Review by Raphie on 04 Feb 2009 (Rating: 4)
This is a good sports quiz game. I was never really a fan of the quiz show to begin with and would only watch it on an odd occasion, in fact it was my late mother who bought it for me as a gift. I was a bit unsure about it at first but it caught me by suprise and I really enjoyed playing it. It maintains just about the same gameplay as in the quiz show and can be good fun with a group of people playing. So if you love sports, quizzes and a good game for you to play with all your friends and family, this one is for you.
I review another quiz show conversion, this time with A Question of Sport.
A Question of Sport is a sports quiz game airing on the BBC which began in 1970 and still continues to this day. The show has been presented by David Vine, David Coleman and currently by Sue Barker. The show uses two team captains who are joined by two sporting guests on each team, making two teams of three. Captains over years include Cliff Morgan, Henry Cooper, Emlyn Hughes, John Parrot, Ally McCoist and currently they are Matt Dawson and Phil Tufnell. This version has David Coleman as host with the captains being Ian Botham and Bill Beaumont. One or two players can play.
At the start there is really nice title music which I don't think replicates the theme tune of the show but it's still a great tune. After you've selected the amount of players you get to choose your special subject from football, motor racing, rugby, boxing, horse racing, cricket, golf, tennis, athletics or question mark which I presume is random or general knowledge. The purpose of this I will explain later in the review. The player selection screen features nice digitised faces. If you are playing a one player game the computer will then select a subject and players at random.
After choosing a question block to load the game begins. Here we are presented with a nice digitised pic for David Coleman, Ian Botham and Bill Beaumont as well as the players you've selected. Speech appears above Coleman as he welcomes us to the game and introduces us to our players. By pressing D you can alter the speed of this text to either fast or slow. This is where your questions come from as well and it's really nicely done as you can imagine in your head Coleman saying the question to you, or his Spitting Image puppet which would be even better.
So now to the game with round one which is the Picture Board round. Here each member of the team picks a number from the board from 1 to 12, after you select a number it'll reveal the sport that your question will be based on, in this case number 8 revealed rugby. As with all the questions, David will ask the question which then you have to choose the answer from four different choices. In this round if you answer correctly you score two points, if you are wrong or timed out it goes to the other team where they can score one point for a correct answer. This round continues until every person on both teams has selected a number. This varies slightly from the show, where if they selected a number they were given a picture of a sportsperson who they had to recognise.
Onto round two which is Mystery Personality. Here David will give you up to three clues about a sporting personality who you've to identify from the four options provided. If you guess correctly after the first clue you score three points, then it's two points after two clues and one points after three. Here you'll need to let the timer run out after the clue if you don't know as if your guess and are wrong your turn ends. You must answer after the third clue or your turn ends, in this case it passes on to the other team for one point. Again this differs from the show which had a clip play of a sportspeople doing various things without revealing their identity and the team had to guess, but obviously the Spectrum can't handle that so questions will do fine.
Round three is Home or Away. In this round you have a choice of choosing Home, a question from your player's special subject for one point, or Away, a question from another sport for two points. Now this is where your special subject at the beginning comes into play, it's the special subject of your captain, say if we selected Tennis and if you choose home for his question it'll be on Tennis, even though player one's captain is Ian Botham, a cricketer, and player two's captain is Bill Beaumont, a rugby player. In the show the captains never had a choice and always had to be asked the away question regardless although here they do get the option anyway.
What Happened Next is round four. For this round, David will give you an event that took place and you have to guess what happened next. An example from modern times would be, In a Premier League match between Manchester United and Wimbledon, David Beckham has the ball on the halfway line. What Happened Next? The answer being he scored a goal from the halfway line. Unlike the rest of the round, David will give you the multiple choices and the options will be A, B, C or D, so you'll have to pay full attention to the question and maybe slow down the text if you haven't done so already to read all the choices. Again in the show a clip was shown which stopped at a moment which is the point you guessed What Happened Next and they didn't have the options, but again the Spectrum can't handle that so questions and answer options work because of that.
Round five is the Quickfire round where you have to answer nine questions in 45 seconds. Correct answers are worth two points while a two second penalty is occured for an incorrect answer. In this round, David is replaced by a clock which times down the seconds of the round. The round ends when the timer runs out or all the questions have been asked. This is slightly different from the show which gave you one minute rather than 45 seconds.
The final round sends us back to the Picture Board where we choose the remaining numbers with the same rules applied. After all the numbers are taken the game is over and the team with the highest score wins the game.
All the rounds in the game work well given it can't really do what the show really offers it makes up for that well. However one round is missing, the Specialist Subject round is missing in this version which I can only presume it was because they couldn't find a way to compensate around the technical features and make it simple. Never mind, six rounds is more than plenty anyway. The game has loads of questions from different loading blocks which will keep you entertained for a while without things getting too repetitive like Bob's Full House did.
A Question of Sport is most certainly one of the better quiz games on the Spectrum and one that worked very well.
