Trivial Pursuit: Unhinged

Rating:
Summary: One Giant Step Downward
Review: Okay, the best point of reference from which to view this game is from the perspective of someone who played Trivial Pursuit Millenium Edition (TPME) for the PC until it literally ran out of new questions. That someone, is me. I really loved TPME and was looking so forward to this Unhinged game blowing me away, but like most modern games fot the PC, this game is all show and no go. Let me explain.

First off, while the game advertises *thousands and thousands* of questions, I really find that at least 1/2 of these questions are the same questions from the Millenium Edition rehashed. Second, the interface is counterintuitive with the gameboard bobbing up and down like some cork in the water. The color scheme and the fonts make it hard to see exactly which direction you should be going in at any given time. The statistics keeping system (the one that tells you exactly how may questions you got right in each category in ME) has been replaced by stupid bar graphs that leave you guessing which categories you are doing well in.

However...the biggest slap in the face has got to be the lack of explanations after the questions. The original TPME produced by Hasbro Interactive was extrememly thoughful in this aspect. Almost everytime you got a question right, the narrator of the game would explain it to you. Somtimes, there would even be a very funny cartoon to illustrate the answer. VERY THOUGHTFUL and moreover, something that added to the educational value of TPME!!! Instead, in Unhinged, more often than not the only supplementary commentary you will get on a correct answer is playful banter (ie: Whoopi telling you things like *the wedgie is your's the wedgie is yours!).

However, I suppose that Atari thought they couldn't go wrong. Instead of having no-name narrators in this game, the questions are read by a team of celebrities including Terry Bradshaw, Brooke Burke, John Cleese, Whoopi Goldberg, John Ratzenberger, and Bill Nye (the Science Guy). Since I like all of these celebs, I was looking forward to the game being perfect. Instead, Atari just messed up a good thing and now I find myself wondering, what if...instead of paying these celebs to read the questions, they would have invested the discretionary funding into hiring a better software design team....hmm...

Anyway, I don;t think that the game is totally without merit. If you haven't played TPME, you might like it a lot. However, fans of the Millennium Edition will certainly be dissapointed on many levels.

Rating:
Summary: Lots Of Fun!
Review: This is the first Trivial Pursuit P.C. game I've played, and I enjoy it very much. This game includes the classic trivial pursuit, as well as the unhinged version. The first version I tried in this game is the classic. I was immediately addicted! A few days later I tried the unhinged version, and found it even more fun and addictive. The reason I give this game 4 stars instead of 5 is that at times during the unhinged game, it can be difficult to hear and understand what the "host' is saying. Furthermore, in the unhinged game, it is not possible to play solo.