Wheel of Fortune 2003 (PC)
While adapting a game show into a video game is often just about giving you the chance to compete instead of only calling out the answers to your television set, there are quite a few that leave out the vital part good hosts play in making game shows appealing. Often it’s because licensing the hosts would be a bit expensive, but Wheel of Fortune 2003 decided to go the extra mile and not only include familiar faces, but they all have unique voice lines for the game. Charlie O’Donnell provides his voice as the announcer and Vanna White actually appears in quite a bit of video footage that is cleanly integrated into play for her role as presenter. While host Pat Sajak’s absence is felt, Charlie and Vanna help to lend this specific edition of Wheel of Fortune on PC a bit of extra appeal.
The game show Wheel of Fortune centers around three contestants trying to earn money by guessing words. A round begins with a set of blanks revealed with a subject clue, players calling out letters to try and fill in the blanks enough that they can guess what the answer might be. To guess though players first spin a large colorful wheel, each slice containing a dollar value, a special event, or a prize. If you land on the dollar values and guess a letter that is on the board, you will earn cash for each appearance it makes. If that letter isn’t present though, play moves onto the next player. Some spots on the wheel can have adverse effects like making your turn immediately end or taking away all the cash you earned that round so far while others can have special benefits like providing you a free turn to spin again even after landing on a bad spot. Since this video game version of Wheel of Fortune isn’t going to provide you real prizes, those are simply converted into their cash value if you do land on them. However, they are at least presented as if they were prizes, the pool of unique ones oddly small and free of any brand associations but still showing footage of appropriate aspirational prizes like vacation packages or high end items.
Players can continue spinning the wheel and guessing until they make a mistake, but if you want to guess a vowel, you’ll have to pay for it with your winnings so far. This makes a good degree of sense, vowels are a key part of words and far more likely to be present than consonants, and it does give the guessing a bit of more texture than essentially playing a game of hangman. When someone does believe they know what the answer might be though they don’t need to even spin to try and solve, the person who does end up saying the solution getting to keep all their money from that round while everyone else loses theirs. The person with the most accumulated cash at the end gets to move onto an end of game bonus round as well where they only get to guess a few letters and then need to solve the puzzle, a few freebies meaning you won’t just go for the most common English letters to increase your chances of winning the final prize. The prize is of course converted into cash which serves as your score essentially, and on a single profile you can start building up earnings across multiple plays as a simple stat to track your successes over time.
Naturally a huge and important part of the Wheel of Fortune experience is going to be the quality of the answers that appear on the board, and for the most part the game manages a good spread with supposedly 3,000 on offer. Rounds don’t go too quickly so repetition is easily avoided, and many of the subjects are the kinds of common knowledge answers you’d hope for to avoid being done in by lacking esoteric knowledge. Typically these will be things like famous cities, normal objects, common phrases, and terminology. The game isn’t free of pop culture references that wane in public consciousness over time, Classic TV as a category containing some pretty specific characters and shows from around the 1950s and celebrities like Anna Nicole Smith over in the Proper Name category feeling like their star has faded since the game’s release. Having some categories literally be decades of American popular culture thins things a bit as well, but the number of subjects on offer mean you won’t run into these constantly and they were still meant to be possible to guess from a casual contemporary fan of the show so they are not often deep pulls. More interesting though are the times the game gets creative with its answer format. Usually you are just guessing the word or phrase letter by letter, but some link together subjects in interesting ways. The oddly named Before & After category links together two phrase or terms with a shared word like with the solution “Ferris Wheel of Fortune” with Same Name doing something a bit similar but with terms that end in the same word like “Bus & Lottery Ticket”. Some solutions even go beyond just filling in the letters like the oddly named Fill in the Blank category where you’ll first need to find the letters for three related terms and then can guess the starting word that connects them for extra cash.
Overall you have most of what a fan of the show would want to see in how the game is played and a wide range of solutions to ensure this game doesn’t wear thin quickly. You can control the game with the mouse exclusively or the keyboard as well and can play with two other humans if you alternate control based on who is up, but unfortunately you can’t control how hard the wheel is spun so it feels a tiny bit out of your hands when the wheel does hand you a negative result. The wheel is big enough that you’ll mostly get money tiles though, although if you do decide to play single player the bad spots do become more devastating. On top of typical play Wheel of Fortune 2003 offers a unique single player mode where you are given a set of Free Spins to serve almost as extra lives, the player trying to make words while being the only person who guesses letters or spins the wheel. Land on a bad space or guess a letter that isn’t in the current clue and you’ll lose a free spin life, and it turns out without other players to suggest letters and potentially take the fall on absent ones it’s quite hard to build up to solutions. You can still likely get a few rounds in before all your lives are gone unless your luck and guessing ability is rather poor, but what makes this single player mode really odd is how the game handles standard play.
