The Stack

Yeesh, did I really just make a “definition of ‘game'” post? I must really be running out of steam. Doubtless this has to do with my continued inability to solve the very last Battleships puzzle. (And I do mean the very last — I’ve solved the rest of the set.)

To counteract this, I’ve moved on to the Trivia section for a bit. It turns out to be annoying — enough so that I didn’t finish it in one sitting like I had planned, even though it’s half the size of the other sections. Partly this is due to the design. You may have noticed from my screenshots that every puzzle type in Games Interactive 2 has its own logo, with a picture labeled in a zany font. Usually this is something you can ignore, but for Trivia, they animated it and made it part of the game. The picture is a caricature of a game show host, which makes sense, I suppose, but honestly isn’t the feel I’d have gone for. He wiggles his head back and forth while waiting. His facial expression changes with your guesses. When you get something wrong, a buzzer sounds and the light on his podium turns red; when you get something right, a brief latin-rhythmed victory ditty plays. If you have sound turned on, you hear this enough for it to become irritating. If you don’t, you just get a pointless pause for a few seconds before it goes on to the next question.

But the worst part of the Trivia section is the questions where you have to type in an answer. This isn’t always the case — most of the questions are multiple choice. But some are type-ins, and a lot of them aren’t really designed for this game. For example, at one point it asks you for the two ways, other than Lisa’s saxophone tune, that the opening credits sequence from The Simpsons varies from episode to episode. Nobody is going to get that one right, because nobody, even if they know the answers, is going to phrase it in exactly the ways that the computer is checking for. But let that slide for the moment; a lot of the questions are reasonably answerable. The more consistently annoying problem is that the game isn’t very responsive to typing. You pretty much have to hold keys down for half a second or so to make sure they register. This is basically intolerable, and I don’t remember the first Games Interactive having this problem.