An interesting little arcade game released by Capcom in 1992.

Quiz & Dragons: Capcom Quiz Game was, as the name says, a trivia game. And, having just spent three hours straight playing it and not even noticing, it can't be that bad, either. KLOV says that it's one of the few trivia games still out, and I can understand why =)

The English (US) version of Quiz & Dragons had very very normal quiz questions in it - perharps a bit too US-centric and "targeted for adults in early 1990s" for yours truly, but I still could get 50% right on average, and besides, with MAME there's a constant supply of coins =) "Outside" of the game was a very generic fantasy land, inspired by Dungeons & Dragons with some preposterous silliness thrown in (No kidding: The ending text says "The legend of these brave heroes soon spread throughout the land. Their names became household words and were eventually used by an enterprising restauranteur to describe various flavors of canned soup." =)

Overall, the translation and localization is very good compared to the games of that era in general - and obviously those have to be good in games like this!

The game is fairly easy. You pick one of the possible "characters", each of which has a special ability. Fighter recovers vitality points quickly, Wizard can change categories, Amazon (my favorite for various reasons) can randomly eliminate obviously wrong choices, and Ninja can "cause double damage" and thus end rounds faster. There are several possible areas in the game, each consists of "playing board" on which squares have different monsters or bonuses (elves who give junk, or inns to recover vitality points). You throw dice, move forward (choosing path if necessary), and fight the evil monster by answering riddles for which there's four possible answers for each. if you pick a wrong answer, you lose one vitality point, and once you drop to zero vitality, it's time to stuff more coins to the machine. After answering enough questions correctly, you "beat" the opponent, and may be awarded several things (potions to recover vitality, magic scrolls to pick question categories, magic stuff to slash out wrong questions, magic rings that show the right answers...) In the end of each area, a huge monster with a tricky series of questions is waiting for you, all hungry.

The game was based on Capcom's CPS hardware (with CPS-mandated suicide battery (*argh*)), with the difference that it had no joystick control, just four buttons for each player (in plain and ordinary JAMMA standard cabinet thingies, or in MAME, the joystick can also be used - different joystick directions correspond to different buttons).

My personal highlights: Those cute dragons, of course, and the werewolves appear on the board as silhouettes of anthropomorphic canids with text "W-WOLF" under them =) =)

Sources:
Information reported by MAME
http://www.klov.com/Q/Quiz_&_Dragons.html
http://zanyvg.overclocked.org/quizanddragons/end.gif

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