Label: TV Games
Author: Consult
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

There's something indefinably naff about Domark's TV Games label, but someone must be crazed enough to buy games based on Bullseye (smashing, lovely, smashing). Treasure Hunt (what an enormous chopper) or Blockbusters (I'll have a P, please Bob). I think what irritates me most about them is not the games themselves, which are usually about as good as you'd expect, but the leering faces of the quizmasters on the front. For Every Second Counts, you have to tolerate the evil gnome Paul Daniels (and you won't like that a teeny little bit).

What you we have here is basically a quiz game with two types of question; multiple choice and text answers. There are nine blocks of questions which can be loaded from tape, but once you've worked through all of them, the game's come to the end of it's useful life, I suppose.

The game can be played by up to three players or couples. You can select a picture for your character (and a pretty rum lot they are too), then assign a name. The screen shows the players in the centre, and categories of question and alternative answers at the top. Any question requiring a typed answer (rather than just pressing a number key, from 1 to 9), appears in a window at the bottom of the screen.

Round one consists of TRUE, FALSE questions, with the teams taking turns until nine questions have been answered. In the second round, you can try up to ten times to answer general knowledge questions, losing one bonus point for each incorrect answer. There are three categories to choose from, including pop music, television, films and so on. and the string matching for text answers is pretty exact (although you can get away with about the first six or seven letters correct).

You then go through the same business again, with harder questions and more points, and the team with the highest score goes on to the last round.

Here the excitement reaches fever pitch as your points are converted into seconds, and you must answer as many questions as possible in the time available. Each time you answer three questions you complete another 'triangle', and your final score is calculated from the number of completed triangles and the time left on the clock. The winners get a car, a holiday for two in Turkey and £10,000. Hah! I was lying! The winners get a screen display of a big clock.

Absolutely uninspired, but not actually an insult to the intelligence, though you'd think the programmers could have learned to spell 'category', Every Second Counts is the kind of package which makes you want to get out into the park for a nice game of football in the sun.

Although this is specifically a C64 review, it's been included as C64 and Spectrum versions are essentially the same game.

MACHINES: Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad
SUPPLIER: TV Games (Domark)
PRICE: £7.95 cassette, £10.95 C64 disk, £12.95 Amstrad disk
VERSION TESTED: C64 cassette

All right, you're down the pub, or you're in the arcade, or you're wherever you reprobates go on a night, and it's getting around that time when there's nothing else for it: you just have to have a game of Triv.

So you wack your ten pees in, gather your mates around, and start to trash that cash. And what d'you get out of it? No adrenalin rush like in Outrun that's for sure, just to prove that perhaps you know a bit more useless information than everyone around you.

What basically we have here, guys and gals, is a computerised triv game for the home, and as such is bound to be a massive success not just now but in a year or two's time because: a) trivia has taken over the country since Trivial Pursuit, machines in pubs etc, b) Paul Daniels is the Granny's favourite, and they are bound to say around Christmas time "oh, little Johnny's into computer games. I'll buy him one", and then purchase the license they know.

So how does it fare as a trivia game? Well for a start, you con forget Paul Daniels. How many computerised pictures do you get of him? Answer: not a lot.

Not even at the end when you've won the contest, instead you do get a rough (read: very rough) approximation of a TV studio, populated by just the sort of people you get in these game shows. Considering that they don't have to do very much - just blink occasionally - they could be better animated, though their very gormless stiffness helps capture the true character of the show.

First thing you have to do is chose your players from the vast range of worthies on offer. Should you choose the shifty looking one with a beard, and perhaps partner him with the blond floozy or what? You can play up to three teams, so you can fight with your pals about which character to clay.

After this fun, the game begins. You whiz through a number of rounds answering true or false questions, or choosing which of three categories various things fall into.

When you get tired of a certain block of questions, it's quite a faff having to rewind the tape to get to another block, if like me, you've made the mistake of playing the cassette version.

Throughout the game, your correct answers are earning you extra seconds which are of vital importance in the final round when the clock really is against you and, well, "every second counts", How much you like it just depends on how much you like triv, I guess.