With the current interest in anything bearing the name 'trivia', you'd think Harold Gale would be on to a winner with this quiz offering on the PCW. It's certainly packaged smartly enough, but, as they say, beauty is not skin deep. Micro Trivia is a simple quiz program based around a 'noughts and crosses' board. The micro throws questions at you and expects a speedy response. If you're right, you get to choose the next square on the board. If not, the computer chooses it for you. Three squares in a row win you the game, and you Ye treated to a 'fun IQ' score. This is about as much fun as being locked in a cupboard overnight, and about as enlightening. There is little to recommend this game. The loading instructions, which are photocopied onto a small scrap of paper, advise you to boot the disc from scratch. This works, but only because the company has copied CP/M, PIP and SUBMIT onto the production disc. They may have reached an agreement with Digital research to do this; then again... The program itself is a short BASIC listing with minimal graphic content and the bear essentials for playing the game. You can select a time limit for your answers, but this seems to have little effect on your final score, which is, as far as I can see, selected at random. Sometimes, but not always, you're allowed to add your name to a high scores list. Nearly always, though, you're treated to a comment on your performance. They run along the lines of 'you are the ultimate DOPE', which is a tremendous encouragement to play again. The questions themselves, billed as 'pot luck', are nearly all to do with land areas and dates and can be listed out by the unscrupulous with nothing more mind-bending than use of the CP/M utility TYPE. You might expect a degree of encryption. Micro Trivia makes much of its Mensa ancestry, but certainly doesn't reflect any particularly high intelligence. Simon Williams , 8000Plus | 