If you do choose to play Wheel of Fortune with its regular rules but only one human player, the two other contestants will be controlled by the game. An unseen man and woman with a fairly small batch of voice lines will guess letters and spin when it is their turn, Vanna’s impressive amount of unique and relevant recordings making this shallow implementation of AI opponents feel oddly lacking. However, what makes these AI opponents even odder is the game actively wants them to lose. They never seem to want to guess the solution and will keep guessing letters when it is their turn, and even if there is only a single blank left to guess for the puzzle, they will start guessing wrong letters seemingly on purpose so it can get back around to your turn so you can cinch the win. I imagine this was done so players almost always get to put in the solution, the satisfying part of a game show being providing your own answer after all, but this means you have no meaningful competition available unless other human players get involved. Rounds are handled better with such dopey AI opponents than the solo play’s lives system though and you can focus on the enjoyment of just trying to solve clues over winning a competition, but the lack of variable difficulties for your opposition is unfortunate.
There are a good degree of options to be found, both meaningful ones and ones that add to the game’s nice commitment to presentation. When starting a new set of rounds you’ll be able to pick the game’s length. 10, 15, and 20 minute games are available to play and if you start getting near the time limit, a special round even plays where all letter guesses are worth the same amount, no spinning is done, and players take turn guessing single letters until someone finally can guess the solution. 3, 4, and 5 round play is also an option that won’t include this special round format, the player not having to worry about how many possible puzzles they’ll get to solve in this more structured type of play. Guessing time is a factor that can be altered independently so that human players can’t just stall as they try to think of what the solution is. The backdrop is also an option that can be changed, Wheel of Fortune 2003 giving you a nice varied batch that influences more than the background as you play. Picking themes based on things like disco, Las Vegas, European travel, and winter sports give the play screen a nice visual tone, but other effects are added too like incorrect guesses being destroyed in a theme appropriate manner like winter sports having wrong letters freeze and shatter.
A tiny but interesting touch also comes in the form of the Contestant Exam, a set of 16 half-completed Wheel of Fortune answers presented for you to try and complete in a set amount of time. This is supposedly based on the kind of quizzes prospective players of the real game show need to complete to get on the show and getting all the right answers even tells you how to petition for a spot on the real Wheel of Fortune, but once you have solved this the answers never change so there’s not much point doing it again. It does make the overall experience a touch closer to what a fan might want out of an adaptation of the game show though, the game mostly having a good amount of glitz, a solid representation of the spinning and guessing, and Vanna’s beaming smile accompanying her wide range of reactions and statements that manage to avoid feeling too stiff and recycled other than the after-round check-ins on score. It would be nice to skip ahead past those segments after they’ve become overly familiar, but they don’t drag either so it’s not truly an issue.
THE VERDICT: While not having Pat Sajak on board is a bit of a shame, Wheel of Fortune 2003 does solid work with Vanna White and Charlie O’Donnel as well as having a properly flashy presentation to match a game show about winning big prizes. The solution selection can be creative and only strays into dated references on occasion, the guessing game still enjoyable and usually quick enough to keep your interest. The pushover AI opponents are a detriment to playing on your own though although they make up for a surprisingly tough solo play option, so while still best enjoyed with other human players, Wheel of Fortune 2003 nearly has what most people would want to find in an adaptation of the beloved American game show staple.
And so, I give Wheel of Fortune 2003 for PC…
An OKAY rating. Really, the computer controlled opponents being absolutely averse to putting up a proper fight is what keeps this from being a perfectly acceptable way to play Wheel of Fortune on your own. Pat Sajak’s absence would be a bit of a shame but this could have been a good game if it at least gave you the option on whether or not you want the two computer contestants just to be less costly ways to guess letters or true rivals aiming for the win, but making the solo play mode more forgiving could have let it stand as a mode focused on solution guessing instead. The core of the game show’s familiar format is reproduced excellently here even if there was room for extra touches, but having the actual Vanna White essentially be the host and speaking and showing up on screen frequently is a nice touch that is probably better than seeing human avatars for every player. If you do get yourself a set of three people to play together you won’t really hit on any issues, even the gradually dated pop culture answers more a way to provide a different edge to players with different levels of broad knowledge. A glitzy presentation, an answer base so large it won’t likely repeat itself soon, and pretty much everything you would have expected to see from the show carried over into the game puts it so close to being exactly what you’d want from the home game, but the computer players were simply too mindless to provide the competition for those who might actually want it to be more than a mere guessing game.
Wheel of Fortune 2003 is inevitably just one of many video game adaptations of the long running game show, but it still seems to have a charm that manages to last. Vanna White has appeared in varying capacities in the video games but here she is integrated as her actual self speaking to you directly in footage, and by not having in-game characters it actually removes some of the plastic feeling a few future adaptations lean into. The bad decision on having the AI be basically there to give you more letters and never win will always taint it a little, but unlike a game show adaptation for something like the NES or Game Boy, this version of the game holds up rather well. The live action footage isn’t exactly crisp and you can certainly make the visuals look even nicer nowadays, but Wheel of Fortune 2003 can still run on a modern PC and provide the same fun it did back when it came out thanks to a good breadth of solutions and flexible set of options for how you can play.