Triv: Palm OS Game

Suit of the suicide king in a standard deck?

Body of water where the Republic of the Maldives is located?

Don’cha love trivia? I love trivia. I played Trivial Pursuit
when it came out in the early 80’s and routinely beat the pants off so many people that no one would play with me anymore. In hindsight, I am not sure if it was their humiliating defeats, or my winner’s dance that they objected to the most, but I digress.

I have tried many trivia games for the Palm, and I find that they tend to either be rather ugly and clunky- but with cool questions (like the freeware Quizzler), or slick and pretty but rather simplistic (like the $20 Trivial Pursuit for Palm). Triv
from Robert Jen is clearly an ugly, clunky program with a lot of cool features and question sets. (Why do so many great programs look like they are designed for a grade school market?)

[Triv Main Screen and a Question Screen]

For $15, you get a program that can present itself in several ways-

[Trivia Pizza, a ‘Trivial Pursuit clone and Quick Quiz, a basic trivia game]

[Triv Grid, a ‘Jeopardy’-like game and Triv Tac Toe, a revival of ‘Hollywood Squares’!]

[Trillionaire, an ironically cheap form of ‘Millionaire’]

Personally, although I doubt they could have designed it any uglier, it is nonetheless a lot of fun to play! The questions are challenging, and there are a lot of question sets to choose from. The basic program only uses 180kb of memory, but there are about 3M worth of other question sets over a nice variety of categories. While most are multiple choice, some are short answer (and it would have been nice to see that in the list name somehow.) You also get TrivWriter to create your own question sets and TrivFind to search the question sets.

[Some of the Question Sets]

So maybe I should just judge it on the questions and ignore the interface. The demo version limits you to 36 questions per set, while the unlocked version runs over 20,000 questions. That is a lot of questions to work through- or to write! I am very impressed with the questions so far. The author has done a lot of work with this and has a clear love of trivia based on his other offerings at his website.

Oh, did I mention that you can play Triv with up to four players or teams? Or that you can tweak many aspects of the way the program looks and plays? Sweet game. (Oh, the answers to the opening questions? Hearts and the Indian Ocean.)