Review by: Jim Brumbaugh

Published: March 21, 1997

If you think you “know it all,” Tiger Interactive offers Quiz Wiz Cyber Trivia to test the limits of your gray matter.

The premise is simple – pose a series of questions to the user, which must each be answered within a specified time frame. Over 15,000 questions are contained in the product, culled from four general subject categories: Sports, Entertainment, Places to Go & Things to Know, and Figments & Other People. There are six sub-categories within each main category, so that the questions can be pulled from very specific subject groups. For example, “The NFL” can be selected from the Sports category, eliminating questions pertaining to Baseball and other sports. Each multiple-choice question must be answered within a pre-determined amount of time. At the end of the questioning, two scoring criteria will help judge the performance of the test-taker. One is the raw percentage of questions answered correctly, and the other is an efficiency rating which relates to the average amount of seconds it took to answer each question. Three levels of question difficulty are also available. If the total score of a game ranks among the best, the user’s name will be entered in the list of the highest scoring games. The top ten high scores and the people who achieved them can be viewed from the Statistics screen.

To aid (or, perhaps more accurately, to harass) the user, a character called the “Wise Guy” will accompany him on his quest for intellectual glory. He appears sporadically, to praise when several questions in a row are answered correctly, and also to torment when the answers are incorrect. He also is the host of the Introduction feature of the product, which is a tutorial on the use of the interface and the set-up of a game.

There are quite a few options available to customize each game to the taste of an individual user. In addition to category selection, a weighting percentage can also be applied to each category to determine the relative amount of questions that are asked from each. The Wise Guy feature can also be toggled on and off, as can the “Original Rock & Roll Soundtrack.” The number of questions to be asked in a game can be set to any number from 10 to 99, and the number of seconds allowed to answer each question can also be specified.

A 50-question game which allows for a maximum of 20 seconds to answer each question takes about ten to fifteen minutes to play. With a set of 15,000 questions, this means that there should be at least 20 to 30 hours of gameplay in this title.