was intent on forcing me to get to the bonus round at the end. I couldn't lose. And I'll admit, I'm not bad at Wheel of Fortune, and can guess them usually somewhat quickly, but even on the games I did poorly on, the two drones I played with did worse. They would do things like guess the letters Z or X when they weren't sure what the answer was yet, and lose their turn. They would also buy three vowels on one turn when they had very little money. This was all so that I could get my turn again to figure it out.
The extras that it includes aare the ability to create your own player in appearance, do fun things like change the theme and challenge your friends to Pass and Play. However, you have to win a certain amount before the game will unlock some of those choices. Not that it will take that long to win a certain amount unless you make a concerted effort to do even worse than the drones.
I shouldn't be too hard on this game, as throughout all this, I did have fun playing Wheel of Fortune. However, I greatly missed a competitive aspect with it. The jury is still out on whether I missed Vanna or not.
