Developer: Steve McCrea
Genre: Quiz
Platform: Spectrum 48K
Language: BASIC

[Announcer] "And, for the first time in CSSCGC 2014, please welcome our guest reviewer; Bamber Gascoigne!"

Welcome to SpecTriv #17 by Steve McCrea which he has programmed for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and which can now be purchased from larger branches of Boots and WH Smith in the City for only £7.95.

According to the games's introductory text SpecTriv is a "monthly" quiz and there have been 16 incarnations previous to this, however, I'm guessing they've got lost in the post... or something...?

After presenting University Challenge for 25 years I know a good quiz when I see one and SpecTriv definitely falls into that category.

The game is split into 5 rounds the first of which is "Free or a fiver?" in which you have to identify, merely from two UDGs of Pac-man and a Ghost, whether the Pac-Man clone which featured them was a magazine type-in or a commercial title.

What's astounding here is how many Pac-Man clones Steve has found and how many bedroom coder's in the 80s figured they could actually sell them!

The next round is "Anagrams" in which you simply have to unscramble the names of ZX Spectrum games from the, frankly juvenile, anagrams. You can ask for a 'hint' in this round, which will reveal the game's publisher, but this halves your potential score and I didn't find that half as helpful as this site.

As the program uses the INPUT command, rather than a professional looking multiple-choice selector like in Mike Reid's Pop Quiz, this round does suffer a little from the occasional requirment to guess at the exact case sensitivity and symbols (such as hyphens and apostrophes) used. On the other hand you don't have to look at Mike Reid.

Round 3 is terribly clever - although I must admit I wasn't very good at it - in Steve's own words;

"In this round, I'll describe a game that is a mixture of two well-known Speccy games. The two game names overlap. For example if I was to say 'This dot gobbling hero is gathering parts to assemble his spaceship', you would say: 'Jetpac-man'."

Unfortunately this does suffer from same issue as the previous round, i.e.: I typed "Back to Skooldaze" when it should have been "Back to Skool Daze" and "Death Chase HQ" when it should have been "Deathchase HQ." It would be nice if the program was a little less forgiving of such minor errata.

The fourth round; "Who charted?" (Chortle - Ed) is, I think, the weakest of the bunch as you guess which of the three games listed was at the top of WH Smith's chart in a given month from 1983/84.*

(I was also able to crash the program when I accidentally typed the name of the game, rather than the number that had been assigned to it.)

The last round; "Seek Well the Sequel" is just a matter of casting your mind back and recalling the (sometimes obscure and unrelated) name of the sequel to a given game. And before you ask there aren't any easy ones like Dan Dare II.

After this round has finished the program STOPs abruptly, much to my amusement. There's tell-tale evidence in the BASIC Listing that there was once a high quality soundtrack and some FMV showing a member of the public winning a speedboat, however, it looks like they've been removed to save on download size?

If Steve had included the aforementioned multiple-choice selector and, perhaps, some additional loadable question packs this could have accidentally become a high quality Spectrum title! I'm not sure if it's luck or skill, however, he's managed to knobble it just enough to fall comfortably back into the mediocre category. Well done chap!

* Where did Steve get this information from? What kind of maniac keeps records of WH Smith's sales charts!? It was at this point I decided to cheat...

Cheats Always Prosper

Faced with an embarrassing score of 11/36 on my first go, I decided to run through the game a few more times and note down some answers in a vain hope to score higher.

Unfortunately there's a reasonably diverse database of questions and some clever display order randomization going on which meant this wouldn't guarantee me results so, naturally, I proceeded to break into the BASIC Listing and note down all the answers instead!

Note: I've attached my 'Cheat Sheet,' however, suggest you try the game without it first - it's much more fun.