Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz
Genre: Trivia
ESRB Rating: T for Teen
Developer: Relentless Software
Platform: Playstation 2
Price: $39.99; Released: March 11, 2008

I was able to try out a sweet new game for the PlayStation 2 called Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz. Basically, it’s a game show video game where you get the game and four game buzzers in a little bundle. You can do a regular game or, if you’re feeling confident, you can go for the harder Film Fanatic game. It starts by either picking a quick game and going right to it or you can customize it a bit by selecting the number of players, a character, and a buzzer sound (monkey, yodel, burp, so on). If you really like customizing, you even customize your whole game, picking which types of rounds are included in your game.

Using the basic, multi-player game as an example, we start out with our very muppet-looking host, Buzz, who guides you through the basics with his Vanna White-esque assistant helping from time-to-time. The rounds go as follows:

Round #1: Fastest Finger — The opening round, where all players can answer and whoever gets it correct, gets some points. Whoever answers the fastest is rewarded with the highest amount of points. A nice first round to get a feel for the game.

Round #2: Fact or Fiction — Simply put, our host reads something off and you decide if it’s true or false.

Round #3: Top Rank — Here, we are given a question and the answer involves putting four options in order; for example, “Put the Will Smith movies in order from earliest to latest.”

Round #4: Pie Fight — This is an interesting round as, well, pie is involved. A question is given and the player that answers the fastest will get one pie to chuck at another player. If you’re hit with two pies, you’re out, with the last player standing getting the most points. Be cautious though, the target moves fast and if not careful, you may just hit yourself in the face, which just doesn’t help you at all.

Round #5: Rollover — Here, players choose a category to get all of their questions from. If a player gets one wrong, their points will carry over to the next player and their question until someone gets one correct and reaps the rewards.

Round #6: Point Stealer — This round drove me insane… which means it did its job. Questions usually consist of a blurry picture of someone and players need to identify who it is. Whoever does this first, has the option of stealing points from another player. This can be very damaging to your score!

Round #7: The Final Countdown — Do not fear if you’re far behind, there is still hope! Here, players are given a sort of bar graph with the leader getting the biggest bar, going down to the lowest bar for whoever is in last place. These bars will get shorter and shorter with each second that ticks off during a question; the player that gets answers correctly the fastest will get a decent little chunk of bar back, others who answer correct will stay where they are, and those who answer wrong will lose a chunk of bar. Dominate this round and even the player in last place can make a valiant comeback!

I won myself three games and was rewarded various prizes for each. These prizes included the bike from E.T., The One Ring from Lord of the Rings, and a James Bond-style laser! Unfortunately, they won’t actually mail these to you.

If you’re bored and can’t find anyone to play with, there are a couple single-player games included as well. One game is to answer questions and gain time to use in a final round. And also a game where you answer as many questions as you can, but have to submit your points strategically, if you get one wrong, you’ll lose everything.

To wrap it all up, if you have a PS2 and love a good trivia game, make sure you scoop this one up immediately. It’s fun by yourself, it’s great with some friends, it would be a blast at parties… you can’t go wrong. They did a really good job with setting up the game show atmosphere and with a hefty 5,000 questions included, you will get a lot of mileage out of it. Better yet, these aren’t all gimme questions; my life is movies and I was certainly challenged periodically, and this was not even the hard game.

If movies aren’t really your dance, there are many other categories out there in the Buzz! catalog, seek them out!

Check out this live demo of the game for where you can actually play to win some cool PS2 prizes: