YMMV / You Don't Know Jack

• Awesome Music: When it comes to Jack Attack music, the first version heard in ''The Ride''/''Abwärts!'' is probably one of the best, mixing the right amounts of ominousness and intensity together. Must be the bagpipe-esque parts. Likewise the ''Sports'' Jack Attack is catchy for the incorporating the "Charge" jingle into its version. The other Jack Attack suite from ''The Ride'' also deserves mention; it's a tense, building hard rock piece, culminating with a screaming lead guitar over the last items of the game.
  • Also The Ride's renditions of the main theme, the Jack Bingo music... the guitarwork was done by Todd Rundgren, and it shows.
  • The "Dis Or Dat" music in ''2011''. Rockin'. 2015 and the Facebook version use it too.
    • Vol 3's Dis Or Dat (which was likewise ported to the first Playstation game) is likewise memorable for being a very smooth jazzy like piece.
    • On that note, the Dis Or Dat tunes in ''The Ride'' (a funky rock piece) and ''Full Stream'' (straight, driving hard rock) are great fun too.
  • Full Stream has a rare, alternate Jack Attack theme— an epic "Wild West" rendition of the main theme that rises in key throughout the Attack.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Cookie is the most popular host after all. Schmitty, who's now the voice of the Quiplash series, also counts to a lesser degree.
• Foil: Nate and Cookie are both hosts of the game. However, Nate isn’t “heartful”. Meanwhile, Cookie thinks weddings aren’t a joke. He also features his cats Poopsie and Mayonnaise in EVERY Nocturnal Admission. And, this comes from the guy who killed his intern.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Cookie trying and mostly failing to get Jimmy Fallon out of the studio in Full Stream? Hilarious. Cookie trying and failing to leave the studio himself in "Escape The Simulation" from that same game? Heartrending. It gets worse when you consider that Nate Shapiro lists "celebrity cameos" as one of the groups trapped in the simulation, and how immediately after leaving You Don't Know Jack, Fallon interrupts YDKJ Oldies Radio, another show that airs on Binjpipe.
  • One of the Moral Dilemmas in The Ride is "If both a Borders and a Blockbuster Video were on fire and you could only save one, which one would you choose?" Both chains wound up collapsing in the early 2010s. Though, answering said question would be pretty easy, as there is only one Blockbuster store in the world that is still running.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The UK version (released in 1996) had a question in which you have to select which part of a Venn Diagram ex-Housemartins member Norman Cook would go into. Quizmaster Jack Cake then says "We HAD considered using a pie chart for this question, but the notion of Norman Cook appearing in any kind of chart was just too ridiculous to entertain". By 1997, Fatboy Slim was a household name...
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The Lost Gold has 300 questions, as opposed to all the other volumes, and for an added kick to the shins, each game is only seven questions long.
  • "Mock 2" was likewise not well liked for this reason, having less questions then the first game.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: 2015 is virtually the same game as 2011 (both in presentation and format) with only a couple new question categories ("Kangaroo, Peanut, Einstein, or Uranus?"; "Foggy Facts with Old Man"). It also used the exact same "Jack Attack" music as 2011, which is disappointing considering earlier games in the series changed the theme in every installment. However, it’s worth noting that there was a four year gap in between the games, and this was also part of Jackbox Games’ first stab at making a game for the streaming market. Could likewise be considered an Author's Saving Throw for the snafu with the 2011 console PC port not having most of the features from the console versions.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The f killed 4!
  • The many variations of the Gibberish Question title being used to replace the proper name of the question type.
  • Ass of the Bag ^note In the Suburbia floor of The Ride (and it’s reappearance as an episode of Mock 2), one question asks what the literal translation of the term "cul-de-sac" is, and this is the correct answer. Throughout the rest of the floor, the answer makes a few surprise appearances.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The guitar chord heard when a player buzzes in in Volume 1, Sports, Volume 2, Movies, Volume 3, Television, The Ride, Playstation, Offline, and Louder! Faster! Funnier!.
  • The "question correct" jingle in Vol. 3 when the number dances on a disco floor.
  • The two-note "BANG-whoooom" when a player nails the right answer in the Jack Attack. Even punchier in The Ride, when it's more of a "BANG-BANG! wha-whoom" or a "BLAM-whum wha-whoom" depending on the Jack Attack music that's playing.
  • The synth chord hears when a player gets the bonus in The Ride's Roadkill rounds.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The music, visuals, and sounds that play during the Jack Attack can reach "do not play alone after sunset" levels.
  • Volume 3's Impossible Questions are introduced with an eerie drone, and a graphic skull and crossbones that suddenly appears from behind the word "impossible".
  • From the Facebook game: The Church of A'zqr, the Eternal Bleeding Jackal Skull.
  • Full Stream gives us a commercial for "The Box", supposedly for a monthly subscription service that doesn’t specify what it sells. It quickly becomes apparent that the organization is just a scam to retrieve personal information as the commercial becomes more disturbing in tone.
  • In 2011, Cookie MURDERS his intern just so he can weigh his brain. Just Google it! Goddammit!
  • From Full Stream, "Escape the Simulation". After a series of questions about simulated realities, Cookie discovers the horrible truth about Binjpipe: "the Algorithm" the Binjpipe lady talks about is actually some otherworldly entity that wants to assimilate the human race, and to that end Binjpipe has trapped Cookie in a Matrix-esque VR simulation from which he struggles (in vain) to escape.
• Nightmare Retardant: However, the overacting and the tongue-in-cheek presentation of the Jack Attack might make some players find it funny instead.
