Zeppelin Games
£2.99

Arcade Trivia Quiz attempts to recreate the thrills and spills of the quiz game on your computer. The only things that aren't included are fifty other people playing games around you and the aroma of hot dogs floating through the air! The questions are categorised in a very Trivial Pursuit style with subjects like Art & Literature, Film & Television, Music and Sport to tax your brain cells. Each subject has its own little icon you have to select in a time limit before you answer.

The fun way to play a quiz game of this sort is to get a few friends round for a two or three player game. So I decided to do just that and roped in Mr Robin 'big hair' Candy of The Games Machine and Mr Mark 'Shaw' Kendrick of the art department to give it a bash! What a mistake that was: I was knocked out in the first round, and Robin went on to earn £20 (you only start with 80p)! Playing with friends is great fun though, as you can shout out the wrong answers and have a good titter when they choose them!

The only real grumble I have with Arcade Trivia Quiz is the lack of variety in the questions when you have been playing for some time. You can load in various question banks at the beginning, but if you have a really long game they soon start repeating themselves. All the graphics, sound and presentation are of a very high standard with features usually only found on the likes of fruit machines to add an extra boost of addictiveness.

Arcade Trivia Quiz is a real winner on your own and especially with some friends. Give it a whirl!

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Another delve into the recesses of Speccy softstuff with Dr Marcus "stand very still and try not to scream" Berkmann.

Zeppelin
£2.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

I was a bit concerned about this one, especially when I read on the inlay notes "Imagine the thrills, colour, noise and excitement of the arcade quiz machine on your very own home computer and you'll go some way towards realising just how exciting Arcade Trivia Quiz on your Amstrad really is". Happily, though, it does load up, and it isn't at all bad. There are loads of these trivia jobbies around now, of course, but the success of the pub games does seem finally to have buried the Trivial Pursuit approach, where they print the answer and you press Y if you got it right. Here there's a much moe user-friendly multiple-choice format, and you need to be on the ball to prosper. Not only do you need to be fast when answering questions, but when picking them as well - otherwise you get some ghastly geography question instead of a nice friendly pop music one. Questions are not that easy (especially the date ones) and doing very well takes much practice. Spelling is as terrible as on all trivia games, but then if programmers could spell they wouldn't be programmers, would they? Up to three can play, and the whole design is simple and neat.

Label: Zeppelin
Author: TAG
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Now you know me, I like a nice bit of trivia, but I take some convincing that games like Trivial Pursuit translate really well onto a computer.

Arcade Trivia Quiz tries to pep things up a bit by adding a bit of split-second fire-button excitement to the brain-scratching, then rather cacks things up by being full of the most stupid mistakes you can imagine.

The graphics are, I admit, raaa-aaa-aaather nice. On the right hand side of the screen you see a pyramid of subject cards, each illustrated with a dinky little icon indicating its subject; film and TV, science, geography, sport and so on.

Up to three players can take part, taking turns to hit the choice key or fire button as the cards flash in turn. If you don't choose a subject within about eight seconds, the currently highlighted card is selected for you. It slides off the screen and a question box appears - the timer bar then starts to slide down and you have a short time to choose one of the four alternative answers by moving the joystick before the timer runs out. If you make a mistake you may be five another chance, or fined and given the choice to restart or continue.

If you get through to the top of the pyramid you get a Cash Run with shorter and shorter times being coupled with greater cash rewards. There's also the odd Jackpot question where you have the chance to double your money. There are several files of questions which are loaded from the B side of the tape. The game's all rather good fun, or it would be if it weren't for The Problem.

The Problem is that the whole game is riddled with spelling mistakes and errors of fact. When asked about the origins of the boars of South Africa, I naturally started sifting through my vast stock of knowledge about wild pigs, realising at the last second that they meant BOERS. Again, when asked "Who said 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be' - Falstaff, Othello, Mcbeth or Hamlet", the true answer is, none of them. It was said by Polonlus. And Mcbeth ought to be spelt Macbeth. And in a pop question, Jimmy OsmAnd ought to be spelt Jimmy OsmOnd. And on it goes.

The ridiculous mistakes in Arcade Trivia wouldn't be so important in any other type of game, but in a general knowledge quiz these things ought to be done proper. Perhaps Zeppelin's programmers ought to indulge themselves in a little spelling quiz?