"Wheel" Gets an XBox/PS3/Wii U Release

The Sonic Advance series- along with all of the handheld games sense- were made by Dimps.

Bottom line: if Ludia picks up Wheel and Jeopardy!, you may as well forget any chance of their video game license being any good ever again.

Then again, given how Ludia clearly doesn't watch the shows they're making games of (despite claims otherwise), they could well "botch" things by making them based on an "inferior" format -- i.e., shopping. And, in all seriousness, I think the shopping format could work in a Wheel video game.

* Buy a deck of cards for $20? You can play games with that deck in the "Souvenirs" area! (The Souvenirs area, I picture, is something like the Wheel set with the puzzle board, Wheel with backdrops, and rotating turntable with the goods you've bought strewn all over the place. Just move the cursor to the item you want to interact with, and your avatar comes over to interact.)
* Buy Stern's pinball game, or GameTek's arcade game? You can play them, too! (Yo dawg, I heard you like Wheel of Fortune, so I put a Wheel game in your Wheel game so you can play Wheel while you play Wheel.)
* Buy that fancy tuxedo? Your avatar can wear those clothes both inside and outside the game!
* Buy a stereo? You just unlocked a Sound Test!
* Cars, planes, boats, etc. -- a game like Diddy Kong Racing, maybe? *shrug*
* And the gift certificates? A system whereby every $x earns you x Microsoft Points or whatever; your total gift certificate savings, and what it translates into, can be seen in the Souvenirs section.
* The sponsorship possibilities are endless, really, and could include a great bevy of licensed games and other fun stuff.

Basically, at least some of the things you can buy unlock minigames and such in the "Souvenirs" area, while others (Chuck Woolery bobblehead, anyone?) do silly things with your avatar. "Real" cash (from the Bonus Round and the like), on the other hand, can be used to purchase other sets, various set pieces (like in THQ's 2012 games), etc. from the "Extras" menu.

There's probably more ideas in that one, but that's for a different topic (which section that would go in, I'm not sure). I'm sure we could brainstorm quite a few more.

Pipeworks Software is the one in charge of making new texture packs. Not THQ.

Not sure where this is coming from because from what I have seen Ludia has done a pretty good job with games like TPiR Decades as well as the FaceBook game. It was clear they went through the archives and even got stuff from unaired/lost shows! Most recently, in TPiR Slots on FaceBook, they made Pick-a-Pair and the bonus round actually uses the classic Ferris Wheel!

I for one would love to see Ludia pick it up and run with it, WoF/WoF Slots could be well executed. (There are some games similar on GSN.com but they're pretty bad...)

Wow! TPiR Decades was the biggest piece of crap yet. You had to be Helen Keller to not notice the choppy animation of the contestants and models. The only games they've done justice to are Feud and Millionaire. Those are kinda hard shows to mess up.

What have you been having from a bowl? The Price Is Right Decades was a piece of tripe -- no footage used for the prizes (and the pictures, while from old episodes, have the models airbrushed out), the host is boring/bored, the announcers don't seem to care either (even Randy West sounds bored), games are played for cash when they shouldn't be, Hurdles is completely wrong, the Showcase Showdowns are totally botched, the music is all modern stuff, some of the classic clips are questionable (one is an unremarkable Carey-era Shell Game loss), and the graphics generally don't look all that great.

Besides that, Ludia's the company that made the indescribably-dense $1,000,000 Pyramid (because why use the good rules when we can do Donnymid?), the fanbase-consulted/insulting Press Your Luck 2010 (Wii/DS only; the PS3 version actually improved), the pointless Family Feud Decades (hey, the classic music's...only in the menus while gameplay uses the "party" theme), Family Feud 2012 starring Sparky Whitmore or whatever his name was (sounds remarkably like the announcer of the first Anderson-era MadTV parody), and a Hollywood Squares whose promoted stars only rotate in the center square (the others are generic-name people like the NES version).

Anything good the company puts out is a refreshing drop of water in a desert of mediocrity.

(EDIT: I was trying to think of a clever way to ask "What have you been smoking?")

...why are we talking about TPIR Decades?

This thread is about the recent 360/PS3/WiiU releases of Wheel of Fortune. Let's get back to talking about that, please.

Actually, I think the main reasons the Wii U version is so bad compared to the others are...

A) Christmas rush. Any more time spent on it would have pushed it to 2013 and possibly less sales. Judging by some of the VA samples, it seems like they had intended for the GamePad to have more functionalities than just duplicating the TV's display (The rules for the exclusive minigame "Toss-Up Flash" imply that the images only appear on the GamePad, while they actually appear above the board on both screens)

B) It's a new console. The Wii version was developed over 3 years into the Wii's life cycle, so they were able to take better advantage of it since they knew more about it, such as adding Miis and Wii Speak support. I'm sure if they had more time or if they actually worked with Nintendo (Pipeworks doesn't seem to have a strong relationship with them), it would have been way better.

It also doesn't help that Nintendo is hardly promoting it. I don't know if that has to do with the fact that they're Sony properties, or that they know most "gamers" wouldn't be interested in it compared to the latest Mario and Zelda games, of course.

Yeah, but then you don't get the big money from Christmas shoppers; the "tradeoff" is that you risk your game getting released with low to no publicity on the same day a well-known series is getting another entry.


Again, "Christmas = Big Money", which isn't wrong but has led to some big-time failures like Sega's 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game (the one where he makes out with a human girl); the thing was nigh unplayable, with glitches galore and a preposterous amount of loading times.

The biggest examples, of course, are Atari's Pac-Man and E.T. games for the 2600. Both were made on very tight schedules to cash in on a craze and get released in time for Christmas (a bad combination), with Atari thinking the former was going to sell consoles; they also paid a ton of money for game rights to the latter. The fact that hastily-created startup companies were producing games of comparable quality on a much lower budget didn't help matters, and contributed to the Crash of '83.