Growing up, I was always a fan of Trivial Pursuit, Young Players Edition.  But as I aged, the questions got easier and outdated (no free upgrades with the standard board games).  When I married, I inherited Trivial Pursuit, Genius Edition from my wife.  This brought a whole bunch of new questions into my life.

Hasbro has been releasing some of their more popular games on the video game consoles.  This is great news for me because it’s less work to store and maintain the standard boxed games.  In short, Hasbro has done a very nice job bringing Trival Pursuit to the XBox 360 platform.

The questions included in the game are current and relevant.  So far, I’ve seen questions as current as the late 2008’s.  So that’s good news.  No more questions about the “current” USSR.  There’s been one free download of additional movie questions. I hope they keep up this trend, although I hear that they’re going to charge for some future updates.

The game moves fast.  The rolling of the dice is fast, and that helps move the game faster.  There are a few things that still slows it down for me:

Landing on roll again results in a “please roll again” prompt.  It would be nice if it just showed the text and let the user continue with the rolling.  The extra click, while minor, is annoying and when it appears, I’m clicking as fast as possible to get to the roll because I know I landed on “roll again”.  Also, the movement of the pieces can be slow.  Some of the animations are nice and quick (like the submarine one), but others are slow (like the helicopter).  So an option to remove or speed-up the animations would be nice.

After you roll, the board does a nice job of highlighting which spots the player can move to.  However, the selection of where to move to is unusual for this sort of game.  When selecting, you move a cursor around the screen.  But since you’re limited to the number of spots, why have to make the user move the cursor from one spot to another.  By this I mean you have to hold the left-stick while the cursor “moves” from one spot to another.  You should just be able to iterate through the available spots using the sticks.

The questions are multiple choice.  Being not the greatest at trivia, it really helps me to have choices to the questions.  Sometimes, I would really want someone to give me some choices with my old game because I knew the answer, but I just couldn’t find the right words for it.  And even though the questions are multiple choice, it’s still not dirt-easy.  I like it.  So far, I’m tending at 45% correct (according to the game-recorded stats).

There are some picture-oriented questions as well.  I like this too.  However, the images are too small and the zoomed-in version only appears on-screen for a very short period of time.  It would be nice to be able to get a closer look at the images (even on my 50” HDTV plasma screen).

The map questions, while a nice addition, are almost always annoying.  Why, when answering a Hobbies and Games question must I be able to locate New York on a map when you really just need to know that New York is the answer.  The map pins are not labelled, so if you don’t know the correct geographical location, even if you know the correct answer, you’re screwed.

The last nice thing about this game is that it’s possible to play with the sound down low.  It’s great because after a while the sounds get annoying.  But it’s also great because you can play it while your baby is sleeping in your arms.

Summary

The Good

Updatable Questions, fast games

The Bad

Map questions annoying, images too small

Rating

7.5 / 10.0