Download Word Whiz

Having a similar interface to Trivia Whiz, Word Whiz is a game that tests your English language vocabulary. A shareware game created in 1990 by Scott Miller, Apogee/3D Realms re-released it as freeware in December 2005, along with many other, less popular productions from their catalogue.

Even though I think studying grammar and trying to enrich your vocabulary is boring, I consider this word challenge fun - unlike in Trivia Whiz, where it was a pain to go through half of the questions, despite the fact that I love general-knowledge quizzes. Word Whiz has four volumes, each with nine hundred questions. You have twenty free misses at the beginning, and you gain one more for every ten correct answers. That means you can finish a volume with at least twenty mistakes. If you run out of free misses, it's Game Over.

There are no direct questions here. You receive a sentence with a word that is in capital letters. You must select the correct definition of this word from the four options given to you. The entertaining part is that you can deduce the correct meaning from the sentence, even if you don't really know it from your previous literary encounters. Since I'm not from an English-speaking country, I can't give this game a definite mark, but I'd say it becomes quite easy if you know different languages, as most of the words highlighted here are neologisms taken from other nations' vocabularies. Because the English language actually borrowed a lot of terms from the French, it would be a big plus if you knew the latter language. Other helpful tongues would be Latin and ancient Greek, but you only need a basic knowledge of these.

It was important for me to be a polyglot in order to answer half of the questions, but I don't think people from the USA or UK would need to do the same. If you've read at least a couple of books in your life, I'm sure you'll find this quiz simple. After each answer, your rating will be updated in the upper-right corner of the screen. It's a nice addition, because you can see the level you're at, such as "Word Wimp", "9th Grade Reading Level", "Average", "Just Above Average", "College Graduate Level", "Word Whiz of the Galaxy!" and others. I also need to mention the option of displaying the correct answer after every miss. If you want to make your experience a little easier, you can choose it at the beginning of the game.

However, being fun is not enough; Word Whiz becomes child's play at times, and there's not much to do besides learning some new words or improving your memory, considering the limited interface and the basic sounds included in the package. Still, it's worth a try. You might even prefer it over other games during moments of total boredom.

Since Word Whiz is yet another shareware game from Apogee, after you finish a volume you must start the next one. The files you need to run are: WW1.exe (Volume 1), WW2.exe (Volume 2), WW3.exe (Volume 3), and WW4.exe (Volume 4). The game works in DOSBox, VDMSound and pure Windows XP.

Editor's Rating: 3/5