TV Quiz

Despite being rubbish at them – and having the uncanny ability to guess the wrong answer every single time we try – we like a quiz. Who doesn't, right? Particularly those quiz machines you get in pubs, which offer the real possibility of winning £5 if you answer around 60 of the toughest questions ever correctly. And each within a time limit lasting mere milliseconds.

As mobile games, however, quizzes naturally lose some of their appeal. There's no money to be won or lost, and no multiplayer element (unless you count asking the person next to you if they know the answer).

But as a challenge to pass the time, they work. The ease of pressing '1' to '4' on the keypad to answer each multiple choice question is certainly a lot neater than carrying a quiz book, and – in the case of TV Quiz – there are also bonus rounds to break up the stream of endless questions.

There's no particularly novel theme to TV Quiz and the game is set out as the most generic of TV quiz shows. There's even a slime-riddled, grinning host and a pretty cartoon blonde who presents the scoreboard after each question.

Questions are divided into rounds, with each round containing seven questions. Make it past these questions without losing all three of your lives and you enter one of the aforementioned bonus rounds. These are either quick-fire in nature, where you answer as many questions as you can within a time limit, or involve betting as many of your points as you dare on just one question.

With there being little more to the game than the questions themselves, they are clearly very important. Obviously, they all revolve around television – think of a mobile Telly Addicts without the video clips or Noel Edmond's smug face. And there's a pretty wide range of programme types and decades covered, ranging from American dramas like ER, to more homegrown contenders such as EastEnders and Corrie, to more universal examples such as The Simpsons and Star Trek.

Going on the questions we got during our games, if you think Fraggle Rock is something you might see on a trip to Wookey Hole and have no idea who Ange and Den were, there is a possibility of you becoming frustrated with TV Quiz quite quickly.

That's not to say there aren't more modern questions (about Celebrity Big Brother, Pop Idol and Lost, for instance), but many seem to involve programmes – some classic, some obscure – made before the early '90s. You know, back in the Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and Blankety Blank era.

Still, even if your knowledge of that era is a little sketchy, you'll find elements set to help you out. In a set-up similar to Who Wants to be a Millionaire, you start each new game with three '50/50' options, as well as three 'passes'. A 50/50 removes two wrong answers from the four displayed onscreen, while pass simply moves you on to the next question.

And don't worry about using them because, as you progress, you're awarded additional aids (as well as lives), for each 250, 500 and 1000 points you score. Correct answers win you a varying number of points, depending on the question's difficulty level – you choose one of four (from 'easy' to 'genius') before you begin the game.

One winning aspect of TV Quiz is that we hadn't had any repeat questions after an hour of playing. On the downside, the presentation and bonus rounds are really so basic, they do little to alter the fact that all the game really involves is answering one question after the next until you've lost all your lives. Your only incentive is the virtual prize you get for your points (a toilet roll then a roast dinner in our case) and beating your last score.

Which leads us to think there should have been more of the bonus round stuff – the one involving choosing the number of points you want to gamble is actually quite addictive and at least gives you a feeling of winning or losing something. It offers the sense of risk so crucial for this type of game.

Still, at least you know what you're getting here. Indeed, those after a generous number of questions to test their knowledge of Del Boy and Les Dawson need look no further. As an overall package, though, TV Quiz feels a little lacking, a little cheap – more Going For Gold than Countdown.