E4's Great British Summer of Games #4: Do Yo Knowz Yo Showz?

Whatever subspecies of gamer you are, chances are that you spend a fair amount of time infront of your television. Aside from playing games, chances are that you'll have packed in a good few hours of quality viewing along the way. Do Yo Knowz Yo Showz? is a fine chance to quiz yourself on your TV education, with ten questions to test you on shows from yesteryear.

The colourful, bizarre nature of the quiz is apparent from the word go. After a short introduction from an orange, middle-eastern penguin, ten television related multi-choice questions are each preceded by a short animation to help you on your way. Answer wisely, and your score might just survive the perils of the number tank which is, you've guessed it, a tank swimming with numbers. While the questions pose varying difficulties of trivia, the animations become increasingly eccentric and it soon becomes apparent that Do Yo Knowz Yo Showz? wants to entertain, rather than to make the player work for a perfect score.

Famous faces from Nightrider, Top Gear and Dr Who are all on board to rack up the nostalgia points and make you forget all about the questions you were answering in the first place. Get a question right and a brief but bonkers animation pops up to congratulate you. Get a question wrong and an equally brief but bonkers animation pops up to commiserate you. Will it be a samauri-obsessed, mumbling giraffe or a vase-destroying shadow budgie? One would be forgiven for thinking that the animators either consumed their weight in LSD one sunny coding day, or they're just plain mental.

Sadly, a second play through would have you answering the same ten questions all over again. Some of the animations are funny enough to inspire a second chuckle, especially the Saved by the Bell standard definition versus high definition spot the difference. The penguin host comes up with some laughable one-liners too including "Im not allowed within a 200m radius of question five... *sob*".

Without a doubt, the eccentric animations and broken narrative from your penguin pal force the quiz element of Do Yo Knowz Yo Showz? into a backseat position. The drive for a trophy score of a perfect ten is lost anywhere between questions one and ten, and so the game can leave you feeling like you're clicking through an interactive cartoon of unrelated scenes. There are only ten set questions and however entertaining they are first time round, there's very little variety or replay value here. You could, of course, cheat your way to a high score, but there's no high score boards for friends, which is perhaps an omission too far.

Not to worry, if you can get over the lack of replay value and sit back long enough to let yourself be entertained, there's plenty laughs first time round. Do Yo Knowz Yo Showz? is a great way to kill ten minutes, ideal for showing off to your mates, or for taking a quick break between plays of something else. It won't set the world alight, but it's hard to deny Do Yo Knowz Yo Showz? points for its eccentricity, imagination and entertainment value.