The Computer Quiz

The Good
The Computer Quiz is another quiz-based game from Scott Miller, which he created for Big Blue Disk #21. It is similar to his other titles, The Astronomy Quiz and The IBM BASIC Quiz, both of which he also developed for Softdisk. If you haven’t played neither title, then the idea is to answer some multiple-choice questions regarding basic computing.

Before I even tried out this game, I studied a course at college called “PC User Fundamentals”, so I know most of the answers. I got wrong the minority of questions that deal with flowcharts, the number of files on a single-sided PC-DOS disk, and the first ever computer to be marketed. Although you can get one of the questions wrong, it is an opportunity to learn something new, and you can do better the next time you play the game.

When you boot up The Computer Quiz, the player has the option of using color or monochrome text. If you press [Enter] on the keyboard, the game assumes that you want colored text. It is nice that Miller decided not only to cater for users who only had a monochrome graphics card at a time, but he made the game so simplistic that any computer can run a copy of the game, no matter what CPU it had.


The Bad
Like many of Miller’s quiz games, there is not much sound in the game. Basically a single beep for everything, so assuming that you don’t look at the text at the bottom, you never know whether it’s correct or not. Also, it is annoying that you get kicked out of the game if you get three incorrect answers and have to run the game again if one go isn’t enough for you.

The Bottom Line
The Computer Quiz is yet another quiz-based game from Miller, this time it is all about computers. Like his previous offerings of its kind, a series of questions will test your basic knowledge of the subject. Every correct answer will give you a point, while any wrong ones will cause the game to reveal the correct answer. This makes it ideal for people who are not interested in computers to learn something new.