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Facts in Action

Moby ID: 152853

Description

Facts In Action is an early multimedia educational quiz game for one or two players. It can be controlled by either the keyboard or the mouse.

After selecting the kind of game to be played, the player(s) are shown a 5x5 grid of picture tiles and a voice announces 'Look for ...'. The player whose turn it is selects a tile and if they are correct they are rewarded with a comment like 'Wow! You're sharp', a short animation within the tile and a basic fact or two. If they are incorrect the game announces 'No! That is a ...'.

Correct answers remove a tile from the screen, revealing part of a picture underneath. When all tiles are cleared a short animation of that picture plays and the game can be played again.

The shareware version of the game has just four categories: Prehist. Animals - which is all about dinosaurs, World History, Basic Science and Spanish. One odd feature is that the game can be played with one, more or all categories in play.

Screenshots

Credits (DOS version)

24 People (21 developers, 3 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Players

Average score: 1.6 out of 5 (based on 1 ratings)

Nice try

The Good
I like the idea of a game where the questions are asked as opposed to being shown as text on-screen, but that's about as far as it goes.

The Bad
If you're going to do a quiz game where the questions are voiced, then the voice part of the game has to be spot-on. I played the game using the DOSBox emulator, which has served me well for many years. By default, my setup emulates a Sound Blaster card which the game supports and all seemed well at the menu, because I could hear the music playing perfectly. However, in the game the questions were unintelligible.
I fiddled with the settings, the emulator speed, etc., all to no avail, so I swapped to emulating the Ad-Lib card which the game also claims to support and got the same results. Eventually, I played the game emulating the PC speaker, which was usable but not 'good' by any means.

The second key element of this game are the pictures. This is a picture based quiz, but the tiles are so small. In sections like World History they are serviceable and I know enough about US presidents to be able to eliminate around half the tiles. Likewise, in Spanish and Basic Science categories if I could hear the clue I was often able to guess the correct tile.
However, in the Prehist. category, where the clue is 'Find the gobbledygookasaurus', I had no chance and the poor audio quality meant that when the game said 'No, that's a thingummyjigocon', I was none the wiser.

All of which leads me to what I see as the fundamental flaw of this game. In sections where I could apply some logic or knowledge, the game was playable. In something like the aforementioned Prehist. section, where I did not know what I was looking at, it was all guesswork. Now there are twenty-five tiles on the screen, so clearing it by guesswork meant a lot of wrong answers before I got one right and nearly as many before I got a second. Things got faster when I'd cleared half the screen, but by then I was bored and frustrated, which are not ideal conditions for learning anything.

The Bottom Line
A decent attempt at a different kind of quiz if you already know the subject, very frustrating if you don't.

DOS · by piltdown_man (235175) · 2020

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  • MobyGames ID: 152853
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Game added by piltdown_man.

Game added December 12, 2020. Last modified February 22, 2023.