PC game from 1994. Finally.

[Gary Male]

Speaking to Jon Corby at Colin jolted my memory as to the series of Countdown game reviews I started writing. Several years and 5 world-class psychiatrists later I think the ZX Spectrum version is finally out of my system. So where better to go next than the 1994 MS-DOS version from Lockton Software?

Firstly best to check that my PC meets the minimum hardware requirements. 286 processor? Check. 640K or RAM with 550K free? Check. VGA/MCGA video card? Check. Hard drive with 10 MB of free space? Check. CD ROM drive? Check. DOS 3.3 or higher? Che... oh, hang on. Maybe it'll just run in Vista and all will be good with the world? No. Compatability mode? No.

*installs dosbox*
*wrestles with the installer that only wants to install onto my C: drive*
*finally gets game running*

Ahem. And as it loads up, actual Countdown music! Something that is relatively close to the 1994 opening titles! The clock! The set! The old Channel 4 logo on the copyright screen!

Right, security protection. For people of a certain age like Kai, they probably won't be aware that a "popular" way of trying to stop piracy was to have some form of copy protection as the game started. Championship Manager required you to enter an attendance figure for a random game from the manual, for example, while Monkey Island 2 had 2 spinning wheels requiring the entry of a symbol that showed under a window. This requires the user to solve a conundrum. Yep, that'll stop people getting into the game who don't have the manual. People into this type of game will have no chance cracking a conundrum. And there's only 200 of them.

On to the game itself. 2 modes of play are offered, competition and practice. Practice is the standard game, whereas competition rules are kind of like a Daily Duel. 99,999 games are stored but you can deviate on the letters selections as it's the order of the piles that are stored. Each game is selectable, or a random game can be chosen. A pretty cool feature that will satisfy the "If you'd picked another vowel in the previous round then you could have had a niner in this round" brigade.

Also 3 levels of difficulty from Average through Good to Champ are on offer.

I get to choose who goes first, and decide to open the batting.

On to the game itself. The letters board looks like the letters board. A generic woman reads out the letters as they are picked. The screen fades before showing the letters at the bottom and the clock at the top. No hand on the clock but the music is there. When time's up the letters vanish and a declaration length is asked for. Ok, I'm beat but I enter my word anyway but see I've made a typo on the first letter. No matter, I'm asked if it's correct. So I get another chance to type my answer. So far, so good.

No Dictionary Corner, rather the 'Concise Oxford' makes a suggestion if there's a longer (or different equalling) word - but only 1 word. Also why is it called 'Concise Oxford' in the game. The manual refers to Dictionary Corner...

For the 2nd round the computer picks speedily, but for those who find Apterous a little too quick then the reading out of the selected letters helps keep the pace at a manageable level.

Round 3 and I see how robust the letters selection rules are. I pick 5 vowels, then when trying to pick a 6th vowel a G comes out. Not a perfect solution (I'd prefer a beep or some sort of too many message), but it works.

From memory there are some dodgy words in the dictionary and a few omissions with no right of appeal, however I did take a screenshot many years ago of the game declaring something utterly bizarre - WILMICIXT was the selection, LXIII was offered by Dictionary Corner! Having a couple of dodgy plurals or some verb forms missing I can live with (just), but including roman numerals?

Round 4, numbers, and, er, I'm picking the numbers? Hmm. But on the plus side the tiles are laid out properly and I can pick an inverted T or any other selection. Also why is the target and number tiles still in view? I've got infinite time on practice mode to enter a solution, so I could cheat quite easily.

Typing the solution is something that can only be described as sheer hell. To quote the manual:

"For example, suppose you have the numbers 75 9 9 8 5 and 3 and a target of 321. One solution would be:

9-5=4
4x8=32
32+75=107
107x3=321

Type 9 - 5 ENTER
Type 8 ENTER *
Type 75 ENTER +
Type 3 ENTER *

Another example: you have the numbers 75 25 3 6 4 6 abd tge target 797. A possible solution is:
6 + 6 - 4 = 8
75 + 25 = 100
8 x 100 = 800
800 - 3 = 797

Type 6 + 6 - 4 ENTER
Type 75 + 25 ENTER
Type *
Type 3 ENTER"

WHAT?!?

