You Don't Know Jack

Pros • Great party game • Easily one of the funniest PlayStation games of the 20th century • Over 1400 questions, making for almost a solid work-week’s worth of gameplay	Cons • The scheme by which the memory card prevents repetition of questions seems less than 100% reliable
Bottom Line If you're a trivia-headed guy or gal, YOU DON'T KNOW JACK is simply a must-have, whatever platform you favor. Think you’re hip? Think you’re dialed-in? Proud of the staggering collection of free-floating, disconnected bits of high culture and low trivia you’ve jammed your synapses with for the past year, or two, or ten? Fancy yourself a man or woman of the world? Sierra Attractions, Berkeley Systems and the odd folks at Jellyvision invite you to flaunt your knowledge, screw your neighbors and expose yourself to Three-Ways in the definitive quiz-show experience that proves once and for all time that YOU DON’T KNOW JACK.

NOTE TO THE UNINITIATED: If you haven’t been exposed to the wonderful world of infosarcasm as presented by the YOU DON’T KNOW JACK series of games, you’ve missed one of the landmark game experiences of the 1990s (sorry to be grandiose but, like, it’s YOUR ignorance that put us in this position, innit?). Quite simply, YOU DON’T KNOW JACK took that most lame and most mundane of entertainment propositions---the Trivia Contest---and turned it into a riveting, hip, witty and genuinely funny game for one to three players. Not only are the questions admireably researched and meticulously, artfully wordsmithed---nowhere else will you see Dante Alighieri, Greg Brady, Isaac Newton and Homer Simpson in such disturbing proximity----but YOU DON’T KNOW JACK manages to take the traditionally isolating, nerd-making thing that we know (in this case) as Console Gaming, and turn it into an actual social outing, a veritable party centerpiece.

Whether you’re playing with one or two opponents or, erm, Jacking alone, YDKJ offers a short 7-Question contest or a full-length 21-Question ordeal. The game’s virtual “host” rattles off the questions with a Dennis Miller-esque flair, seeming to go out of his way to mock players who answer incorrectly, jump at the obvious (but wrong) answers, or even hit their answer-selection buttons before buzzing in---even with the slew of restrictions the console format often puts on games, the PSX version of YOU DON'T KNOW JACK manages to play smoothly and convincingly, as though you’re interacting with some wild, hip TV quiz show.

The YOU DON’T KNOW JACK franchise has mutated somewhat over the years, from Sports and Movie editions as well as from PC to Mac versions (including several add-on packs, compilations and even a battery-operated electronic stand-alone version), and the best, most enduring features have been included in this newest 2-disc PSX incarnation. In addition to standard-issue Jack fare such as the Screw Your Neighbor function (wherein players who “know” their opponents don’t know the answer to a really tough question can “screw” them by forcing them to answer), YDKJ sports the “Dis or Dat” and “Three-Way” question variations: The former isolates one player and presents a series of trivial pursuits (“Do the following seven movies star Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme?”), and the latter challenges all players simultaneously to hit their buzzers when words matching a certain clue flash across the screen. All the while, the parts of your brain that have actually managed to hold on to useful things throughout the years (like General Relativity, the Pythagorean Theorum or classic literature references) are forced to work shank-to-shank with the rotting, piss-alley brain-cracks that are soley devoted to storing old Burger King Commercials, Three’s Company episodes and Duran Duran songs. You Don’t Know Jack is, true to the advertising, “the game where high culture and pop culture collide.”

Bottom line: YDKJ is a perfect game for newbies and veterans, guys and gals, brains and slackers alike. With over 1400 questions, you won’t burn this title’s fun up anytime soon unless you have, like, nothing else going on in your life. In general, the game’s memory-card scheme (which is designed to ensure that questions do not repeat for people who have already played) is mostly reliable, but seems to burp every now and then, giving a random question you’ve heard before. Nevertheless, it’s a minor irriatant, and YOU DON’T KNOW JACK is simply one of the most humorous, high-quality and user-friendly titles available for the PlayStation in 1999. Remember: if your Ernest Hemingway Quotient doesn’t get you through, your Ernest Goes to Camp Quotient just might.

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