Reviews

I cannot believe I've never done Blockbusters here. I had the TV Games version in my collection! What is wrong with me? This is one of three games based of the classic UK game show aired on ITV hosted by the late Bob Holness. Whilst I had the third game years ago it is with tradition that I review a series of games in chronological order, and as such I begin this Blockbusters extravaganza with the original release by Macsen Software in 1984. Here's a brief summary of the rules for those not familiar with it. The players are separated by a colour, white and blue, and they have to pick a letter to answer questions corresponding to that letter, so for example for S, an Opera by Rossini is the Barber of ____, in which the answer is Seville. The players have to connect the board corresponding to their colour, so the white player has to connect the board vertically while the blue player must connect horizontally.

The game starts with a pretty nice redition of the classic Blockbusters theme which in my view is one of the greatest theme tunes in game show history along with The Crystal Maze, absolutely love this tune, however this is missing a few notes but it's still nice for what it is. It can only be played with two players and strangely, player one is on the right and player two is on the left, which is a bit odd. I found answering the questions to be fiddely. You give the correct answer yet it tells you off for a spelling error, then you give a wrong answer and still it tells you there's a spelling error at times despite it being completely being wrong. In my case, and I can't remember the question but it was O, traveling around a planet or something? Anyway I put orion initially, which was incorrect becasue the answer is of course orbit, yet it said it was a spelling error and I had to try again, then I inadvertently typed orbiy instead, an obvious spelling mistake, and it was accepted as a correct answer! What the Jesus? And when you do finish a game you are supposed to do a Gold Run, ideally after two wins, but guess what? There is no Gold Run because it was released SEPARATELY! But more on that in another review.

I was personally underwhelmed with this. It feels half-cut especially without the Gold Run. Also don't play with the sound on because it will drive you mad, so please I beg you, press N for no when given to option to save your brain from exploding. Not too bad I guess but it could and should have been better and there are better quiz show games out there on the Spectrum.