You Don’t Know Jack: Mock 2 uses a few of the PlayStation’s polygon-pushing abilities, but it’s all for eye-candy. The game itself is the same as it ever was, with questions at the top of the screen and the answers at the bottom. It’s not particularly impressive graphically, and it’s certainly lower resolution than the computer offerings, but it definitely gets the job done.

As usual, the voice acting in Mock 2 is top notch, with every question being read out, and most of the wrong answers having wonderful little quips, along with the right answers. However, when playing, it seems that the host talks a little too long before some of the questions, slowing the pace of the game somewhat. It’s not unbearable, but there is such a thing as too much chatter, and Mock 2 comes close.

If you’ve ever played a You Don’t Know Jack game, you should know what to expect. If not, it’s basically a quiz game with really, really odd questions and answers. They’re usually a little perverted or sick, or a combination of the two. It’s meant to be played with as many people as possible (three) and even more watching as the game goes along.

Mock 2 follows in the same tradition. On the computer versions, there are question types that require typing. Since you can’t do that with a PlayStation controller, they’ve replaced those types with something unique to this game. One is the “Wendithap’n,” where you’ve got to buzz in as to whether the event displayed happened before, after, or didn’t happen at all with respect to another event. It’s basically a same-subject Three-Way, for those of you who remember those. And then there’s the “Coinkydink,” which shows two things and has you buzz in on a word that answers both of them. It’s reminiscent of Roadkill.

It’s all entertaining, certainly, but Mock 2 has most of the flaws of the Jack series. The recent ones have been themed, which means that you don’t get to pick questions before rounds. And it seemed to me that the point values in Mock 2 were a lot lower than I’m used to, with lots of $1,000 and $2,000 questions, and only the occasional high-value one.

And, in the end, it’s the same game we’ve been playing since the original You Don’t Know Jack. It’s either your thing or not, but this is basically a “question pack” with a few different things thrown in.

And yes, you can still Screw Your Neighbor.

Painfully simple. Buzz in with a shoulder button, then, if necessary, hit one of the four face buttons to select an answer to the question. You don’t get easier than that. Of course, the questions themselves can be devilishly difficult, but that’s to be expected in a quiz game. It all depends on just how much useless knowledge you know.

The control scheme is trivially simple, and can be explained in about five seconds to any newcomer. For those who aren’t used to the PlayStation’s button placements, perhaps the arrow keys being the selectors would have been a better choice, but that’s more prone to error, so I can understand not using them. If you genuinely know the answer, you have more than enough time to look at your controller and find the right button to press.

PS2: You have to do some hoodoo to set the Fast disc speed and Smooth graphics option, and they don’t help Mock 2 at all. There are no load times to begin with, and I had some freezes with the Fast speed. And the Smooth option makes a few of the text boxes look a little messed up. Just use the default options.

Do remember that you have to use a PSOne multitap for PSOne games, even when you’re playing them on the PS2. And the PS2 BIOS doesn’t recognize controllers plugged into the PSOne multitap, only the games themselves.

In the end, You Don’t Know Jack: Mock 2 offers the same YDKJ experience that we’ve been having for years. That’s either a blessing or a curse, depending on how your humor runs. But the themed question rounds, smaller number of questions, and excessive blathering, takes a little away from the penultimate Jack experience of the first three computer titles. If you’re a fan of the series, you could certainly do much worse, but it’s neither the highlight nor the lowlight of the Jacks.