What do you think you know about movies? Is your knowledge limited to knowing who was the male lead in Top Gun (because Tom Cruise is so lovely!) or do you know who ran the MGM studios in 1948? Are you content with just going to the movies?

If your answer to the last question is yes, you can stop reading this story now. However, if you are interested in the details of the movies, you can test your memory and skills with different movie trivia games found on the Internet after reading this story. Pastime, or waste of time?

Internet is full of all types of movie games. Although there is a wide range of games, they all have one thing in common: they require relatively good English skills. There seem to be no Finnish movie games on the Internet.

Are you interested in cloaks and tricot costumes?

The best place for playing general games is Cool Movie Trivia. This website offers hundreds of games, some of which are realized with Flash. The games are sorted by genre and difficulty level. The hardest questions are truly knotty, whereas the easiest games can be played through really quickly.

The funny categories include, for example, a game concentrating on spiders in movies, a game measuring Jedi Knight knowledge, and a game questioning about various cloak-and-tricot-clad superheros. So in case you know in which year the killer spider of Arachnophobia landed in the U.S.A., of what color the Darth Vader's laser sword was or how many teenage mutant ninja turtles there were, these games are for you.

There are of course also games about actors. Mainly the list consists of actors who have been successful in Hollywood and have made several movies. A quiz about Tom Cruise's smiles can be found, for instance.

One funky variation is a combination of a shoot'em up game and a movie quiz. The game asks a question, and then the user must shoot the candidates that match the answer. This may sound like a simple and easy game, but it is not.

"Hey, I know this!"

Another traditional movie quiz concept is recognizing the origin of movie quotes. This game has also been offered by the English movie magazine Empire for quite some time, as there are familiar lines from movies printed on its back.

Recognizing quotes requires a little more knowledge than can be expected from an average movie-goer. Surely everybody remembers Arnold Schwarzenegger's line "I'll be back", but who remembers lines from the Godfather?

One of the best games in this genre can be found in Huge Movie Quizz. Player can choose movies from one decade between 1970-1990. The game functions similarly to a hangman game: the computer gives a line from some movie and the name of the movie can be found out by choosing letters. The more false letters the player picks, the worse the score.

A word of warning: this game is extremely frustrating and addictive. Frustration comes from knowing for certain that the line is familiar, but being unable to name the movie. Play this game only if you have absolutely nothing more urgent to do.

Trivia and nasty comments

Another game genre is an extreme trivia quiz. There is a plentitude of games available on the Internet especially for Star Trek fans.

For instance, Funtrivia offers a game which concentrates on the details of the starship Enterprise. One might still know on which deck the captain's cabin is located, but it takes a real expert to know the answer to a question which applies to a dialog of one specific episode where one person is asking something and the player should know what the other person replies. This is actually a model example of the extreme side of movie-oriented computer games.

There are also movie quizes on the Internet which have clearly been made with a cheek in tongue. In these games the questions are less formal and the answers can be highly subjective. Or what do you think of the following question: who's the best actor/actress in the Arquette family? Oh and by the way, one of the possible answers is Tennis Raquette...

The above example can be found on the Indiana Sev and the Temple of Movie Trivia site. There the quiz-taker usually receives an analysis of the answers together with nasty comments on how good or bad the result was. This site is not for the humor impaired.

It is quiz time!