Animal Vegetable Mineral

Sound must be more of a powerful memory trigger than I thought because this is the second game in a row (the other being Oh Mummy) whose sound effects triggered a visceral memory in me. Specifically it's the sound the game makes when it can't guess what you're thinking of.

So what is this game? Well it's a guessing game. The game asks you to think of either an animal, vegetable or mineral and then it asks you one or more questions with yes or no answers to try to figure out what you're thinking of. It's a kind of a dumbed down twenty questions.

The game begins with a comically small knowledge of objects (8) and at the start will just ask a single question and then give up. When it gives up it asks you to name the object and then provide a question to distinguish that object from one of the others in its knowledge store:

One feature the game has that did impress me is the ability to save the objects you teach it to tape and then load them back the next time you load the game. It's a little clunky how it's done (the very nature of a cassette-based system) but it does work and makes entering new objects actually worthwhile. I felt a little bad after my kids had played the game for 30 minutes only to tell them I didn't have any blank tapes 😬.

I'm slightly fascinated by how the game learns. I'd love to know how the developers implemented the storage of questions - presumably it's some sort of graph.

Overall it was a brief trip down nostalgia lane but it's not a game I'm likely to play again any time soon.