The Sci Fi Channel Trivia Game

Trivially Obscure

A Review of The Sci Fi Channel Trivia Game

by Edmond Meinfelder

You watch Babylon 5. You know the difference between the Green Lantern and The Hulk. You can discern, after reading the first 5 words, weather the author is Heinlein or Asimov. Finally, the Sci-Fi Channel’s Trivia Game puts all your wisely invested time to the test. Do not expect the galaxy, though. Despite the Sci-Fi channel brand name, there is little to amaze or captivate even the most avid SF fan.

The game begins with your rude, but nicely rendered, genial host named Morphix. Starting a game is as easy as pressing “new game.” All games have two players. If no one else is around, the game supplies a computer opponent with three levels of difficulty. Each player has a key on the keyboard acting as the player’s buzzer. The first player to press their buzzer, answers the question. The last player to correctly answer a question has control and may select the question’s topic from: movies, books, comics, television and wormhole (a pot-luck category).

Players duel for three rounds. The first round, the Drop Zone Round, has 5 questions from each category going for 10 to 50 points. The second round, the Star Jump round, is the same, except point scores double. The final round, the Time Warp Round, points scores are significantly higher. Scores in the Time Warp Round start in the hundreds. As the timer ticks, options vanish and the score diminishes until one option remains and Morphix moves on.

You do not have to be a genius to know the Drop Zone round means nothing. Strangely, the game play feels no different — the questions are equally hard. So, the first round acts as a time filler. Other problems with the game play exist too. A 10 point question is, as often as not, as hard as a 50 or 200 point question. Seeing a question repeated in the same game is not unusual, either.

What is the deal with the rules? Why have two meaningless rounds when players win the game in the third? The Counselor Troi within me wants to cry out, “I sense bad design, Captain.” Trivial Pursuit showed carefully chosen questions are fun to answer; it required no fancy game play. Sadly, you will not find carefully chosen questions in this trivia game.

I am a confessed Sci-Fi junkie. As a child, I read far too much Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein. I had a huge comic collection spanning many issues of Superman, The Flash and The Hulk. I watched all the SF television shows and movies. Despite my proclivities, I found many of the game questions extremely obscure.

The questions are so obscure, you may shrivel in embarrassment, after dragging someone else to play. After the 10th time when Morphix reads another question referring to people you never heard of, you ponder letting your friend “off the hook.” After all, your friend may owe you money. Antagonizing people owing you money is never a good idea.

The Sci-Fi Channel Trivia Game is no Trivial Pursuit hiding beneath a tribble’s fleece. The questions are obscure and the game rules do not approach the quality of a bad game-show. Why would anyone buy this game? The rendering of Morphix is smart and your genial host speaks every question. If you keep Morphix waiting, he turns into Lizard-thing, robot or a skeleton. After the first run-through, however, Morphix fails to entertain, leaving players with a boring game.

If you want a relatively painless way to learn the answers to obscure questions, like which cinematographer worked on what film or who inked what comic in the 50′s, have at it. If you value your friends, you may wish to reconsider before asking them to join a game.

486 SX-33, 2x CD ROM, 2 megabytes of disk space,
8 megabytes of memory, SVGA graphics,
Windows ’95 or 3.1, Windows compatible soundcard,
keyboard and mouse