iReview: Trivia Crack addiction spreads through JC

Scroll to unlock a review of the best and worst iPhone apps. Media Chief Lauren Glase explores the App Store, bringing you advice regarding the most popular and the most helpful apps around.

Crack is spreading throughout the halls of JC. Trivia Crack, that is. Instead of getting high, students are getting high levels.

Trivia Crack is the newest number one free app in the app store. Whether your goal in the game is to increase your level, collect characters, or beat your friends in general knowledge questions, Trivia Crack is as stimulating and addictive as the drug referenced in its name.

The premise of the game is simple. You challenge your friends or other Trivia Crack players around the world with questions in six different categories: geography, history, art, science, sports, and entertainment. Each round, you spin a dial for a random category and get one multiple choice question. Upon answering three questions in a row correctly, you answer another question to achieve a character. The goal of the game is to collect all six characters, one from each category, before your opponent.

Here’s the downside: while the app is free for download, you either need money or patience to play the game fully. You start the game with three lives. Once you start a challenge and answer incorrectly, you lose a life. Then you must either wait an hour to refill your lives, or pay $0.99. While the price may seem low, the addictiveness of the game will lead you to spend way more than you had intended.

Trivia Crack would have been a good game if it had come out about a year ago, but with QuizUp as its predecessor of trivia games, I had higher hopes. QuizUp was released Nov. 2013, and it became my addiction. It has hundreds of specific categories, with more constantly being added, in which you can challenge your friends and other QuizUp users.

QuizUp has a category for everything – your favorite subject, your favorite TV show, your favorite movie – whereas Trivia Crack has the same six categories. That, in addition to the fact that QuizUp is free in all ways, makes Trivia Crack far inferior to QuizUp.

Remember, kids: drugs are bad. While Trivia Crack may look fun to try just once, its addictive nature will suck you in, distract you, and empty your wallet. Don’t give in to the peer pressure.

Lauren Glase is the Media Chief for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.