Microdeal
£19.95
With the success of Trivial Pursuit and all its clones it is no
surprise that trivia programs should appear on computers. What is
perhaps surprising is that so few of them should have appeared! This
one, written by Steve Bak, is graphically quite simple but quite
challenging and keeps you coming back for 'just one more try' as all
good computer games should do. It has the added bonus of allowing
you, or a friend, to add almost unlimited questions of your own.
Trivia Challenge is, essentially, a one player game being based on
the trivia gambling machines found in pubs and arcades. You start
with $10 and can insert either 25 cents for one go or $1 which gives
you five credits. Once the coins are 'inserted' you click on the
word play and your first question appears. After a short delay to
enable you to digest the question, three alternative answers appear
and you click on the one you feel is correct. You have a limited
time in which to answer and the faster you answer, the more points
you score. Actually winning something is quite difficult as you are
allowed only two incorrect answers in a turn and need to score at
least 1000 points to win $1! The maximum points per question seems
to be around 116 but if you need time to think it will be much
lower. I consider myself to be pretty good on Pop music, but even so
have had a hard struggle winning even $1.50 in this category!
The disk comes with the categories Sport, Art, Pop, Science and
General Knowledge which is a mix of all the others. Each category
has a minimum of 500 questions and General Knowledge has nearly
2,000. Questions do tend to repeat when you play the game after
switching off, but the answers do not always appear in the same
order. The questions are well thought out, interesting and
particularly 'English' despite the $ winnings and the frequent
spelling mistakes! Mind you if you want to be pedantic I suppose you
could always load up the questions with your word processor, spell
check them and save them back! Full instructions are given to create
your own question sets with any ASCII word processor.
All in all, Trivia Challenge is great fun and highly recommended for
any trivia buff, especially those who cannot find any friends to
play with. Finally, for even more fun, how about using the 'do it
yourself' option to load in all of the official questions from
Trivial Pursuit, practice like mad and then thrash the life out of
everybody at the next party!!
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