When I was twelve years old, my best friend made a bet with me. He reckoned that I didn't have the bottle to run away to Australia. Being an honourable (stupid) schoolboy I took my friend up on his offer and, during morning break, set off out of the school gates. I made it as far as the other side of town before getting completely disillusioned with the whole idea. Therefore I turned around and wearily wandered back to school. Unfortunately I'd missed double religion and Mouldy Matthews (the teacher) put me on detention for a whole week for skiving off. All of which just goes to show you what crap things dares are.
    Double Dares however are wonderful things. You see, they enable you to throw a silly dare back on someone so that they end up looking stoopid and you get to eat your crab paste sarnies in peace. All of which leads us along quite nicely (and why not) to Double Dare, the Speccy version of a quiz which takes place during Going Live on Beeb One.
    
Granary baps anyone?
Ermm, no thanks I'll go for the baguette as usual please. Anyway, Double Dare is a quiz game. You can play either another person or the computer. The idea is to answer questions successfully. These come in the form of multiple choice questions, in which you have three choices. However, there's some extra skill involved in this game. If you think that your opponent can't answer the question then double dare them, then if they answer incorrectly, you get double the points. If they get it right, then they get the bonus. (Is that it? Linda)
    

BLIM! The neuron to glial cell ratio in Section 39 of the brain of Albert (Relativity) Einstein was 1.12 as opposed to a normal human being's score of 1.936. That's a difference of 72.8 percent.

Not really no, you see, they can still throw the dare back at you, even before they answer, a kind of triple dare. At this juncture you can choose to either answer the question or take a challenge. These challenges test your mental agility by setting three types of test.
    Place the Face is the first challenge you'll encounter. The idea of this is to re-arrange a famous face. This isn't as naughty as it sounds, you see it's like one of those plastic puzzles where you have to shuffle blocks around, or to draw a more modern analogy, like the Spitting Image game [Andy's confusing Spitting Images with Splitting Images (aka Split Personalities). There's one 'l' of a difference - NickH].
    The second challenge is called Follow the Leader. The idea of this is rather like those crap 'electronic' games from the early eighties where this round thing would beep out noises and colours in a certain order and you had to repeat it (You don't mean Simon do you? Linda) Ermm, yes that's the one, but this version's a lot easier as it only has six levels.
    If you're unfortunate enough to get three challenges then you'll be faced with the Pyramid Power game. Here the idea is to transfer different coloured discs (arranged in descending order of size) across three pegs making sure that they're in the right order when they get to their new peg. If it sounds confusing then try completing it on your Speccy!
    
More spleen Mr Billington?
No thank you Marjorie, I'm in the middle of a review. Where were we? Right, so Double Dare's a kind of Trivial Pursuit without a board and with a few penalty clauses built in. It's actually jolly easy to play. The computer asks you a question and you either answer it or dare someone. Even James (God rest his soul) could have handled this.
    The graphics are lovely, cheery and thoroughly suplex-duplex; the crap presenter of the show wobbles his jaw as the question is read out and your pixel team does a little victory 'hurrah' whenever they get a question right. The challenges look gnarly too, loads of colour and some thoughtful use of the odd colour clash.
    Here's a nice little game. Nice in the way that your mum might say it, generally alluding to its wholesome qualities. I mean lets face it, you don't get to kill or otherwise injure anyone in this game, not even the odd put-upon alien. Nope, it's cerebral, fun and very much a 90s game. The aliens are dead, long live the brain.

Ratings given by other magazines

7/10      6/10

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