Previous Next

Oh dear! TV quiz games never look as good on the Commodore as they do on the box, do they? The logos are there, bad reproductions of the theme tune, and maybe a digitised picture of the host, but it's still not the same, is it? Double Dare is no exception.

I suppose the one thing in its favour is that it closely follows the Peter Simon TV show. Two teams, each with two players, are depicted. You play the red team, and either the computer or a friend plays yellow. The presenter asks a question, and you are offered three alternatives. If you get it right, you get another question. If not, play passes over to the other side. If unsure, you can 'dare' the other side to answer, but they can always 'double dare' it back, forcing you to either answer yourself or take a challenge.

The questions are pretty dire. Unlike the TV programme, they all seem to be about entertainment, and you quickly get bored with endless book and film questions. There's very little else on offer. If you don't know the answer, try the first choice - you'll be right more often than you ought to be! Also, several of the questions are already out of date, e.g. referring to characters from soaps that have long since departed.

The challenges are fairly interesting, but certainly nothing special. There's a "Split Personalities"-style sliding block puzzle with famous faces to rearrange, and "Simon"-style sequences of lights to copy - fun, but not worth buying the game for.

Graphics and sound are terrible - the shapes the presenter contorts his mouth into when asking a question are indescribable, so I won't bother trying to describe them!

The second (multi-loaded) part is the assault course, which is basically an unimaginative run-around-collecting-things game, but at least the background tune's OK.

At the end of the day, Double Dare is poor value for money. Die-hard fans of the TV programme might get some mileage out of it, but no-one else will.