Trivial Pursuit - Hasbro Electronic Entertainment

                  Reviewed by Alan Medley

Well, this year I had a choice of two games for my grand annual
review. Sue bought me two CD ROMs and we decided I should review
the first one we got working.

Sadly, in our house, we're still waiting for the day when we can
assume that a new piece of software or hardware will work first
time. In fact, we seem to be as far away as ever - did anyone in
your house ever manage to 'plug and play'? Until the clever people
(including Bill Gates and his gang) get to the point where
everything works straight out of the box, I fear that computers
will remain the preserve of the nerd and the enthusiast. Sorry,
where was I?

Well, Sue managed to get Trivial Pursuit working after a couple of
days by moving the odd `DLL' file in Windows 95 so I guess we were
pretty lucky. Once we got it running, we found that the game is
very similar to the board game in most ways. I guess that everyone
and his dog knows how to play the board game but, just in case
.....

You throw a dice, move that many steps on the board and land on a
colour. Different colours mean different subjects. You have to
answer a silly (or trivial) question from a card. If you get it
right, you can throw again and answer another question.  The board
looks like a cartwheel, and if you get a question right where the
spokes join the rim of the cartwheel, you get a little piece of
coloured plastic cake and you put it in a little round plastic
thingy. When you get all six pieces of cake you aim for the middle
of the board and, if you get that question right, then you win.

The major difference with this PC version is that you get audio
and video with the questions, although you can't do anything with
the computer version you couldn't do with the board game. In the
`Classic' version, you click on the dice which spins, then the
available squares flash for you to choose your destination. Once
you click on a valid square, the film clip loads and plays. The
question appears under the film. Once you have decided your
answer, you click on the answer button to see the correct answer.
Then click `Right' if you got it right, or `Wrong' if not. Those
with a dishonest streak may have noticed that this gives the
player a major opportunity to cheat by clicking `Right' whatever
he/she thought was the answer (as if I would).

The fancy films and all that don't add very much to the game.  It
obviously wasn't too difficult to program because you load up some
stuff called QTIME and WING which seems to have existed
previously, and which seems to look after the audio and video. The
question material is mostly newsreel and archive stuff done by
other people although the quality is generally quite high. Often,
the questions don't seem to have a very strong connection to the
audio and video. They clearly came up with the bits of old films
and some soundtracks first, and then thought of any old questions
- no matter how tenuous the linkage. Some examples:

Science and Nature (don't ask me). Film and sound track of
Margaret Thatcher's farewell speech from the steps of number 10.
The question? What two liquids does Maggie reportedly mix to
produce her favourite drink? (whisky and water)

Sport and Leisure. Film of Japanese tea ceremony and some
Japanesey music. Which Japanese sportsmen were banned, in 1994,
from having implants to bring them up to regulation height? (Sumo
wrestlers)

Wild. Film of Chas and Di on the Buck House balcony after their
wedding, accompanied by Auld Lang Syne. Which county boast
Althorp, the family home of the Spencers?  (Northamptonshire)

See what I mean? There is a connection between what you see and
hear, and the subsequent question, but the pictures don't help
very much do they? I'll be generous and assume that they could not
get all the pictures and sounds they really wanted because of the
copyright laws.

The packaging boasts that there are over 1000 questions but when I
played it the second time (when writing this) I had already seen
and heard all the clips. Sometimes, the question was different
from the question I had the first time round. So they obviously
don't have over 1000 films - closer to 100 I reckon. The board
game has over 6000 questions in each set and, if you play it often
enough, you soon get to learn the answers. With this version, that
will happen all the sooner so I doubt it will have any lasting
appeal.

Although we got the program running OK there were some weird
coloured backgrounds when the films were running - so weird that
you sometimes couldn't read the buttons you needed to click on.
Definitely a bug but I suspect some kind of clash between the game
and Windows 95.

And finally. Sue and I played it in anger, and guess what? It
crashed right at the end. Luckily we had Norton Crashguard running
so we could recover from it but that was the penultimate straw for
me. There was not long to wait for the last straw. The game gives
you the opportunity to look at the statistics to see what success
rate you are having in each category. A good time to look at that
would be at the end, right? Well it wasn't there at the end. No
statistics at all.  Whether it was due to the crash or not I don't
know but I ask you.

So Sue, sorry to be an ungrateful old g*t but thanks a lot for the
lovely present and all that, but is there any chance you could
change it for some socks or hankies?

Happy New Year

Alan








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