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A couple years back, Berkeley Systems, the people who brought you the widely deployed screen saver After Dark (source of those flying toasters), released a game called You Don't Know Jack. Jack was a trivia game whose pitch was that it was completely off-the-wall, not taking itself seriously in the slightest. The game quickly became a hit, spawning numerous sequels - there are six Jack games at last count, as well as two online versions updated weekly. Head Rush is Berkeley's latest foray into the trivia realm.

While the previous Jack games tended to be aimed at the 18-25 crowd, Head Rush has a different target audience. Play through a few questions, and you'll see that the game is obviously aimed at junior high and high school students. I'll be writing this review with that in mind, since if I reviewed Head Rush as You Don't Know Jack Volume 4, it would receive a markedly lower score for being far too simple. Fair warning - adults will probably not have a lot of fun with this one, but, in the immortal words of Marty McFly from Back to the Future, "your kids are gonna love it".

The game is not at all buggy gameplay wise, and I've not come across an incorrect question. A couple graphical glitches mar Head Rush's otherwise perfect form. This is quite refreshing in this age of "Just get it released before the buying season, we can always patch it later", and the programmers deserve much praise for bug-free code such as found in Head Rush.

Check out the screenshots for a sampling of what you'll find in Head Rush, but keep in mind that screenshots do not do this game justice at all. A large portion of the game's appeal lies in the speech running throughout by the wisecracking host. Head over to the Overall section of the review for the answers to the various screenshot questions.

Here's a quick overview of the way the game works, for those of you who have not yet been blessed with the opportunity to play one of the You Don't Know Jack games. You select the number of players, then it'll ask you to type in names for yourselves. Don't. Sit around, and the game will assign names FOR you. Laugh at your friends' misfortune, at least until you get saddled with an even worse name. We had one game where the contestants were Cow Lips and Pantyliner.

Then, once you get into the game, you select from one of three categories for each of eleven rounds. Most categories will lead you to a multiple-choice question, worth either $10,000, $20,000, or $30,000. The host will read off a question, then once you think you can choose the correct answer from one of the four choices, you buzz in and choose. If you think your opponent doesn't know an answer, you can buzz in and use a "biter" on him, which forces him to answer or lose money. If he DOES answer correctly, he gets money and you lose it.

Some categories lead to other question types, such as the Dis or Dat, in which the controlling player (the others don't get to play the question) has to decide whether each of seven things that appear belong in one category, the other, or occasionally both. As an example, one question named seven recent movies, and you had to decide whether there was an actor/actress in the movie from Friends or from My So-Called Life.

The eleventh round in this game is always the Head Rush question, in which seven words will appear on the screen, and using a common clue you have to relate the words to other words that fly past them by buzzing in at the right time. This round tends to lose people a LOT of money as they buzz in to false leads.

The questions are, as usual, hilarious, if a little juvenile, which is probably to be expected given the game's target audience. Every once in a while, a totally bizarre question will come up that completely breaks the unspoken rules of the game. I would give an example, but I don't want to spoil these questions for you, as they are rare gems to be treasured when found.

The gameplay is simple and easy to pick up the first time you play through it - if you don't understand my above directions, the game cheerfully explains them to you as the situation arises. There is a MAJOR problem, though, in that if you know exactly how to time it, you can buzz in to the question before the answers appear on the screen, such that no other player gets a crack at the question before you get to guess. This has plagued all the Jack games, and it's unfortunate that it was not fixed in Head Rush. This is the only thing keeping this game from having a 10/10 in Gameplay, and it's serious enough that I have to dock it down to 8. (Note, however, that if you buzz in TOO early, you get a smart remark from the host, the question disappears, and you have to type in the answer just as he would have given it to you. If you've seen the question before, and type in the answer correctly in this way, you get the money and he mutters about psychic powers.)

There are only so many questions in the game (I ran into one repeat in one two-hour stretch of playtime), and once you've seen them all, you've seen them all. Admittedly, it would take a very long time before you came across every single question, but you'd likely see a lot of repeats. The game just doesn't cut it as a single player experience, either. So it's only really fun for any length of time when you have a large group of people rotating in and out to play the game, since in the same group of 3, one of them is bound to get bored eventually. This is a game you'll come back to every once in a while, but I don't see it being used more than maybe once or twice a week after the initial excitement wears off.

Couldn't be easier. Q for player 1, B for player 2, P for player 3, spacebar to "bite" (the equivalent of Jack's "screw"), and 1, 2, 3, and 4 for the multiple choices. Simplicity at its finest.

No 3D-accelerated mip-mapped anti-aliased triple-buffered textures here (I have no idea what I just said). There's just clear, easy to read text. The graphics are a bit on the cartoony side, and some are downright gross. There's a guy who plays the conga drums with his buttocks, and a close-up of a zit-plagued teenager's face. The graphics get the job done, but I can't help thinking they could have been less.well, graphic.

This is where Head Rush really shines. The music manages to not be intrusive, which is a rarity in computer gaming. The real goldmine here is the speech. All questions and most answers have their own individual speech, complete with wisecracks. And the addition of other voices, such as the Moldy Old Man and Milan the Trash Talking Janitor, keep the game fresh. The speech is often key to the question.I know of at least one question where if you don't listen to the speech, you can't answer the question without guessing wildly. You get different greetings based on when you play the game. Both data and time play a role in this. Oh, and listen after the game while the credits roll for more surprises. I can say nothing bad about the sound in Head Rush.

The game makes about a 30-megabyte footprint, using the CD to hold all the speech. I have a couple of complaints. First of all, the game refuses to install to any directory path that does not end with /sierra/headrush. This is very aggravating when you just want to install to /headrush or /games/headrush. Also, it makes far too many shortcuts in the start menu. Five web sites, the Sierra Utilities - which happen to be the uninstaller, although that point isn't too clear - and the game launcher itself. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'd like to see just the program and the uninstaller, and have them show up in a "Headrush" folder in the start menu, not in "Sierra".

The overall score gets the +1 bonus point award for Running Well On My Pentium 166. Fight the bloatware bandwagon! OK, enough preaching, on with the review.

As I said earlier, Head Rush is a game for the 12-17 gang. Anyone who buys this who expects it to be another You Don't Know Jack release will be extremely disappointed at its simplicity. The best way to describe Head Rush is "You Don't Know Jack for kids". Just make sure it's given to the OLDER kids, there's some stuff in there that could warp impressionable young minds. The ESRB's teen rating is well placed. However, in the right frame of mind, Head Rush is a great game for many ages.

Trivia answers

• Prince Charles would not emit hydrogen.
• Mr. Rogers would be wearing armor.
• The Grinch stole Kwanzaa.
• Cornholio experienced the Doppler effect.
• Jewel is not checking out your Ursa Major.
• The best way to masticate is with your mouth.