I was an exceptionally awkward child.
I would often trip over my own feet. I tended to hum a lot and annoy those around me. I wasn’t equipped with the sharpest wit or the best social graces. I had a horribly pronounced overbite that probably could have incited villagers to attack me with clubs and pitchforks had I been born two centuries earlier. And my scrawny frame and lack of even the basest athletic abilities were such that, when I once forgot my jersey before a basketball game, I was able to borrow one from a girl on the team. Our coach made the girl lend me the jersey, but not before I heard her tell her friends that she would have to burn it afterward.
Good times.
Now, when I was in fifth grade, my elementary school held a history and geography competition. Much to my (and to my classmates’) surprise, I did well enough to advance all the way to the semi-finals.
It may not seem like much, but I cherished this needed little victory and took it to heart. Looking back, my surprising performance in that competition is probably one of the reasons why I ended up getting my bachelor’s degree in History (it certainly wasn’t the marketability).
I’m happy to say, that as I grew bigger and wiser, I eventually passed out of my dark and seemingly endless awkward stage, and I’ve been able to lead a largely normal life. Braces and contact lens go a long way.
A few years ago, my wife and I started meeting with a few other couples every weekend to play board games. Because of my experience in fifth grade, my favorite board game has always been Trivial Pursuit. When it was my turn to pick the game, nothing else would do.
The crowd went along with my enthusiasm for a while, but after several weeks, I had to resort to going through the question box and quizzing myself. One of my friends grew to hate the game so much, that the very mention of its name now sends her into a catatonic state. So, you can imagine her horror when her husband offered to help me review the new Wii version of the board game classic.
When we turned the television on and took the disc out of its case, my friend’s eyes glazed over and I noticed that she clung to the arms of the couch like it was a seat on an aircraft plummeting to earth. But after a couple of hours with the game, she began to relax a bit and even conceded that “she didn’t hate it as much as [she] thought” she would.
Considering the source, you should take that as a ringing endorsement.
I’ll second it. Trivial Pursuit, also available on the Playstation 2, Playstation 3, and X-box 360, is a perfectly enjoyable, if not terribly exciting, game. While its brain-teasers are probably too advanced for young kids, parents and teens will have a blast competing in this intellectual smackdown.
For the uninitiated, Trivial Pursuit is a board game featuring questions ranging in difficulty from those requiring common knowledge to those that would stump a doctoral candidate. The questions are divided into six categories - history, geography, arts and literature, sports and leisure, entertainment, and science and nature – and each category is assigned a color. Each player or team controls a “puck” and rolls a single die to determine how many spaces to move on each turn or after each correct answer.
The game board is shaped like a wheel with six spokes radiating out from the center and is made up of colored spaces, each matching one of the question categories. There are also several “roll again” spaces sprinkled throughout the board. When a player lands on a colored space, they must answer a question in the category that corresponds to that color. If the player answers correctly, he can roll again. If the player answers incorrectly, his turn is over.
On the game board, there are larger spaces, one for each color, that form a cap on the spokes of the wheel. If the player lands on one of these spaces and answers the question correctly, he earns a “wedge”. Once a player earns all six wedges, he must return to the center of the board and answer a question in a category of his opponents’ choosing to win the game.
As you can imagine, it can take a long time for all of the pieces to come together for victory. That’s why my friend hates this game so much. But if you have the patience and mental fortitude to withstand the grind, each game can be a fulfilling battle of wits.
Now, with a video game like this, one question precedes all others: Why should you spend your money on the electronic version when it is cheaper to just buy the board game?
If you have money in your wallet labeled “Trivial Pursuit fund”, then the Wii version of the game certainly offers more bang for your buck. Not only does the electronic medium allow for more variety in the format of the trivia questions, but the disc also comes loaded with three different game modes and three separate question packs.
You can choose to play the classic game, a single player version called “Clear the Board”, or a separate multiplayer mode called “Facts and Friends”. Each game type allows you to pick from a roster of three different types of questions: Standard, Full, and Movie Pack. The Movie Pack, as you would imagine, contains only questions related to movies and cinema, although the questions are still divided into the classic categories. But for the life of me, I have yet to figure out the difference between the Standard and Full packs.
