Family Feud (NES)

Video game versions of game shows already have a lot of the hard work done for them. People already enjoy shouting the answers to the questions for the televised version, all the home game has to do is allow them to actually play the game themselves to be a decent facsimile. Perhaps it was because they figured that interactivity could carry the experience that many early game show video games were such thrown together products, and that might be why Family Feud for the NES isn’t quite what you’d hope a home version of the game would be.

The Family Feud game show is a competition between two families of five. A single show is split into multiple rounds where the families must try and guess how a group of 100 surveyed individuals answered a question such as “Which European city would you most like to visit?” When a person guesses one of the answers correctly, their family receives an amount of points equal to however many people gave that answer on the survey. If a family can clear out every answer they will get all the points, but if they provide three wrong answers, the other team has a chance to steal the points if they can provide one of the remaining correct answers. Each round begins with a single team representative trying to guess the most popular answer, and whoever is closer can either let the other team answer or play the question themselves. Each family member usually gets a chance to answer in the real show, but in the game the players control one team each or one is controlled by the game’s AI.

If you win enough points through the survey questions, then the player gets to play two speed rounds called Fast Money where five questions must be answered. If you can get 200 points or more across the two speed rounds, you’ll win an extra cash bonus for your victory. While the Family Feud video game naturally does not provide any real world rewards for a well-earned win, to try and keep the player interested they do set up a goal to hit. The player is asked to try and maintain a streak of victories until they can earn a cumulative total of 20,000 dollars, after which they are kicked out and asked to play again. There is no flashy victory for getting that far, but having an objective other then just winning does at least give this version of Family Feud a reason to keep playing other than personal entertainment.

Naturally, the survey questions are incredibly important to the way the game is played, and Family Feud on the NES supposedly borrows all of its questions from the show. While I have no reason to doubt the claim, this can lead to a few issues. One of the less worrisome ones is the period this game was made in. There are inevitably dated questions where you had to know the pop culture of 1991 to even have a chance, but there are plenty of questions that rely on general knowledge to balance out the occasional quirk like the most popular answer for famous brothers being Smothers and the people of the early 90s apparently thinking that Herbert Hoover ranks on a list of worst presidents. The bigger problems though comes with how you fill in your answers. You are presented a large box full of letters or numbers to type in your answer with and need to do so within a time limit. The time limit is actually generous enough to only apply pressure as it should, that being when you have no clue what to say. However, filling in answers can often be an annoying process beyond the fact that you need to move the cursor to each letter to enter them.

The first big issue is that there is a character limit on the answers you can put in, and yet, the game expects you to fill in answers that are longer than it can contain. For these, you are left to guess how the game might abbreviate certain terms. How would you condense the name of the Mediterranean Sea? What about National Geographic Magazine? Meditn and Natl Geog are not only answers you’re expected to put in but fairly good responses for the questions being asked, but you’ll have to hope your chosen abbreviation triggers the game’s very strict substitution rules. Sometimes, the game is generous. Usually it accepts both “physician” and “doctor” for questions where those could be an answer, some typos are accounted for, and many people names only require the last name. However, some questions are hyper specific about what term they want you to use. You can’t just say someone’s excuse for being late was “Slept in”, you having to say they were sleeping in just how the game expects it. You can’t say that meat comes in slices, it has to be referred to as lunch meat specifically. It’s aggravating to miss a question only for it to turn over and reveal you did give the right answer, it just couldn’t parse your intention. Thankfully, the AI opponent, even in the later games of a 20,000 dollar run, plays with a believable fallibility, making them a decent opponent who won’t just win every round when given the chance. You don’t get to see their wrong answers though, the game probably deciding whether or not they’ll fail rather than presenting the illusion of a true competing family.

Trying to wrangle this limited version of Family Feud into properly interpreting your responses is an annoying battle already, but the problems with the game side of the game show aren’t helped by the utter lack of showmanship. There’s hardly any music, only appearing at the start and end and the starting song not reappearing when you’re doing the 20,000 dollar run so as to further immerse you in bland silence. Sometimes you hear a static noise to imitate audience applause, but most of it is pretty quiet and the host is not really a presenter so much as a passive figure observing the players. He does have to do an annoying introduction every new round though where he silently and slowly approaches the new competing family to kiss the women. He’s essentially a malformed version of Richard Dawson, some of his sprites looking downright awful, especially the one where he leans to a family in the face-off round at the start of every question. He’s certainly not the only poor attempt to create humans out of pixels on show, most contestants having some hideous look either when you view them close up or see their simplified versions from afar. Some characters look like their faces are smeared, some seem oddly lumpy, and others have far too many lines around their features. What’s stranger still is that some characters don’t even look the same between positions, grandmas and mothers sometimes having different hair and dresses depending on how they are being presented. There’s no energy in this competition between these poorly drawn people, so essentially, there’s nothing to distract you from the constant struggles to try and get the game to understand the answers you’re going for.

THE VERDICT: A lifeless and empty attempt to wear the skin of a popular game show, Family Feud on the NES’s barren and often ugly presentation means all you have to focus on are the questions. The 20,000 dollar goal is a nice way of guiding play, but while Family Feud’s appeal is captured at times, the struggles with the answers that aren’t being properly parsed emerge a bit too often. The game isn’t capable enough to accept fairly reasonable synonyms and some answers rely on you somehow intuiting the game’s odd abbreviation of an answer that was too big to fit its character limit. Not being able to guess one answer can ruin a round of Family Feud, so those technical limitations all too often lead to the annoying answer reveal of something you tried to put in but the game refused to accept. Ultimately, you’re far better off yelling at your T.V. screen during the actual show, since at least then you can’t be told you’re wrong just because a game couldn’t understand what you were saying.

And so, I give Family Feud for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. Family Feud’s ugliness is worthy of mentioning since so many game shows rely on glitzy presentation and a charismatic host, but it’s definitely not what puts Family Feud under the bar of being an acceptable home edition of the show. Having the shiny accoutrements would give the game more life, but no amount of distractions could help you swallow the repeated instances where the game just isn’t cooperating. You might get a lucky streak of questions where you can just enjoy the guessing game format, but Family Feud as a concept hinges too much on every single answer being properly submitted. Family Feud should not have picked any of the show’s questions that couldn’t be properly typed into the game. If it felt like it absolutely had to include them though, it at least should be consistent about how they’re abbreviated, such as cutting them off at the character limit rather than expecting you to play a guessing game on which parts of a word can be trimmed. It can be ridiculously strict at times, such as only allowing the term Behind when referring to a person’s butt, and it’s not like the parser has to show it’s work to allow for potentially more ribald synonyms for that word.

What it comes down to is that the team making Family Feud’s NES adaptation didn’t have the technical know-how to make the concept work well on the console. It might even be best to say the NES shouldn’t have had its own version of Family Feud if it would turn out this soulless and clunky, although other games, some even game show adaptations, did handle the need to input information better than this flimsy adaptation of a game show. Family Feud doesn’t seem to be trying to accommodate its limitations at all is the problem, leading to an ugly presentation, bad answer parsing, and an overall weak attempt to provide the Family Feud experience at home with the bare minimum of effort.