Professor IQ

Ah, Professor IQ. The game that professed to be educational when really. . .OK, it was obviously educational and not much else. Two players would take turns spinning the “Wizard Wheel” and then play a mini-game. In Puzzle Time there was a sliding-tile puzzle of the alphabet that had to be put in the correct order. Word Scrambles showed a mixed-up word that you had to put in the correct order. Math Fun simply gave you a math problem you had to solve. Finally, Reverse it showed a line of numbers, starting with just 0-2 and eventually going from 0-9. When you pressed the joystick trigger the line reversed itself from the cursor to the left side. The object was to order the numbers correctly from 0 to 9. While all of these games sound about as exciting as scraping your gums, the point was to earn credits, which were then spent on a somewhat amusing final mini-game where you and your opponent (or the computer) had their icons placed on an 8×8 grid. You could spend each credit filling in a square of the grid with your color (overwriting the other player’s color if it was already there). The game was won when one person had filled in the entire grid with their color. You could also “eat” your opponent and send his icon outside the grid if you had more credits than he.

Professor IQ was about as fun as it sounds. However, the bright graphics and cheery music kept it from being a total snore-fest, and if you like those sliding-tile puzzles you might enjoy the alphabet game. Also, in the math and word scramble games a snake-like character with a graduation cap marched across the top of the screen, and if you took too much time solving the problem, an unseen assailant would throw a book at it and a giant “WRONG!!!” would appear at the top. This was obviously in the days before political correctness would take effect; nowadays an authority figure would put an arm around the snake and a giant “YOU ALMOST GOT IT!! KEEP TRYING!!” would appear.

Rating: C-

Well, that’s the only game on Disk 1. Next time: Disk 2, consisting of Necromancer, The Last Starfighter, Pitfall II, and Frogger 2.