Wheel of Fortune

Oh Wheel of Fortune, the TV game show that is impossible to mess up. There's no need to spell correctly and no difficult questions to answer, it's just you and a big, colorful wheel dole out cash prizes. Of all of the TV game shows making their way over to portable game systems, Wheel of Fortune is by far the most natural. Unfortunately that doesn't mean it's a spectacular game.

Wheel of Fortune on the Game Gear is pretty standard fare, it plays exactly as you'd expect it to and is just as much fun as you can imagine. Like the TV show it's based on, this Game Gear Wheel of Fortune is extremely simple, to the point where you might tire of the formula minutes after you start. It's not that the game is bad; it's just so uneventful that you'll wonder why you're still playing it.

Even if you've never seen the long-running TV show, Wheel of Fortune won't take more than a second to learn how to play. It involves you spinning a giant wheel full of various amounts of money. After you've landed on a dollar amount it's your job to guess a letter and see if it's one of the letters on the board (similar to how you play Hangman). If you guess a letter you can continue until you solve it, but beware, the more you spin the more likely you will be to hit the dreaded Bankruptcy, the piece that not only gives control to somebody else but takes all of your money away.

The object is to be the first to solve the puzzle, if you get it right first then you'll keep your money and go on to the next puzzle. These different puzzles aren't hard, especially after you've uncovered a few of the letters. If you're the type of person who is constantly guessing the puzzle before the contestants are then you're going to have no fun here. In general the puzzles seem easier here than they do on TV, but that may just be my imagination.

Although it plays well, this Game Gear version of Wheel of Fortune is pretty bare bones. You don't get much of a choice in who you want to be and outside of the main game there isn't much more you can do. You are able to play with up to three players, which is nice, but even that isn't as exciting as it seems on TV. Perhaps it's the fact that you aren't playing for real money. Whatever it is, Wheel of Fortune on the Game Gear is good, but nothing to write home about. Well, at least it's better than the Pat Sajak Show.