'Trivial Pursuit' (Wii)

Also available on: Xbox 360, PS3
Developers: Adrenalin
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Genre: Action / Adventure
Release date: March 13, 2009

Most people can remember family parties spent shuffling a little circular disc around a board and answering colour coded questions. Oh yes, it's Trivial Pursuit, the cause of many a disputed victory and heated argument over the years. Electronic Arts is banking on the game's vintage appeal, alongside the ongoing popularity of quiz contests, to boost the console version of Trivial Pursuit. Despite presenting some good brain teasers in a reasonable package, the game never really capitalises on the possibilities of going digital and also fails to justify its price tag.

Trivial Pursuit follows Monopoly and other board games to make the jump onto consoles. Graphically, the game is okay and is pretty much what you would expect from a video game version of the pastime. The board is laid out reasonably well and the little animations as the playing piece moves between squares are quite decent. However, the accompanying sounds are rather annoying, especially the commentator, who seems like a disgruntled children's television presenter. He injects irritating comments at regular intervals and even calls you a loser at one point. Thankfully, both voice and FX can be turned off.

The dice is rolled by shaking the Wii Remote and then indicating the chosen destination on the board by pointing at the screen. Single-player and multi-player options are available but it is the latter that will most likely appeal. After all, playing a board game on your own is not exactly a pleasurable experience. The Classic mode most directly follows the original game where players compete to answer questions for individual pie wedges for their playing puck. Having gained all six wedges from the subjects - Sport & Leisure (Orange), Science & Nature (Green), Arts & Literature (Purple), History (Yellow), Entertainment (Pink) and Geography (Blue) - players head to the middle square for the final poser to claim victory.

Only available in single player, the newly introduced Clear the Board mode involves all the same coloured squares disappearing once a wedge is won, until the board ultimately disappears entirely apart from the central square. This proves fairly fun and a reasonable innovation, but it is the multiplayer Facts & Friends mode that is the most successful introduction. This involves players placing bets before each question as to whether their opponent will or won't know the answer, or to claim that they in fact know the correct response.

Selecting particular options must be done carefully as there are punishments involved. For example, if you say someone will not be able to answer a question when in fact they can, then the opponent gets extra points. Bonus squares replace roll again places to offer a variety of power ups, such as stealing an opponent's points or placing a bomb that speeds up the question timer. The Facts & Friends mode successfully injects a bit of extra spice to proceedings as players are able to steal points from their opponent and potentially snatch victory from the jaws of defeat (or the other way around).

Questions in Trivial Pursuit are decent and varied, if not occasionally a tad perplexing. This is largely because the difficultly mix seems a little off kilter as some questions are puzzlingly complex while others are ludicrously easy (such as one requiring players to know that crosswords are printed in newspapers). Another aspect of annoyance is the map-based questions, which are imprecise and frequent.

This involves tasking players to pinpoint a geographical location for a place or occurrence, but the maps involved are confusing and do not list place names, just their actual locations. Therefore, anyone with a less than solid knowledge of geography could get a question wrong that they would otherwise have got right. Moreover, these questions arise with unreasonable regularity and are not just in the geography section. Equally frustrating are the questions featuring a meter where you have to pinpoint people's heights or the particular year of an occurrence.

Despite including local multiplayer for up to four players, the lack of an online option in Trivial Pursuit feels like a missed opportunity. Indeed, there could have been lots of interesting ways to take the game by hooking up to online networks. For example, the production team could have introduced a community aspect in which people submit their own questions to be checked by a community manager and then made into a completely new challenge. This could have given the game a LittleBigPlanet style evolution where particular themes of questions are constantly evolving. However, no possibilities such as this are really explored in what is really just a straight port of the board game.

You can see the appeal of a console version of Trivial Pursuit, especially for families or parties wanting a different way to play the popular board game. Despite this, the price of around £30 seems to be a little steep for what you get, especially when comparing it to the quantity of work and devotion put into titles such as Gears Of War 2. There is certainly a case that the game should have been made available as a digital download rather than a packaged product. Unfortunately this all adds up to make purchasing the console version of Trivial Pursuit a somewhat questionable decision to make.


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