Trivia

Your Sinclair

Life Expectancy 62%

Instant Appeal 70%

Graphics 58%

Addictiveness 55%

Overall 62%

Rich Pelley 62%

Shades (Grandslam) £6.99 cass/£9.99 disk Reviewer: Rich Pelley The title may give you a little clue to what this one's about. Any idea? Yep - you guessed it - surprisingly enough it's yet another question and answer game. Ooooooh! Rather than being based on some highly intellectual board game, such as Trivial Pursuit, this one's based on those trivia games that you find in pubs. Y'know - the ones where you have to pick the correct answer, usually from a choice of three, to a completely irrelevant question in a time limit of about ten seconds. But now a Speccy version, eh? Hmmm. The basic idea's the same - pick the correct answers to lots of questions within a time limit. Accidentally get the answer correct and you'll complete a square on the score table - complete 21 squares and you're awarded an extra life. You have two lives to start with, so you can effectively answer two questions incorrectly before your game is over. And that's it really. There's nothing else - you just try to score as much as possible per game. I'm not really a big trivia man myself, but I managed to play quite contentedly with this for about the first half hour or so (it's a single player game). I was quite impressed that the questions were not repeated all over the place, but suddenly the thing seemed to run out of inspiration and that was it until I flipped the tape over for a different set of questions. Unfortunately, the memory of the Speccy limits the amount of questions. But all is not lost because the multiple choice answers are given to you in a random order. The graphics are adequate, but the sound is crap - no tunes or anything. In spite of this, though, it's a reasonably good triv game if you like that sort of thing, but there are lots of alternatives I could think of. I mean, I've got piles (ahem). (What is this boy on?! Ed) And whether or not you're going to feel like answering lots of boring questions after completing stacks of homework is up to you.

A is for Apple, B is for Boat and Q is for Question, which is what we have here. But what's the answer, I wonder? Hmm. I haven't got the faintest idea, so I think I'll take a random guess. Dip dip dip, let's go for c). Blimey! I was right! I'm just so brainy. (In fact I'm so brainy, I even spotted the 'deliberate' spelling mistake!) Oh, and if you're wondering what the bit on the right is for, it gives you an extra life if you can fill up all the rows with black squares. As you can see I've got two already (without even trying).

Read it at Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years