If you're anything like me, then at some point in your life, you've drank heavily.
Maybe you still do, but I'm not here to judge.
But I will talk about some positives and negatives.
Negatives are excruciating hangovers, dehydration and an absence of cash.
But on the positive side, sometimes you'd wake up next to....
SOME FREE Software, such as Carling Pub Quiz.
That's right, during the late 90s and early 00's there was somewhat of an explosion in
the free things offered in pubs category.
Whether it's free hats, squeezy stress toys or even audio CD's.
There was always some form of branded marketing being dished out to drunken punters.
The Carling Pub Quiz arrived when Multimedia was the hot thing.
Just imagine having the fun of the pub quiz machine in your very own home.
Yeah, it's not quite the same is it?
Gathering your mates around your Windows 98 machine and booting up a half arsed implementation
of a pub favourite.
But let's dive in anyway.
"Now you can challenge yourself with traditional pub quiz questions on your PC at home.
With over 7,000 questions covering entertainment, general knowledge, etc, etc.
You can challenge up to 3 friends to an on-screen buzz-in quiz or for larger events create and
print out your own traditional quiz sheets.
Alrighty then.
Well, installation is pretty quick, which you'd expect given this CD only contains 6MB
of files.
Under the GSP menu we find Carling Pub Quiz tucked away.
GSP being the company behind this and numerous other budget multimedia titles of the time.
At this point if you're stuck, you can dive straight into the "Help" section, which opens
up a standard Help file.
Here we can find out how to Answer Questions among other gems of knowledge.
Starting the quiz presents you with a list of question collections, along with player
options and a timer function if desired.
Multi play can be achieved through taking turns via.
a buzzer with a nominated key, or a combination of the two.
The buzzer, and in fact, sound effects through-out are a little sporadic.
Sometimes they work.
Othertimes, no tomato.
Plus you might as well buzz in for every question as early as possible, as there's no penalty
for doing so, and it blocks your friends from having a chance.
But if you're playing with 1 person, which is more than possible after your friends all
leave, then you just answer question after question after question until either the timer
or the questions run out.
There's no multiple choice as you'd usually expect with this type of game.
Instead you have to type the answer, although there is some lee-way in how you answer.
If your response doesn't match exactly, then you'll usually be asked if it's close enough,
requiring honesty.
Plus the algorithm doesn't work all the time, sometimes completely marking down answers
which are correct to all intents and purposes.
You can see this is firmly based in the late 90s with some of these questions, whilst others
are of course, timeless.
The idea is to fill up your bar, or glass, whatever that represents by getting correct
answers, and at the end we're presented with nice chart to indicate the losers and winner,
if there is indeed a winner at all from playing this game.
This is late 90s CD-ROM software at it's very worst and also because of that very reason,
it's very finest.
Which is why it's marvelous, and worth venturing into - for me at least - if only to remember
how awful free gifts from the pub truly were.