🕹️ New release: Lunar Lander Beyond

Facts in Action

Moby ID: 152853

DOS version

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.

by piltdown_man (235831) on November 6, 2020

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