Weren't computer game magazines so much better in the good old days?
        "The good old days" here refers to a period from about 1984 to perhaps
1988; the eight-bit machines were going strong, you could, quite literally,
buy a top new game and still have change from a tenner, and for poor
buggers like me there were a stream of 2.99 games coming out faster than you
could say "those Darling brothers are on the box cover AGAIN". Ah, glorious
days. Multiload-filled, colour-clashing, BEEP-command, cover-mounted tape
halcyon days. Yes, I was a Spectrum man. Still am to this day.
        So, for me, instead of reading DolchstoB and Greatest Hits and
Boojum and Bruce (yes, I am cribbing wildly from T2W3 here) my, in effect,
zines of choice were Sinclair User and Crash. (Your Sinclair was for the
gutless, tasteless and clueless who preferred early pre-postmodern wackiness
to good hard content.) The computer magazines were thick with quality
journalism whose standards I have to keep myself from applying to zines still
today and all were fat with reviews; twenty, thirty, forty of them every
issue. I wanted to be a computer magazine reviewer - life would be an unending
stream of new games, and I would differentiate between 53% clunkers and 84%
steamers. Little did I know how unusited I was for writing to deadlines.
        Now I have a game to review, before the rest of the country has got
their greasy hands on it. Literally, you read it here first. Let me savour the
moment, please (though half a page is probably a little too savoury, ahem).
        You Don't Know Jack, by Berkeley Systems, has been out in the States
in three or four forms for at least thirty months now, and it has been a
mildly critically acclaimed perennially steady, if unremarkable, seller. A
version with UK content and accents at long last is due soon; I traded 11
hours of game show tapes with Ed Stash in Whitehall, PA for his beta-test CDs
from this April of the new game. I think the Britishness was lost on him.
        YDKJ is a computer game designed for PCs running Windows 95 that is
a fictional game show with a distinctly ballsy attitude. Like Channel 5's 100%
the host is never seen on screen and he acts principally as narrator, though
all the questions and answers appear as text on the screen also. Before and
after the show the presentation has voices of fictional staff working on the
show, with lots of "you'd-have-thought-they-were-in-"jokes at just the right
level. The graphics of the outfit are no great shakes; the animation is
acceptably smooth, but it's obvious that you buy the game for the soundtrack
and the questions. There are apparently 800 questions each with perhaps 30
seconds of low-fi but perfectly clear and good quality sound track stored on
the one CD for each one - the question and responses for each answer chosen.
        The basic format is that players alternately choose subjects (often
designed to mislead, often full of innuendo, smut and Viz-esque single-and-a-
bit entendres) and questions with four possible answers come up on screen.
The first player to press their buzzer key then picks one of the four and
gains "money" (points) if they're right, losing "money" if they're wrong. The
subject matter is a mix of high culture and pop culture - really, all sorts of
rubbish, varying throughout the entire spectrum of difficulty and obscurity,
but laced with the same highly in-yer-face attitude throughout. The questions
often feature unashamedly disgusting and/or bodily topics, and the narrator
isn't above calling you all the names under the sun if you get questions
wrong. I think one of my friends was convinced this game was a winner from the
moment it called him a twat. His computer has never done that to him before.
        On top of that there are three or four different little types of
question that pop up from time to time to add variety; "can you remember?"
gives four clues of decreasing obscurity to a person or thing, the look and
listen carefully questions are as you would expect, the "DIS OR DAT" round
asks you to split seven items into two categories (painter or pasta? Disease
or Bond movie title?) in thirty seconds; the infamous Gibberish Question
often announces itself as a Flickerpiss Nosescum, and you have to perform the
same rhyme-the-phrase-syllable-by-syllable operation as quickly as possible
to decode the line of rubbish, and the Jack Attack that ends the game is a
very high-adrenalin fast-reflexes test of your ability not to panic as much
as anything else. And there's a lot more to it, too. All good "clean" fun.
        An excellent computer game even for those who don't normally play
computer games or enjoy quizzes, but I'm not sure I'll be playing it more
than occasionally in more than three months' time, and I really couldn't
recommend it for those whose attitude to cursing and obscenity was more, ahem,
cultured than that of, say, Jim Hardy. However, for, say, occasional
tournaments at housecons, it's a perfect game; until the appeal runs out I can
see lots of people wanting owners of this game to get it out for the lads.