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I remember Mike Read, back in the old days when he used to get his guitar out on Saturday Superstore and do his amusing Cliff Richard impersonation. Now a megastar, Mike has sold his name to a board game and sub-let it to Elite. Read on...

What Elite then do is dig out the programming routines, they used for A Question Of Sport, bung in a load of muso-trivia questions and stick the resulting program on the shelves. While this may not earn them brownie points for imagination, or constructive programming, or much else really, it can't be denied that, as a music quiz game, Mike Read's Pop Quiz just about does the job.

After you've loaded your questions, the game begins by letting you and the computer (or another player) select a team of three from the gang of twelve digitised faces who appeared in A Question Of Sport, who, since their last appearance, have become specialists in certain types of music. I assume that, if you're a big classical fan, you pick three classical specialists, while if you want more of a challenge, you pick a more varied bunch, but it didn't seem to make a lot of difference, except in the "Your Scene" round, of which, more later.

First, individual team members have to pick one of twelve numbers from the Juke Box, to reveal a question category. A question from that category is displayed above four answers, and it's up to you to move a cursor to the right answer before time runs out.

Next comes "Spot the Star", in which each team gets three clues to a pop personality's identity. After each clue you get a chance to guess who Mike is talking about, but each extra one you take reduces the point of value of the question.

"Your Scene" is the groovy name for the Pop Quiz equivalent of A Question Of Sport's "Home or Away" round. So, if you picked a bunch of classical music buffs at the start, you can go for "Easy" Questions for one point and answer a load of questions on classics. "Hard" questions are hard in the sense that your player isn't a specialist in that area.

"Name the Year" is similar to "Spot the Star". Each team has to guess a year from three things that happened in that year.

In the "Quick Fire round", each team is presented with a question at the same time, and it's a race to plant your cursor on the correct answer before your opponent. Ten questions later, it's back to the Juke Box for the final round.

As I said earlier, as music trivia games go, this one isn't too bad. The various rounds are quite well presented, and the whole experience is reasonable fun with two players, though the range of music covered and the lack of recent chart stuff may be off-putting to young players.

However, I can just about visualise parents joining the kids around the computer, getting nostalgic about old vibes and harking back to the good old days, such as when Mike Read was on the telly...

If you're really desperate for a computer pop quiz game, Mike Read's Pop Quiz is a number one in a field of one. Not one for the mainstream gamer, though, especially at this price.