• Older Than They Think: The trash questions, while turned into a proper question type in 2011, made occasional appearances in the earlier games.
  • 2015's "Foggy Facts with Old Man" questions are a successor to Headrush's "Old Man’s Moldy Memories".
  • The basic concept behind the "Dis Or Dat" questions was first used on the mid-80's game show Every Second Counts.
• Polished Port: Party, an iOS release that can be played on TV or directly on the iPad.
• Porting Disaster: The PC version of 2011 somehow had less features than its console counterparts, despite most of those features being more than possible on a PC. Almost all of the games supported at least 3 players on PC; 2011 supports 4 players on consoles, but only 2 on PC due to the new question format with money-based-on-time-to-answer not working so well when everyone has to share a "controller." When a concerned player tweeted a request for further clarification as to why the PC version was limited to 2 players to YDJK's twitter account, this insult◊ was what he got in reply.
  • In a 2013 Reddit AMA, the dev team did give a real answer. Basically, because of some of the changes that were made to the game from previous editions, they either had to pare down the PC game or rebuild it from the ground up. THQ wouldn't give them the money for the latter, so they were stuck with the first option.
  • The DS version of 2011 doesn't include the "Wrong Answer of the Game" or "Nocturnal Admissions" questions.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • "Mock 2" (the second YDKJ game for the PlayStation) wasn't very well liked by most fans. Unlike the first game, which more or less was a more stripped down Vol 3 that still retained the charm of that game, "Mock 2" had virtually no personality behind it. The graphics were all just shapes zooming in and out and looked ugly. The text was simple computer font, very few special categories, less questions than the first game and the host, Schmitty, lacking the snark of Cookie. Overall the production just screamed rushed and made on the cheap.
  • "The Lost Gold" often receives ire from fans of the franchise for several reasons. Along with coming after an unexplained three-year long hiatus, the game primarily consists of unused questions from the original 5 volumes (hence the title), features only seven questions per game as opposed to the options for 7 or 21 questions in earlier releases (along with only including 300 questions as opposed to the larger question pools), and once again suffers from the host lacking Cookie’s snarky charm. The integration of the "haunted show" premise is also rather haphazard, only playing into the login screen narrated by the pirate and the occasional Impossible Questions supposedly put in by him. All of this led to a rather forgettable outing and a loss of interest in the franchise until the advent of the Webshow.
• The Scrappy: Billy O' Brien in 2011. Even Cookie hates him and is happy if you pick the Wrong Answer of the Game in the last on-disc episode, which gives you Billy.
  • Buzz Lippman is the Scrappy of the whole series, getting only one game and a Butt-Monkey joke in The Ride.
  • Replacement Scrappy: The f in 2011 for the dead 4.
• Scrappy Mechanic: They removed the ability to skip the instructions for "Dis or Dat" in 2015, an annoyance for people who have been with the series from the beginning. Luckily, they still allowed you to skip the instructions for "Jack Attack". However, the instructions for the former category in 2015 are shorter than they were in 2011, likely as a form of compensation.
• Seasonal Rot: Vol. 6: The Lost Gold, for reasons above.
• Squick:
  • The contents of Chocky's various breakfast cereals. (Pink and tarty milk, anyone?)
  • Commercials featuring Tammy, a Nightmare Fetishist parody of 976 phone-sex lines.
    • Her first commercial, 976-WART, has Tammy teasing rather unpleasant skin conditions.
    • Another ad, 976-CORN, has her wanting callers to slobber over her feet that are rife with bunions, corns, and ingrown toenails.
    • Finally comes 1-900-TUNA, where Tammy is sitting on the toilet after eating eight tuna sandwiches with expired mayonnaise.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The Wrong Answer of the Game fanfare from 2011 and 2015 sounds similar to the 20th Century Fox fanfare.
  • The original version of the Gibberish Question waiting music as heard in Volume 1, Sports, the Facebook port, and Full Stream bears a striking resemblance to this piece of stock music.
  • The "It's the Put the Choices into Order then Buzz In and See If You Are Right... Question!" theme sounds similar to the '60s Batman theme.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Ooooohhhhhh, cuatroooooooo...
  • The Question That Cared
  • In Full Stream, The Question That Cares Too Much
• That One Question: In 2011, Episode 55, question 9ine requires you to memorize a code word that Cookie mentions at the very beginning of the episode. Because Cookie's opening lines up to this point have been one-off gags with no relevance to the game, this will likely blindside players who dismissed said code word as another one of those (or, even worse, skipped the intro entirely), basically reducing the question to sheer luck.
  • Question 10n of episode 73 (the last on-disc episode) in the same game is pure trial and error - a question where you have to guess which phrase wasn’t in Jack Torrance’s essay, where all four answers are "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". Good luck with this one. The answer is the third option, which Cookie clarifies is because the third option tends to be the one selected most often across all of the game’s questions. Or maybe it’s because you guessed.
  • The Gibberish Questions can be these for people who struggle with them, especially considering the obnoxious way they start.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Slightly. The questions are just meant to be silly and mix pop culture and real-world facts to keep them from getting too dated. But a lot of them are very much products of their decades (90s, 2000s, 2010s, etc.) and whatever's popular at the time in the media. The themed one (Sports, Movies, Television) is really hit by this the most since a lot of the questions are steeped in subjects from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s culture and likely anyone who played them nowadays that were born in the 2000s onward likely wouldn't get the questions.
  • The blurb for the Steam rerelease of the teen-targeted spinoff Headrush pretty much acknowledges that the game won't have much appeal if you weren't a teenager when it came out.

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