Obviously, the electronic medium necessitates a multiple choice format, something that, until now, has been largely anathema in the series. While giving you four answers to choose from naturally makes the game easier (since you now always have a 25% chance of choosing the correct answer), the computer usually doesn’t give you any hints by providing obviously bogus answers or non sequiturs.
Multiple choice questions might dumb-down the overall game a bit, but making the shift to a video game format has also allowed the developers a chance to introduce some new and innovative ways to answer the once simple trivia questions. Geography questions now ask you to point out a correct location on a map using the Wii remote. Science questions can have you correctly identify a particular species from a choice of four pictures. A history question can show you a picture of a famous building and ask you to choose the correct date of its construction by using a slider bar to select the proper date range on a timeline. These new devices are well-executed and add a lot of depth to the tried and true formula.
The new game modes also offer welcome variety. Both are well-designed, innovative, and fun to play. “Clear the Board” is a challenging single player experience that beats quizzing yourself hands down.
Players are tasked with getting as high a score as possible in the shortest amount of time. Correct answers are worth 200 points and a wedge is worth 500. A correct answer adds to a multiplier bonus, applied to each category, and a total multiplier is tallied from all categories. An incorrect answer removes one point from your multiplier.
When you land on a space, it is removed from the game board and when you earn a wedge, every space in that category is removed and the board shrinks. Players must not only answer questions correctly, but use each roll of the die strategically to get the maximum amount of points in each category.
Once you have earned all six wedges, the game asks one final question from a random category. If you answer incorrectly, one point is taken from your multiplier and the game generates another question. After you have answered the final question correctly, your score is multiplied by the remaining multiplier points and paired with your total play time to evaluate your overall performance.
The new multiplayer mode, “Facts and Friends” is a unique twist on the classic game. Up to four players or teams share one puck, and possession of the puck switches after each roll of the die. Each correct answer gives the player a portion of a wedge while incorrect answers take a portion of the wedge away. Once you earn an entire wedge, every square from that category is removed from the board.
After seeing each question, players can bet on an opponent’s answer. You can decide if the player currently in possession of the puck knows the answer, doesn’t know it, or declare that you know the answer. If you bet correctly, you are awarded a small portion of a wedge (or a larger portion if you correctly answer the question once your opponent has failed).
In another variation on the formula, every “roll again” space has been replaced by “bonus event” squares. The name is a bit of a misnomer since landing on one of these spaces can turn out to be a blessing or a curse. There are a variety of bonus events, each randomly selected by a die roll, and every one has the potential to make or break your fortunes.
On the technical side of things, Trivial Pursuit is a perfectly adequate, but not outstanding title. The graphics are simple and the motion controls are rudimentary, but they get the job done well enough. There are some annoying sound effects and the game’s announcer is a bit clichéd and overdone, but those negative elements are balanced out by nice touches, like a cool ticker that runs along the bottom of the screen and keeps you abreast of every player’s current stats.
The game seems to have a bizarre interest in Indian and Chinese cinema, and I found the arts and literature questions to be inordinately difficult. Granted, I don’t read much (as you may have guessed, I’m more of a movie guy) but the questions still seemed a bit extreme. The developers also overemphasized geography, allowing geography-themed questions and maps to invade almost every category. Finally, in the classic game, there are still too many “roll again” squares, but you now have to answer each question within 30 seconds. This keeps the game moving and helps to prevent fatigue and boredom.
It’s a shame that you can’t import your Miis from the Wii’s main system. Instead, you must choose from the game’s roster of rather lame and generic avatars and use them to represent each player or team.
After a few hours with the game, I did notice one repeated question. This could have been a fluke, and, of course, the board game also comes packaged with a finite amount of trivia, but you should bear in mind that if you play the game long enough, you will eventually know all the answers.
I suppose it’s conceivable that there could be a trivia question in the game that some parents might find objectionable, but I never came across anything that tingled my spidey sense. Most of the questions may be too hard for anyone younger than twelve or thirteen, but the game does encourage learning and engenders a sense of intellectual competition and pride.
Wheter you’re planning a party, a family game night, or you just want to hone your skills for your appearance on Jeopardy, you could do a lot worse than Trivial Pursuit. It’s not without its faults, but this is a smart and entertaining video game that successfully builds on its board game roots.
Caution Rating: 0
