Press Your Luck

If you’ve ever seen Whammy, or Whammy 2000, or whatever the hell version is on Game Show Network today, this one is the OG. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “Big Bucks, Big Bucks, No Whammies!” but never knew the reference – now you do. And now, through the magic (…magic?) of GameTek, you can spout the phrase with meaning yourself.

Press Your Luck was a flashy gameshow – even for the 80s – with a revolving set and a three-story randomized prize board. There was an intellectual quiz section, but this was only a way to divvy out spins on the big board. After a couple of questions, the entire set would turn to face the monster board. The contestants would “press their luck” by pounding upon a plunger to (hopefully) stop on a prize.

Interspersed around the board are the dreaded Whammies. These were little cartoon dudes that danced across the screen and stole all that contestant’s money. The more you pushed for greater prizes, the more you risked hitting a Whammy space and losing it all. Four Whammies in total took you out of the game completely. There was really no skill to the show (unless you count that guy who timed out the board cycles); you pretty much just wanted to get as many spins as possible in the quiz section, and not press your luck too hard on the board section. Still, it was a neat and sometimes suspenseful half hour of telly.

GameTek, as usual, gets the basics of the show correct and admirably transfers them to the PC. When you load up the game, you’ll go through the standard pick-‘n-name your character routine, and select which characters will be controlled by the computer. Each game is for three contestants at a time, but it seems designed as a one-player experience. It’s theoretically possible to play with three friends, but the controls aren’t really conducive to it – more on that in a moment. Once you pick three out of the six possible characters – who actually don’t look that bad compared to many of GameTek’s contestant drawings in other games – you’re ready to head to the first round of the game.

Round One has a question typed in above the heads of the contestants, with a couple extra seconds to read the whole thing before buzzing is allowed. The first contestant to ring in will type in an answer. That answer is then matched with two computer-generated possibilities, and the remaining two contestants must guess or confirm their answer from the multiple choice selections. The initial contestant who types in a correct answer gets three spins, the others who guess correctly from the multiple choice get only one.

The questions themselves mostly involve surveys or general knowledge. They’re not meant to be very taxing. I worried that what I typed wouldn’t match up to the correct answer, but this text parser seems pretty sharp. It capitalizes or corrects the spelling of your answer appropriately and does a fine job of providing two similar answers – provided you’re not typing in random, bonkers answers for cheap giggles. This round continues for a few questions, then it’s off the board.

Here’s why you can’t really play with friends – there are no individual buzz-in keys. Instead, the space bar toggles through the contestants to select which will ring in and type in the answer. It’s truly not possible to have three people fighting over the same key – I don’t even think it’s intended – so I assume GameTek either means this to be a single-player game against two computer players, or for your three human competitors to work out some kind of buzzing-in honor system. I don’t understand why they couldn’t have simply assigned the Q key to player 1, the space bar to player 2, and the P key to player three, especially when that’s the exact setup for so many other trivia games. But they didn’t, so you have to play with the hand you’re dealt.

Once you have the spins you’ve earned, you head to a pretty spot-on representation of the board round, camera angles and all. The space bar starts the board spinning – really just meaning that a square of lights will rapidly bounce around the board – and the eighteen board spaces will individually alternate between a couple of prize options. Another whack of the space bar will stop the lights on a prize. The prizes all have dollar values attached, which add to your total score and decide the winner at the end. Occasionally you’ll land on spaces that give you extra spins, spaces that jump to different spaces, or spaces worth thousands of dollars.

The scores of the other two contestants are helpfully listed in the corner, so you can decide whether to risk your accrued fortune to the whims of the whammies, or you can pass your spins to the person with the highest score. Passed spins must be played. Though the number of whammies doesn’t increase in relation to your score, there are so damn many of them that it’s really only a matter of time. Passing these forced spins isn’t just handing the leader more money; it’s a strategy and a hope that they will crap out and leave you with the win.

After the first board, another quiz section is played, followed by a final board section (two of each per game), then the winner is declared. The name of the person with the highest score is sent to the Hall of Fame, which is the only credit you will be receiving from GameTek. You don’t even get a consolation copy of the Press Your Luck home game, because son of a bitch, this is the home game.

The graphics are far and away the worst part of the game. They were able to drive some yellows, reds, and greens – the same colors that defined the show – out of the corresponding CGA mode (make sure to set DosBox to CGA!) Still, if you’re not used to much older games, these graphics will take some getting used to. Once you do, however, the detail of them is sharp enough to be understandable, readable, and never detract from the gameplay.

However, the Whammies are a flat disappointment. On the show, they were little devil guys who would be superimposed over the dejected contestant and run though some kind of self-deprecating Loony Tunes animation as they stole or destroyed that contestant’s money. In this version, the Whammies are bald dudes with some dollar signs on their shirts. Their sole, unchanging animation is to dance in a chorus line across the screen. I don’t know what kind of space different animations would have taken up, but you don’t even get two to cycle through. You get the point, especially if you’ve seen the show, but it’s a lame version of the stars of the show.

In closing, this version just kinda checks the boxes. The lack of real three-player support is inexcusable, while it’s a far less accurate translation of the look and feel of the show than most of GameTek’s other forays. The show’s theme isn’t even recreated. It is, however, the ONLY translation of the game, so as far as letting you play Press Your Luck as a contestant, it works. The quiz section works and the parser is excellent. The board section can offer some legitimate drama and serious thought as to whether you should risk another spin or pass. But if you’ve never seen the original, it’s doubtful that you’ll be impressed with what the game is trying to replicate here.

 

The Good

Solid recreation of the basics of being a contestant in the show, though certainly helped by being the only recreation of being a contestant in the show.

 

The Bad

Harsh colors, but that’s CGA. No true support for more than one player at a time. No attempt to characterize the Whammies.