I use to watch this game show all the time; I remember vividly Richard Dawson's charming bits, and then Ray Combs later. Game shows like this and price is right brought me through my childhood. Naturally I was excited to say the least when they came out with a game for it. I hadn't played the game for quite a few years until, due to nostalgia for all my childhood educational games; I rediscovered it thanks to this site. I have had some trouble running it on my new computer with dos-box but slowing the cpu cycles down to about 1000 helped a lot.
It’s a great game at first, but it does have some major flaws. It has long loading portions where it says please wait while "Jetsons" (or any other family name) take the stage. The sound bits were terrible at best as well, the sound would get of track a lot, and if I tried to launch it with dosbox it would just emit a high pitched continuous note. I noticed when I played it for a couple hours that I would get some repeats of the same questions it asked even a few minutes before. The graphics are horrific even by dos standards.
Of course this didn't bother me at all because that’s really not the major goal of family
feud. One of the worst parts of the game was the computer, it seemed like it was trained to give a right answer on every other one but when it got a question wrong it would give a completely nonsensical answer like "physics" to the topic "things that you put on your coffee table, the game is kind of ridiculous to play by yourself because of the terrible AI. Also the game would misinterpret my answers and give me an answer that I wasn’t even close to or not give me an answer that I had said a direct synonym to.
The game does have good attributes however, even though it is not a game I would want to play for hours on end, I enjoyed using it with moderation. It is a very entertaining game to play with friends or even with family members especially in groups where each person can be a member. I wish they would make a decent version of this for my kids to play with some updated graphics and a huge question database. I doubt that this version had more than 200 questions. It was nice also to go back and play one of my other childhood games that I have missed so much. Despite all of the negatives I have given about this game it is actually quite enjoyable to play for a couple hours a week, I would recommend it to any fellow game show fans.
