SNES game review 99: Family Feud

So the game I have been playing is Family Feud, it’s based on a well-known American Quiz show, in fact you will have most likely have been watching the British version of it Family Fortunes on and off for years. The basic premise of the show for those who don’t know and therefore for this game is that two families compete to try to name the most popular responses given to survey questions in order to win. Now I have to admit that this is a bit of a weird one to review for a whole host of reasons. One being that it is an American game, asking you questions which might at times throw you culture wise for example ‘’Name a dish which you are sure to find at every PotLuck dinner’’ now I have heard the term before it’s basically a dinner where everyone brings something they have prepared to the hosts house but this just illustrates the fact that the questions are aimed at the market it was released for.

Ok so you are probably wondering at this point how you answer do you select from options or…? Well you answer by using your control pad to navigate a virtual keyboard and type the answer you want to give out, basically making the possibilities endless, add on to this that you need to spell the word or term correctly and that’s spell it correctly according to the Americanised spelling of the word. Now maybe I suck but I got my first five or six questions wrong even thinking and spelling American style for example I had to name something that someone would like as a present if they were an outdoors kind of man and I said Rifle as well we know Americans love their guns. Rifle wasn’t actually a valid answer knife however was.

So one of the important questions to raise about this type of game is how many questions is there, as with this kind of thing if the question count is low and starts to quickly repeat then the game is of very little worth well surprisingly this game has around 4,000 which is actually a lot especially when you consider the fact the latter Playstation one version only apparently has 1500. I guess they lowered the number to add in digitised speech and such. You won’t find anything like that here, sound wise you have some twee midi music in the background with a buzz noise for when things are wrong and a clap noise. The graphics well its largely static screens with your cartoon family just standing there, my personal favourite sprite is the Asian old man Harry Hill look alike, although I am also partial to the guy on one family who looks kind of like Chuck Norris. There is this clapping animation that I actually find really funny. Basically your sprites stay perfectly still there faces don’t change and they don’t move apart from their arms and hands which move backwards and forwards clapping erratically for some reason it makes me think they are all dead and being operated puppet style like the film weekend at Bernie’s.

Playing this on your own is as dull as dishwater, it is a little bit better with a friend but to be fair you’d probably have more fun just watching Family Fortunes and guessing along and seeing if your guesses are right or wrong. I basically knew going in to this that I wasn’t going to be blown away, I was just curious to see how they handled things, do I think it could be better? Well I guess I would have gone for offering a screen full of answers people could choose from instead of typing the answers out but maybe that would make it a little too easy and remove some of the pressure. This is one of those things where it’s hard to rate as we now have games like this which work better on modern smart phones. I have sat and watched my fiancée play all kinds of mobile scrabble and quiz show games which are free or cost literally pence which knock this out of the park.

This is most definitely a case where it’s only worth it if you just want to see what it is like or you are trying to collect any and every SNES cart you can get your hands on. I wouldn’t have bothered buying this myself if not for the fact that it was £3 including postage costs so I wouldn’t really recommend it as a purchase to anyone. I feel a bit mean giving it a score as it really is a product of its time but as it stands playing it now I would give it a 2 out of 10. If you desperately need this game I have seen a few copies on ebay selling from America where they want about £3.50 for the game and then £3.50 postage to the UK but remember you need either an American system, a convertor or a modified console.