We miss Trebek, mustachioed or no.

Freeverse’s Wheel of Fortune Deluxe and Jeopardy Deluxe are solid contestants trying to win your gaming time, but we doubt either will make it to the tournament of champions.

Both Wheel and Jeopardy were built on top of the same game engines, so you’ll see the same avatars, character-creation tools, and game mechanics. Both also provide similar modes.

In solo mode, you play alone to see if you can solve the puzzles and win as much money as possible. In multiplayer, you can either play against two computer-controlled opponents or create extra profiles and have friends play with you (each player using different keys on one keyboard). In the daily puzzle mode, you play one solo round with the puzzle for that day. Both games have great puzzles—sometimes the solutions are obvious, but other times we had to scratch our heads. The overall balance of puzzle difficulty felt just right.

But the computer opponents seemed unbalanced. We played against a Medium-level opponent in Wheel who couldn’t guess a single consonant correctly over several rounds and a Hard-level opponent who made some really obvious mistakes. We suspect the game lets your AI opponents make stupid mistakes to keep the game close.

The studio looks good, but how much money do our opponents have?

Wheel of Fortune is played just like in the television series…spin the wheel, choose consonants or buy vowels, solve your word puzzle. The wheel needs better balancing, though—at times it kept landing on bankruptcy, several times in a row. Road Trip mode, only available in Wheel of Fortune, lets you play multiplayer in three, five, or seven cities. The word puzzles coordinate to the cities, so the more you know about a particular city, the better your chances.

Jeopardy also plays just like the television series, with one exception—it’s multiple choice. This is an obvious solution to the problem of how to otherwise interpret your response. However, if an opponent chooses incorrectly, you don’t get to see which response they chose.

The graphics are detailed, right down to the individual tines on the wheel and the gloss on the floor. You’ll hear some appropriate sound effects and the audience’s applause, but no clips from Pat Sajak or Alex Trebek. Also, the applause volume was not always appropriate—loud cheers when the wheel landed on $300 and a an oddly restrained golf clap for the $3,500 wedge.

Both games are relatively faithful interpretations of the TV quiz shows. But we wanted more—like downloadable content, with gamer-created questions, puzzles, skins, and so on. Eventually, we’ll go through all of the puzzles, and then where will we be? Back to reruns again.

COMPANY: Freeverse
CONTACT: www.freeverse.com
PRICE: $19.95 each
REQUIREMENTS: G4, G5, or Intel processor; Mac OS 10.3.9 or later; 256MB RAM
Nicely detailed graphics. Puzzles are difficult enough to be fun. Variety of game modes available. Universal binary
No additional content available online. Lack of consistent audio makes game dull. Where are Pat, Vanna, and Alex?