Previous Next

At last an acceptable version of Trivial Pursuits, the game which dominated Christmas stockings last year. Unlike US Gold's Monster Trivia, this is an accurate copy of the game with questions tailored for British players.

The questions are loaded in from a main program from two double sided cassettes containing over 1400 questions.

Between two and four players can join in the fun as they travel around a board answering general knowledge questions on a range of subjects. Each correct answer allows the player to move the number of squares which have been determined by the throw of an electronic dice. The best feature is that answers are called out by the player rather rather than typed in so if, like me, your spelling is atrowshus it woant loes you poynts!

After calling out an answer, a press of a key will reveal if you were correct and your symbol will move around the board if you say you were correct. Never play this game with a nimble fingered cheat.

Some of the squares are larger than others to indicate that they are bonus squares. These should be your focus of attention because success on one of these squares wins a piece of pie and the first player to gain six pieces wins. That is assuming you can jump the last hurdle when your opponents are invited to select a final category of question that must be answered for success.

The game owes more to its contents for its attraction than to its presentation. The graphics and sound are fairly rudimentary and loading the questions takes a long, long time. A little more thought should have gone into the program when the computer is searching for a question. Normally the question appears almost instantaneously but occasionally it can take a while before anything appears on the screen and I found myself wondering if the computer had crashed.

The level of the questions is what I would class as intermediate, not too hard but not too simple. This doesn't matter too much because there is an editor program which allows you to compile your own question tape if you wish.

My overall opinion is that this is the best Trivia game available for the C64 only because it has very little opposition. It probably won't be long before it is superceded by a better presented version, but at least it's relatively inexpensive.

E.D.