I swear when this game first came out I solved a numbers game and wrote it down, then spent over 5 minutes trying to work out how to enter the solution in a form the computer would take. Stupidly overcomplicated, makes me pine for the ZX Spectrum's numbers game. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And why is the computer allowed to use brackets in its solution, but I'm not? Stupid. And it sometimes multiplies a solution by 1. I don't know what algorithm the solver uses, but why is it wasting time bracketing out the solution then multiplying by 1? STUPID!

Now for obvious reasons you will always have to declare your word first if there's a tie in word length, but it'll happily put up the numbers solution first for the computer player if it has it.

As for the conundrum, well, there's a generic voice asking for the conundrum to be revealed, it appears at the bottom of the screen, Space buzzes in. The conundrum is mixed properly (NAILSROUT in the test game), no complaints there. It works how you'd want it to work. However in test game 2 the answer was DEMOCRATS. Hmm!

And onto the final score. Score updates are shown between rounds on LCD panels, like the show. Ok, the 28-68 scoreline doesn't exactly flatter my ability but I was playing against the equivalent of Apterous Rex.

Overall it's not bad. The installation originally was quite smooth, modern technology being the beast here. The wordlist is pretty accurate and having the Countdown clock and music makes it almost authentic. The voices are bland but servicable. No Richard or Carol there. But the numbers game? Urgh. Plural conundrums? Double urgh. But still, it's the best so far out of the, er, 2 games reviewed.

I have a horrible feeling that next up it's the handheld game V1.

[Matt Morrison]

Enjoyed reading that, thanks Gary. Never owned any Countdown games but it certainly did make me miss my ZX+3 and the days of security protection code-wheels!

[Charlie Reams]

Monkey Island 2 had 2 spinning wheels requiring the entry of a symbol that showed under a window.

Oh man, good times...

The conundrum is mixed properly (NAILSROUT in the test game), no complaints there.

Constructing these proper shuffles is quite an expensive operation even on modern hardware, so my guess would be that the game just has a database of pre-programmed shuffles. But, given the small size of the copy protection pool, I wouldn't be surprised if it was just one shuffle per conundrum, so you'll probably see duplicates pretty quickly.

[Rosemary Roberts]

Constructing these proper shuffles is quite an expensive operation even on modern hardware

In my youth I programmed a lot of card games on the PET and the C64 (BASIC and assembler). Received wisdom was to shuffle by exchanging pairs of cards a few hundred times. Eventually I hit on shuffling by placing each card in turn into a random location. Surely that method would not be too costly for a conundrum ? Or are you going to tell me that my brilliant idea was fundamentally unsound?

[Jon O'Neill]

Constructing these proper shuffles is quite an expensive operation even on modern hardware

In my youth I programmed a lot of card games on the PET and the C64 (BASIC and assembler). Received wisdom was to shuffle by exchanging pairs of cards a few hundred times. Eventually I hit on shuffling by placing each card in turn into a random location. Surely that method would not be too costly for a conundrum ? Or are you going to tell me that my brilliant idea was fundamentally unsound?

I think by "proper" shuffles, Charlie means ones which you might find on the TV, in which the letters aren't randomly placed but rather spell something out. Usually it's two words, or a word spelt wrong - along those lines.

[Charlie Reams]

Constructing these proper shuffles is quite an expensive operation even on modern hardware

In my youth I programmed a lot of card games on the PET and the C64 (BASIC and assembler). Received wisdom was to shuffle by exchanging pairs of cards a few hundred times. Eventually I hit on shuffling by placing each card in turn into a random location. Surely that method would not be too costly for a conundrum ? Or are you going to tell me that my brilliant idea was fundamentally unsound?

Sounds like you (re)invented the Fisher-Yates algorithm. But Jono is right, that's the kind of proper I was talking about.

