The Krypton Factor

The Good
This is based on the British game show The Krypton Factor which ran originally from 1977 to 1993. The show was famously billed as television’s toughest quiz…and it was one heck of a mental challenge. Four contestants tested their wit, skill, stamina and logical thinking across six gruelling, testing and punishing rounds to earn points, dubbed their “krypton factor” and the one with the highest score wins.

So how does this computer game version by Domark’s TV Games label compare? Well the game gives you the six rounds to play, which are Mental Agility, Observation, Response, Physical Ability, Intelligence and General Knowledge, so this is a good start…except of these rounds only two of them work out well.

The first is Mental Agility. Here you are given some numbers on the screen and you must re-enter them in numerical order, for example if the numbers 4145227 appeared you would then need to type 1224457. Then if 8226162 appeared then you will need to type 1222668. This really does resemble the TV show very well and requires a great deal of mental strength to succeed, especially if you’re dealing with repeated number, like the three 2’s in the second example and these numbers appear very quickly, so it’s very tricky to get it right...except it has a flaw which I’ll come to later.

The other one is the Intelligence round. Here you are given a picture, like the Krypton Factor’s K logo or the TV Games logo, which you will see for less than a second until the pieces are all scattered, you must then rotate and re-arrange the pieces to build that picture again in just one minute. This also resembles the TV show well and again can be quite tricky, it’s so difficult to assemble the picture together, especially with the short time limit. This can be seen as the only event that provides a proper logical challenge.

The Bad
So while two of the rounds vaguely work, the other ones do not as you will discover here.

Round two is the Observation round and here we’re given a story to read with a picture on it, one such story goes something like, “As the sun set, Mark turned to Michelle and smiled. The last two weeks had been idyllic. The arrived on the Monday and spent the first few days walking around the town buying postcards.” And the picture of this story is a beach with boats on the sea and the sun shining. After the story finishes it is repeated a second time, only this time there are changes to some of the words in the story and in the picture and you must work out what the changes are. The problem is the text moves so fast you are lost within the first twenty seconds, especially after the second time because you're too busy staring at the screen looking for the changes. And you're fed up reading it the first time you'll end up not feeling bothered to read it a second time. So in short, yes it doesn't work.

Round three is Response which comes in two parts. The first features the stupidly named "Ergobuggy" that you move from one side of the screen to the other within the time limit by pressing up and down with your left hand and left and right with your right hand. This to my knowledge has nothing to do with the TV show whatsoever and its presence in this game makes absolutely no sense. The second is the “Vidiwall” where you have a split second to guess the colour that fills the most TV's, for example if there are three greens, two reds, three yellows and five blues...the answer is blue. But this appears to be glitchy because I made a video of this and played it back and on two occasions I was flagged incorrect for not guessing blue even though I was actually correct. So basically because the Ergobuggy has nothing to do with the show and the vidiwall can’t tell from right from wrong it doesn’t work.

The game’s fourth round Physical Ability is by far the dullest round of the game. This is supposed to be the show’s assault course which was one of its more exciting features, only here gone is the excitement of the assault course and in its place is a slow-paced borefest. Basically you go through the course while pressing a button to determine the amount of each of the four attributes, Legs, Arms, Speed and Stamina, and this apparently makes you go across the course in the "fastest" possible time even though most of the time he only goes at one speed all the time, making everything you are doing a complete waste of time. Shall I say it again? If you answered no, tough, it doesn't work.

The final round is General Knowledge which is your standard quiz. You are given 99 seconds to answer as many questions correctly, getting a question right increases your krypton factor by two points, get it wrong and you lose two points. This resembles the TV show except this suffers from the same problem the majority of quiz games or sections Spectrum games had, which is after giving you the question it then gives you the answer and then asks if you were right or not, no that's your job computer! What fun is it that I can just cheat by saying yes, yes, yes, oh I was right again, oh I'm smashing and thus I have now doubled my krypton factor without any real effort! All together now...it doesn't work.

Now remember the Mental Agility round at the very start? Remember I mentioned it had a flaw? Well it’s simple…it’s exactly the same all the time! Yes that’s right the round doesn’t change at all, which means you can actually progress through the first round of “television’s toughest quiz” with such ease after practice…not so much a “mental” test now is it?

Another problem is the game’s music. The Krypton Factor famously had theme music performed by British synthpop band The Art of Noise, arguably most famous for their cover of Prince’s “Kiss” with Tom Jones, however that is completely missing in this version, instead we have title music with one too many beats that constantly interrupts the tune. If the game itself doesn’t test your mental strength then listening to this tune will.

The Bottom Line
Domark released a number of game show licensed games on the ZX Spectrum under their TV Games label and it has to be said this is among the poorest of them, on the basis that, it just doesn’t work. Perhaps a computer game version of The Krypton Factor was too much to ask for and a bridge too far and thus should have been left untouched. It was a brave attempt to convert this, it's just poorly executed.