Quizz Show- Monster Mania

Description:

Monster Mania is one in a series of 3 educational trivia games for kids. This one focuses on People, Culture and Entertainment. It's intended for grades 4 to 6, but many of the questions go beyond this age range. The setting is a Haunted Mansion - pick your favorite claymation character from the ghost, mummy, wolf man, medusa, witch, black widow, mad scientist and zombie. Then answer QuizzMan's questions correctly to grow your very own lab Frankenstein!

The program starts with a cute video, showing QuizzMan's wake up call and drive across the planet. A buzzer hub and 2 buzzers are included with the game - A, X, N and P keys can be used instead of buzzers. QuizzMan maintains a hilarious commentary throughout, for example 'The architect must have been a manic depressive?' in the main hall of the mansion.

Set options for level of difficulty and question categories and start a game. There is a short countdown and it's important to press the buzzers (keyboard or real buzzer) for all intended players at this time, as that specifies how many people will compete. If this is not done, a demo game starts and the word 'demo' appears in the upper left of the screen.

Each player picks a character and a 3 round quiz begins, moving amongst 10 ghoulish rooms in the haunted manor. The graphics and sound effects would be perfect for Halloween! The player with the least points selects a category to play. 'Blood and More' is on Health, 'Guzzle, Gobble & Gunk' on Leisure and 'Get me a patent!' on Inventions and Discoveries. The other categories are more obvious from their names and include geography, women's history, sports, entertainment and famous Americans.

Snippets of information are shown after correct answers, elaborating on them. Some of the questions and answers are fascinating - I especially enjoyed the one about why woodpeckers don't get headaches! There is a penalty for wrong answers - points are taken away and the player is temporarily frozen. The game is best with 2-4 players. In single player mode, the objective is to reach a high point score.

At the end of each round, there is an opportunity to gain more points by winning a Spider Race (around a web). Move your spider by pounding on the buzzer! The winner gets extra points immediately or bonuses, protections and penalties against the other players. The lab is visited after the Spider Game, and each player's creepy monster grows, according to the points gained.

The winner is the player with the most points at the end of 3 rounds - watch what happens to the monsters. Are you really sure you wanted to win? A Question Editor makes the game open ended by allowing addition and editing of questions and categories. They can then be shared with friends via disk or e-mail.

Features:

• 1-4 players
• People and Entertainment trivia
• Over 1400 questions
• 9 questions categories
• 3 skill levels
• 4 port buzzer hub and 2 buzzers included
• Question Maker to add questions
• Swap questions via e-mail
• 8 claymation characters
• 11 page usage guide in the jewel case

Technical Aspects:

The user interface was at times inconsistent and not very intuitive. For example, item selection could not be done with the mouse but only the buzzer keys. Items have to be chosen from rotating menus, and sometimes the timing is off when you click on them, which then results in waiting till that phrase comes around again (this was also a problem at times with quiz answers).

On the other hand, category selection required dragging items onto the question marks on the screen, using the mouse. It seemed at first that this was not working as categories appeared in the game that had not been selected. This was clarified by the documentation - remaining questions marks are filled in randomly by the computer, but no feedback is given.

How to choose the number of players was not explicit in the documentation or on the screen, and the default was to start a demo game with 4 players. This stumped me for a while, but I finally worked out that you need to click the buzzer keys during the short countdown after starting a new game. This was not at all obvious!

It took 10 seconds or so to load each time the program was started, and there were occasional delays during play. The initial sequence can be interrupted with a buzzer key, but Escape (which takes you to a screen with the Quit option) does not work in all modes.

Quizzes could be answered by users with auditory difficulty, but they would be missing much of the fun in the game which lies in the crazy dialogue and chilling sound effects!

Report and Conclusions:

Even at the Easy level, I found many of the questions hard for grade 4 students, and there is a strong bias to U.S. knowledge and culture, which makes the title less interesting to those from other parts of the world. However, most of the questions and answers were as interesting for adults as for children.

Winning the game results in your character being chased by their monster, which made my 9 year old uncomfortable at bed-time - the game atmosphere might be too well done for some sensitive kids :-). Overall, the title provides many hours of rollicking family fun and learning with QuizzMan and his manic monsters!