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Test the Nation DVD: The Great British TestThe blurb says:
How does it work? If any TV show was ideal for being turned into a DVD game, Test the Nation is it. You get two discs, the first is The Great British Test (this is the main meal) and the second is The National IQ test. Both games work in the same way. Shove the disc in, wait a minute for the DVD complanies to get their logo in, then it's just like the show. In one player you use your DVD remote to select the right answer. At the end it tots up your score for you. Multiplayer is frankly, a bit lazy - you all write your answers down and after each set of questions you go back through the questions and it tells you the answers. At the end, count your ticks to see who wins, and in the IQ test, match your score with your age on the IQ matrix to see how thick you are so that you can whinge that "yeah, but it doesn't actually mean anything, does it?" to anyone who will listen. All the time Anne Robinson pops up periodically to encourage and reveal what the next topic of questions is. Reading an autocue. Is it "good"? It highly depends on your mood at the time. As a DVD quiz, The Great British Test is a triumph of simple design, in the several games played we didn't get a repeat question, although we did sometimes get the same clips or pictures but with different questions associated - tellingly, some of these were really quite tenuous (example - a clip of Sean Connery talking about the Scottish National Party, the question following asking what Roger Moore's first James Bond film was). The biggest problem is that at 70 questions it feels like a slog if you're not in the mood for it. Whilst the thirty seconds you get for a question seems generous in one player (where once you've selected an answer it will move straight on to the next question) we'd probably get bored rigid playing it in multiplayer where you can't move on quickly. And whilst you get told (by neccessity) the answers in multiplayer, you don't seem to get the option in single player. The IQ test is a bit different and correctly labelled as a bonus. The questions are completely new (as in they haven't been used on a televised Test the Nation) and this time you do get the answers in single player. Although you don't seem to get any explainations, which is a shame. The IQ questions (and we write from the perspective of people who find this type of thing quite good fun, so your mileage may vary) are varied and quite wide-ranging. But here's the killer, some of them are rock hard. Of course, that's the point in a way, but the reason some of them are rock hard is because in some cases you're given just 12 seconds on a question, some of which (like the number squares) require two stages of thought to arrive at the right answer. If you don't select an answer, the DVD player will pick one at random for you. Now, when we were playing this on a computer we could use the mouse to quickly click on an answer and we had plenty of close calls. As the Average Man is going to be playing this on a DVD player and using arrow buttons, frankly we don't fancy his chances. Whatsmore, we can't think of any particular reason why questions that would get 20-25 seconds on television would get such short time limits here - it's not as if this DVD was absolutely packed with stuff that they ran out of space - there's just one seventy question quiz here, after all. Overall it's quite a nice little package although how much fun you'll derive from it largely depends on how much fun you find the TV show, really. Which is a bit of a cop-out opinion but there you go. And 127, before you ask. |
"All you need is a DVD player! Suitable for players of all ages! Includes two exciting interactive games."