Thursday 2 April 2015

Quiz and Dragons - Arcade


There's Dragons and a Quiz... Ronsil would be proud.

Combine the awesome power of nerds, geeks and swots together to form the ultimate fusion of Dungeons and Dragons with a Quiz game. Take your dice rolling board game and instead of determining fights and such with the rolling of more dice (perhaps of the 20 sided variety) you have to answer a series of questions on a range of subjects before time runs out.

I always pick the ninja, possible double damage
For either one or two players, Quiz & Dragons sets people against a whole host of monsters, characters, bosses and events that will require them to answer questions in order to progress. Each player can choose between one of four main characters, each with their own advantages that they can bring to the fray. The Warrior, can more regularly regain hit points; The wizard, can steadily choose different subjects in which to answer questions; The Amazon, can drop the questions from 4 answers to 3 or even 2; finally the Ninja that can cause double damage on a correct response. I personally, use the ninja as with a bit of luck, even the last boss falls in a few right answers.

No jokes on this one. I don't know enough to joke about it.
Being an older game, means that there will be no questions newer or more recent than 1994 but there's still a wealth of questions for those that are a little more chronologically gifted amongst us (read: Old gits) though the topics are rather American in basis and as such, there's a whole set of questions on American Football and Baseball that non-American's are going to be hard pressed to answer accurately (There's always room for guessing).

You need to fight Inn-Masters to stay the night, but you get a bonus if you win, death if you don't.
Gameplay in Quiz & Dragons takes the form of each player rolling a dice and moving that many spaces around a board unless they hit a boss square (bigger than usual) and then have to 'battle' the event on that square. In particular there's also Inn Keepers and Fairies that can restore hit points and provide magical items upon being defeated, these magical items include the ability to remove wrong answers from questions, able to pick questions or the most useful, the "TELL YOU THE ANSWER" Item, of which I've had on the last boss.

Multiple paths and routes available for your "pleasure".
On some levels in Quiz & Dragons, you get to choose multiple routes in which to take your character and navigate the maze. Ideally it's to either avoid the bosses and the short routes, or go the longer (slightly) safer path that may or may not lead to bonus items and such. If you're comfortable in your knowledge or you're able to win a prize that gives you control of the questions, you could cakewalk some of the bosses on a topic like movies.

I've a better question. "Who gives a ripe fuck?"
As such, for Quiz & Dragons, it's more a luck based event that determines whether you get a question you can answer successfully, a question that it's obvious what the answer is because of the false responses, or you get a question that nobody, even the people of the subject question, would get right. But you could always get lucky and 25% is still a viable chance, do that 7 times on the trot to win the first round entirely and you're looking at a 1 in 16 thousand (and a bit more) chance of guessing your way through the first level and the boss.

I only know the name of that one because of Blues Brothers.
Quiz & Dragons, oddly, sports a little bit of plot but its main strength lies in its graphics and audio. The music doesn't entirely irritate and in fact becomes rather ambient during the course of the game while the music intensifies during low health questions, there's the pleasant blinks and boings of sound from winning and being award victory pieces while visually, Quiz & Dragons has managed to illustrate and represent almost all of the key Dungeons & Dragons monsters in respectable detail.

43% of complete guesses were right.
Overall, it's one of the few quiz games one can find that tries to go the extra mile and don't just flood you with questions until you lose or quit playing to accept a prize. It's all about the score and the various different ways and means of playing, making it one of the more fun quiz games out there and worth a few credits if you find yourself a machine of Quiz & Dragons.

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