Buzz! Quiz TV

What the heck, internet. At what point did you stop telling me about cool games I haven’t played yet? You didn’t drop the ball when SingStar came out. Earlier, you told me about Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid before I knew games could be any more involved than Alex Kidd and Ayrton Senna’s Super Monaco GP II, and since SingStar hit our shelves you’ve still been telling me about the various cool games coming out. So why didn’t you say anything about the Buzz series?

I guess I shouldn’t blame you, really. I did actually see it once, and I had a look at all the wires and thought about how any game of Trivial Pursuit has ever gone down in my household (imagine telling a know-it-all they’re wrong, then imagine they’re a belligerent drunk and multiply by five) and decided four garrottes wired to my entertainment system might not work. It’s more than wireless buzzers which has me loving Buzz! Quiz Tv though.

The game is so simple and yet so engaging. It reminds me of sitting in front of the TV watching Sale of the Century all those years ago, except now when I get the answer wrong everyone still laughs at me and Tony Barber’s equivalent calls me stupid. The game’s host gives you props when you’re right and bags you out when you’re quick and wrong, keeping wrapped up in the experience.

Buzz!, if you haven’t encountered it before, is a quiz game. The game is broken up into a number of rounds, each one having different challenges to help you earn points. One of the rounds lets the fastest correct answer throw a pie to eliminate a challenger – you can still hit yourself though, so you have to be careful. Another puts a bomb in your hands, and you have to answer as quickly as possible to get rid of it. Your total score dictates your position in The Final Countdown (minus the obvious Europe soundbyte), the last round of the game, where you have to answer as quickly and correctly as possible to avoid being eliminated.

The entire game is made of multiple choice questions, which is obviously a necessity – you can yell the questions out if you like, but there’s no real interface for the game to read it. The five button interface is always broken up between rounds – you either use the four coloured buttons for swift responses to multiple choice questions, or you use the single large buzzer to quickly identify who’s singing a certain song or who starred in a particular movie in rounds with visual stimuli.

As a Buzz noob all the features are new to me, but one of the PS3 only additions is the Sofa Vs Sofa game mode. It’s online multiplayer, where you can play against random individuals from around the world. Buzz translates well to the online format as your ping time doesn’t seem to be an issue – still, it’s a lonely way to play what is obviously a party game. Single player mode is like Sofa versus Sofa… minus the other players. It seems like a completely worthless mode – you can’t practice at Buzz as there are over 5000 questions plus downloadable packs, so you’d never remember all the questions.

I’d like to see is persistent characters – at the very least give players usernames which lasted beyond game changes. Letting someone create a profile with a name, preferred character and buzzer noise seems like some pretty basic stuff and throwing in a profile picture from your PlayStation Eye seems like an easy cash-in opportunity. PlayStation Eye support for the entire game should have been a native addition to the game – you could take snapshots of the winner, screenshots of people when they lose and – most importantly – heckle your opponents if you decide to play online.

I imagine the Buzz series has always been one of those games that you only pull out when everyone is too hoarse to play anymore SingStar. That’s what the game has turned into at my place. It’s definitely not worth buying a PS3 over, but it’s definitely a must have title if you’re the kind of person who likes to have friends around to goof around with video games. With support for up to eight players, over 5000 questions over a vast range of subjects and the ability to download both dev and user created questions, Buzz! Quiz TV is a great addition to your PS3 library.