[Mike Brown]

Great stuff, Gary. Really enjoying these... looking forward to the next one! How's the avian flu?

[Rosemary Roberts]

I hit on shuffling by placing each card in turn into a random location.

Sounds like you (re)invented the Fisher-Yates algorithm. But Jono is right, that's the kind of proper I was talking about.

If Wikepedia is right that it dates from 1938 then I reinvented it. It was a major breakthrough on the lame processors I was using, but I never knew it had a name.

Certainly the cod words in the shuffled conundrums are more fun than a randomised string. Are you saying that they are constructed by software? Such wordplay is very simple for the human brain, but I guess the result might be too transparent.

[Charlie Reams]

Are you saying that they are constructed by software? Such wordplay is very simple for the human brain, but I guess the result might be too transparent.

Well, on apterous they are constructed by the software, and it was remarkably difficult to get right (and still has some limitations; it's pretty difficult to shuffle a word like ETIQUETTE in a way that doesn't make the answer entirely obvious.) Even now it can take a couple of seconds of CPU time, which would equate to at least minutes on 1994-grade hardware. So my suspicion is that they either wrote them all by hand, or generated them all "in the factory" and then just dumped a database of shuffles into the program.

[Derek Hazell]

I have this game. Interestingly as well as Damian being on the front of the board game (with Don Reid, as mentioned on Countdown Wiki), he is also on the front of this one (this time with Richard Hendron). Somebody somewhere must have had a premonition about his future importance to the show!

If anybody is interested in this game, let me know.

[Dinos Sfyris]

And it sometimes multiplies a solution by 1. I don't know what algorithm the solver uses, but why is it wasting time bracketing out the solution then multiplying by 1? STUPID!

This is actually quite a well established algorithm known as:

Method of
Unnecessary
Befuddlement
Enabling
Eccentric
Number
Solutions

[David Williams]

And it sometimes multiplies a solution by 1. I don't know what algorithm the solver uses, but why is it wasting time bracketing out the solution then multiplying by 1? STUPID!

Is it possible that, rather than selecting a random target, it does random calculations on the six numbers till it comes up with an answer between 100 and 999, and makes this the target? Clues would be that the target is always possible, and lower targets appear much more often than higher ones. And that there are totally unnecessary steps, like multiplying by 1.

[Charlie Reams]

And it sometimes multiplies a solution by 1. I don't know what algorithm the solver uses, but why is it wasting time bracketing out the solution then multiplying by 1? STUPID!

Is it possible that, rather than selecting a random target, it does random calculations on the six numbers till it comes up with an answer between 100 and 999, and makes this the target? Clues would be that the target is always possible, and lower targets appear much more often than higher ones. And that there are totally unnecessary steps, like multiplying by 1.

I'm sure that's exactly what it does. I doubt it has the computational power to solve the games itself, so it adopts the reverse approach. It could certainly have been done better (how hard is it to suppress identity operations?) but it's quite a neat use of very limited hardware.

[Derek Hazell]

Oh well, I offered . . . I suppose I'll try and sell it on Amazon then.

[Derek Hazell]

I just decided to try this game, just for the amusement of seeing how it looks all these years on, but got stuck on this bit because of Windows Vista's refusal to allow full screen DOS mode:

*installs dosbox*
*wrestles with the installer that only wants to install onto my C: drive*
*finally gets game running*

I installed Dosbox (which is supposed to work round the full screen thing), but I couldn't get past the wrestling bit. It kept saying "Not enough space on HD"

So, what else do I have to do to work round this?

[Rosemary Roberts]

So, what else do I have to do to work round this?

My solution to almost every computer problem - get rid of Vista and reinstall XP (or 98, if you can get it, where the user is still somewhat in charge).

[Martin Smith]

Luckily I had the foresight to buy my PC a few weeks before Vista was released. Windows 7 seems to ahve had better reviews and my PC should be up to it, so I might give it a go. really ought to try Linux Ubuntu first, I just haven't got around to it.