1984 Paraninfo Soft (Spain)
by Antonio Bellido, Luis Rodriguez Martinez, Juan Redondo, Paco Garcia, Fabricio Perez
This quiz is based upon a popular Spanish prime-time television game show, extremely popular also here in Portugal. It featured prizes such as apartments and expensive range cars and on the opposite side, scrap cars or even trucks loaded with sand!
The game, however is a bit of a disappointment. The game is comprised of 3 stages, like the TV show, the first is a quiz written in BASIC and it's the best part by far, although rather slow, the second is an arcade game with a weird plot, you have to jump on clouds and do whatever, which I couldn't figure out and finally the third, which is not exactly a game, this is the prize round, where you could enter a real life draw by saving on tape the prizes you win by accepting them or not and sending the tape back to the production. None are well implemented and really don't work all that great. It's easy to see why the game never reached the same status as the TV show.
Review by YOR on 16 Sep 2020 (Rating: 3)
I've been dreading this one. Most people will probably know this by its default Spanish form Un, Dos, Tres or in The Dean's case the Portuguese equivalent, but people like me will know it by another form and that form is the British version called 3-2-1 with the late Ted Rogers and Dusty Bin, and as such that's the version I'm reviewing. Now 3-2-1 was called as such because it was three shows in one, a quiz, a family game and variety show with big guests and even bigger prizes. It was immensely popular back in the day, with up to 16 million viewers in its heyday, but it has to be said it is almost completely unwatchable now because it is astonishingly bad and so much so it frequently appears on worst TV show lists and for good bloody reason. Anyway this is also three games in one, the first is a quiz where you are given a subject and you have to determine if the items mentioned are true or false, so for example home computers, Spectrum, true or false, Colecovision, true or false, Bosch, true or false and so forth, and it works well. The second part is the arcade portion worth you have to guide a couple on clouds to the top to score points, if a cloud hits you, you lose points, and this is dreadful. This being a game alone would not set the world alight and thus being a part of 3-2-1 kills this game's potential in an instant, and this goes on for five minutes and you have to do it three times, once for each couple, there's 15 minutes of my life I'm not getting back. The third part is the prize round, where you have a clue on the table and usually a rhyme but we don't have that here, instead we have a visual clue and you have to choose or refuse. Now the prizes you win here are fictional but you were able to save your results on a tape and send it back to enter a draw to win said prize for real. If you refuse it is discarded and it tells you what you could have entered the draw for, if you choose it it's yours until you choose another item and it gets replaced and discarded. After all the items are refused the item you have left is the one you are entered in the prize draw for. But it's just drawn out at this point and the fact you do this two more times afterwards just adds to the boredom. Plus, some of the items contain the very same prize, like in all three rounds the guitar was Dusty Bun, this absolutely kills the suspense and just makes everything needlessly predictable. This could have been a fun game especially after it's simple quiz that worked wonders, but an annoying arcade section and a boring prize round later and 3-2-1 is nothing more than an average, overrated and overbooked product, much like the show itself. Oh and the Spanish version is identical so I guess you blame that for this game's shortcomings.
