Looking for answers

Christmas and New Year is the time when families get together, and what better way to spend those hours than with a friendly game of Trivial Pursuit?

Even better, why not let your 32-bit micro read the cards and keep track of the positions?

The advantages are clear: No need to sit round a table on hard-back chairs, no board to be knocked over by marauding cats, dogs or infants and you don't have to put down your glass to read out the question.

In fact all you need do is stick the disc in the drive, click the icon and double-click the cute pie that appears in the directory window.

From here you get a slightly unfriendly request about whether you want waveform sounds but answering yes or no doesn't affect whether you are asked questions with sounds in them, so take your pick.

Next comes the pretty title screen declaring the various authors, copyrights and informs you that the interesting sounds are courtesy of EMR.

Finally you get on to the playing screen, where you are asked to enter the names of the players in turn - you can have up to six.

The Trivial Pursuit board is shown plus, initially, a menu of options including a question timer (extremely useful), edit players and quit.

There's also the first mention of TP, that cute and cuddly question master. You can put him to sleep if he irritates you.

A further options screen lets you modify the way the on-screen clock appears and which combinations of text, graphic and sound questions you want. The edit players menu has very handy options to pause one or more players.

Play is simple. The program puts your pie in the centre and starts spinning the die located in the bottom left. When you click the mouse it stops spinning and all the possible positions you could move to are highlighted with Xs except the one nearest the mouse pointer, which is displayed as 0.

You highlight the position you want to go to by moving the mouse pointer and clicking the Select button. When answering a particular question will get you a piece of pie - also known as a wedge or, colloquially, a widgie. There is an accompanying beep when that position is highlighted.

When you choose a position the screen switches to show a room and cute (but ugly) TP is there and proceeds to ask you the question. Actually the text of the question appears at the bottom of the screen and TP makes some squeaky noises. If it's a graphics question you get a picture, or you may hear some music.

There are some incomprehensible graphics and occasional indefinable music, but on the whole both are satisfactory and certainly a bonus over the board game.

If the question you've answered will give you a wedge you hear a beep. The pies of opponents not actually in play do not appear on the board. All the usual Trivial Pursuit features are there - Go again board positions, choice of question in the centre and so on.

At any time you can click the analyse icon in the top left ofthe screen and see how good you are. What you see is the total number of questions answered, how many you've got right and your percentage right.

Also there's a similar breakdown by subject - this means that if you're a serious strategic player you can optimise your route round the board by only moving to your preferred subjects. That might seem obvious, but I discovered I had a much better chance in the area of entertainment than I previously thought.

I found Trivial Pursuit fun to play and unlike most board game conversions it actually does work on screen. The ability to include graphic and sound questions extends its capabilities tremendously. Definitely worthwhile.

Steve Turnbull