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Trivial Pursuit, the board game that tests your general knowledge on subjects like sport, history and entertainment, has become the latest craze to sweep across the USA, where there are already national Trivial Pursuit competitions. Even in a large America bar - you'll find a group of people hunched over a board all concentrating hard on winning a game.

So it's no surprise that the American company Cosmi have produced a computer game based on Trivial Pursuit called Monster Trivia.

The game can accommodate from two to four players or four teams of players. Basically, the idea of the game is to answer as many questions correctly as you can from the six categories of questions, which include sport, history, showbiz, science and general knowledge.

At the beginning of each game, the player chooses to answer questions on one of six topics and is then treated to five or six questions on that subject after which you must choose another topic to answer questions on. The more questions you get right, the higher your score. Get them wrong and the trivia monster starts trying to break into the room you are sitting in - the doors shake and the walls begin to crack.

On reading the cassette inlay, I thought the game would be great - I am a Trivial Pursuit fanatic - unfortunately the game didn't live up to my expectations. I doubt if many readers of C&VG could answer that many questions on the history of American football.

And, if you get a question wrong - something you do quite often because of the way the game has been written - the game makes the most awful screeching and rumbling sounds.

Another annoying feature of the game is that there is one main program to be loaded, then one of 15 other sub-programs need to be loaded to actually get any questions out of it. This means keeping a close eye on the tape counter and trying to place the cassette tape at exactly the right place - in practice, this happens very rarely and I spent some time actually trying to load the program due to loading problems.