A PC-Style ‘Wheel of Fortune’

Does Vanna White know about this?

There’s this new computer game from Interplay called “Lexi-Cross” that looks a lot like “Wheel of Fortune.”

It’s been souped up and changed around enough that the game-makers’ copyright lawyers probably stand on firm ground. But the basics of “Lexi-Cross,” set on a future 24-hour game show TV network, are familiar: a board of tiles concealing letters of the alphabet, spinning wheels, solving word puzzles and, even, a silent female tile flipper named . . . Robanna.

So here we are: The computer meets television--which, as some wag once noted, is the sincerest form of imitation.

Two players--humans and/or computers--face off before two banks of tiles. Robanna flips them to reveal the layout of the crossword puzzle-like game board. You then spin the money wheel and flip tiles again to reveal letters. The words in the puzzle have a common theme, and you win a round when you guess it (i.e., FORTY NINERS, TROLLEY and GOLDEN GATE add up to the solution SAN FRANCISCO).

Each game consists of three rounds plus a borderline-impossible bonus round.

Although not bad, “Lexi-Cross” needs work. The preliminaries, which included a pre-show interview, are cute the first time but get boring really fast. We found no way to avoid them; nor did we find a way to stop a game, save it and pick it up later. The manual was over-designed and omitted some important facts while containing some inaccuracies.

Finally, the wisecracking in “Lexi-Cross” isn’t nearly as good as Pat Sajak’s.

But Robanna seems a pretty even match for Vanna.

LEXI-CROSS

Rating:

IBM and compatibles, Tandy; 512K, 640 K for VGA graphics. List: $49.95.

Computer games are rated on a five-star system, from one star for poor to five for excellent.