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Genre: Trivia

Format: iPod Game

Developer: Apple, Inc.

Minimum Requirements: 5G iPod (video), iPod Software v1.2, 16.5MB disk space

Price: $0.99

ESRB Rating: N/A

Availability: Now

Ah, the quiz game show. Where would the upper channels on the digital cable spectrum be without it. Even prime time television is full of such game shows again, such as those new karaoke ones which are quizzing your knowledge of song lyrics, and that Are You A Moron Like a Fifth Grader, or whatever it's called. Quiz games are popular, I think, because they make the TV audience feel smarter than the contestants. "Pfffft. Who doesn't know that Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso? Lot of good that Princeton degree did you, ya moron."

Is it a sad commentary, then, that where we once provided answers to difficult and broad questions on Jeopardy, we're now going up against fifth graders? I think the sadder commentary is that Jeff Foxworthy continues to find work.

But I digress. Apple's iQuiz brings the quiz game show to your 5G iPod, and does so rather effectively. It's a crisp, polished package that has some extremely unique features. Before I get to those, though, I want call your attention to the price above. iQuiz costs 99 cents. If you can afford an iPod, you can afford a 99 cent game. Buy this now. Don't even worry about my review. Download it and review it yourself. It's 99 cents, people. 99 cents. If you play it just once, you've gotten your money's worth.

But, if you need to learn more about it, okay. iQuiz offers a couple methods of play, the less interesting of which are standard trivia games for TV, film and music. These are basic games of ten questions in the selected genre. Get three wrong, and you lose. Make it through all ten without getting three wrong, and "winner is you." Yea.

To cater to the young iPod audience, most of the questions are geared towards today's entertainment. I guess that makes sense. My wife did much better than me, because she watches stuff like One Tree Hill. Unfortunately for me, to this point there have been no questions about The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. or Pink Lady and Jeff, so I'm not doing as well. Maybe that's a good thing, though; you don't want the questions to get too easy. What fun would a trivia game be if you always went 10 out of 10? That would be like giving yourself a quiz for which you wrote the questions. Which leads me to...

Aspyr's iQuiz Maker. With this free application, you can actually create your own quizzes for iQuiz. These can then be shared with others, and online repositories are popping up. Aspyr also offers some with iQuiz Maker. If you're not interested in creating new quizzes but would still like to download those created by others, Aspyr offers Quiz Installer separately. There are also different visual themes available.

This ability to customize the game isn't its greatest asset, however. That accolade goes to Music Quiz 2. More than just a predetermined list of questions to answer, Music Quiz 2 looks at the music on your 5G iPod and actively generates questions based on your collection. So, it's not a matter of what you know about music, it's what you know about your music, which makes things much more interesting.

The majority of the visual punch is packed into Music Quiz 2, which attempts to take on the sights and sounds of a modern prime time quiz show. Visually, this is mostly done with static renderings of a sound stage, although some animations are thrown in. There's also a creepy woman who smiles at you a lot and makes you thankful you don't have to go any long trips with her. The music contains that in your face bombast of most TV game show themes, but considering Music Quiz 2 is about your music, you don't have to listen to it for long.

The point of Music Quiz 2 is to correctly answer the questions about what's on your iPod. This is done in five rounds of two parts each. The first round will have you matching album covers with their title (kind of dumb, really, considering the album title is usually written on the cover), determining in what year a particular song or album was released, saying who sings a particular song, etc. The questions are usually presented in true/false or multiple choice format, although there is some variation there.

If you don't miss three questions in this round, you move on to the speed round where you'll have a certain amount of time (determined by where you stop the spinning wheel and how much money you're wagering per question) to play one of a variation of bonus games, which are essentially matching games. Repeat this process five times, and you win, which basically means you get to see how much money you made.

Music Quiz 2 tries hard to make itself look like it knows what it's doing, but this causes for some comical phrasings. For instance, it assumes that everything on your iPod is a big hit or a great song, which can be quite funny it's referencing filler material from Petty Booka. And because it only knows about the songs what you tell it about the songs, some of the questions can be inaccurate. For example, if it asks you what year Blondie's "Sunday Girl" was released, the answer is 1978. But if the version you have on your iPod is from a 1999 comp, then that's the answer Music Quiz 2 is going to want.

And that leads to a bigger problem. In order for Music Quiz 2 to really be interesting, you have to stay on top of your song tags in iTunes. That means managing the release dates and the album artwork, and making sure everything else is properly labeled. If you only have artwork for a couple of albums, for example, then Music Quiz 2 is going to be forced to constantly ask you about those albums (which it tends to do anyway, really; Music Quiz 2 seems to be oddly obsessed with Jellyfish...or maybe it just wants to make sure I'm a true fan). If you've got 60GB worth of music on your iPod, that'll make for some fun quizzing, but only if you've got the time to go back in and manage all those tags for the albums you didn't purchase through iTunes. (For information on how to batch edit song tags, read this Applelinks Hands-On article.)

Despite these drawbacks, iQuiz is easily the best deal out there for iPod gamers. Why? Because it's only 99 cents, first of all, but also because it's the only game that'll grow and change as your iPod music grows and changes. And although you'd think it would only be fun for you, that's not the case. It can be just as fun to see how well your friends know your music.

Especially your friends who went to Princeton. Lot of good that degree them, huh? Morons.

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