Trivia Whiz

The Good
If you were a fan of games made by Apogee Software, you probably have played their earlier title called Pharaoh’s Tomb, which was developed by a small company called Micro F/X Software. George Broussard, the founder of Micro F/X, created two quiz games, one of which was Trivia Whiz, a game which is probably catered for Americans who spent half their life reading encyclopedias, watching TV, and following sport. There are five volumes consisting of 100 questions, in which the first volume was shareware and in order to get the rest of the volumes you had to pay a small fee to Broussard.

Each volume has questions covering different subjects such as General Interest, Television, History, Sport, and Science. It is similar to the game show Jeopardy!, except you don’t get to choose the subject and there is no money involved. The idea is to get as many questions correct as you can. Incorrect answers are considered a “miss”. Get three misses and the current session ends. I like the way that if you answer incorrectly, the game doesn’t reveal the correct answer, making it difficult to get the same question right the next time you play. To make things interesting, you receive a bonus which varies depending on how fast you answer. Fail to answer within 15 seconds, and you receive no bonus.

The game opens up with a nice title screen, showing the main title in big blue letters. Then after a notice, the menu appears, allowing you to start the quiz or read information about ordering or about other games Broussard created. You return to this menu when you get three incorrect answers. During the game, the most noticeable thing is the timer at the top. This timer consists of various colors, and counts down as you spend enough time reading the answers and picking the correct one.

The sound effects themselves consists of beeps, and nothing else. The most noticeable ones are the 15-second beeps that increase in speed when the timer counts down. Different beeps varying in pitch are for right and wrong answers.

The Bad
Trivia Whiz boasts some good animations, but they go way too fast if you are running the game on anything other than an XT. Also, answering each question in less than 15 seconds is supposed to award you with bonus points, but this turns into one second. Luckily that running out of time doesn't count as an incorrect answer.

Some of the answers are inaccurate. I remember being asked what the capital of Australia is, in which the answer is Canberra, but the game assumes that it's Sydney. The game also shows some confusion at what year the telegraph was invented.

The Bottom Line
Unlike Scott Miller’s quiz-based offerings where you get one big game of questions, Broussard’s attempt split the game up into five volumes containing 100 questions each. This means that if you manage to answer all 100 correctly, you can move on to the next volume to tackle the next 100. Each volume contains a menu which lets you access specific information, as well as fancy graphics (the title screen being an example of this). It would have been useful if more categories were added, so the game would be less boring. Regardless, if you like quiz games, then Trivia Whiz should be right up your alley.