Hands on with novel iPhone quiz game Map My Mind
Node-based approach to question and answer
I'm no trivia king, but you can't spend as much time as I do researching things dossing around on Wikipedia without something sticking in the old grey matter.
Yeah. I like quiz games, and while there have been some decent examples on iPhone - QuizQuizQuiz and Daily Quizz: What Happened Today? were two I enjoyed - there's not been any that I've loved.
Map My Mind may be that game.
From Spanish studio Tragnarion, it takes the theme of mind maps - a way of organising your thoughts in a graphical and holistic manner rather than as lists or bulletpoints - and combines it with questions.
To start with, the game does seems a little overwhelming as you use your finger to scroll between different nodes, each labelled with respect to their subject matter.
For example, choosing Entertainment as my main topic, the first node on offer was Oscars, with two branches connecting to other nodes labelled Animation and Actor.
The Animation question was about the first animation to win an Oscar. The Actor question was about which actor had been nominated the most times.
You select which question you want to answer by tapping on the question mark on the connection between nodes.
Answer the multiple choice question correctly and new connections between the node you opened up are created, until you're moving through a largescale web of nodes and connections. You'll need to use the iPhone pinch zoom in and out controls.
The neat thing about this set up is that while you have three lives - or attempts - to re-answer any questions you get wrong, even when these are used up you can continue unlocking the question nodes as each has at least two connections to other nodes.
As well as answering questions, other options include making connections between multiple trivia - i.e. matching capital cities to countries, or stars to films - and playing mini-games.
In the version of the game I was playing, there were two modes: Quiz (which is what I've been describing so far), and Countdown, which is time-based with either one, two, or five minute options.
Available categories were Entertainment, Social Science, Sports, Culture and Natural Science, while the questions themselves seemed well balanced, being neither too hard or easy.
There's also an option to download new questions, although this wasn't activated in my preview build.
So despite (or because of) its novel approach in terms of question organisation, I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the finished version of Map My Mind, which should be due on the App Store in December.
