Buzz!: Quiz TV Review

As a developer it can’t always be easy to come up with new ideas for sequels. Relentless Games, the studio that brought us Buzz! on the PlayStation 2 must have had a hard time when planning Buzz! Quiz TV for PS3. There’s only so much you can do with a quiz and seeing as the PS2 games nailed the quiz show formula it’s hard to bolt on new features rather than re-invent the wheel.

For anyone who has never played a Buzz! game before, it’s essentially your standard TV quiz show, played with buzz controllers. Ideally played with friends, you compete for the highest score in a series of rounds, testing your knowledge in numerous categories (music, movies and TV, knowledge, sports and lifestyle). Things come to a head in the final round where you compete until one player remains. This basic formula hasn’t changed much in this PS3 incarnation, although you’re now free to wave your arms about thanks to the wireless controllers.

Being on the PS3 you can expect a much nicer looking game, with highly detailed character models and some excellent use of surround sound to make it feel as if you really are there. Although a minor thing, the sound of applause from the crowd creates a superb quiz show atmosphere. Jason Donovan is back as Buzz, the extroverted host, and puts in the kind of cheesy performance expected of him. For some it might be too much to take, but we’re quite fond of his over the top mannerisms.

Quiz TV’s biggest strength over the previous PS2 games is its online functionality. This comes through a number of features that are sure to give quiz fans endless amounts of fun. Competitive online play allows you to play against others even if they’re not in the same room as you, in what the game calls Sofa v Sofa play. It pits your gathering of eggheads against another to see who has the greatest collective knowledge. This is just the tip of the online iceberg though.

For the first time in the series players are now able to create their own quizzes. When this was announced we imagined full on mega quizzes combining pictures, video clips and audio, but sadly this isn’t the case. In the real world allowing users to upload multimedia content probably presents numerous copyright problems and would open the service up to crude quizzes that wouldn’t really be suitable for a family game.

What we’ve got is the ability to submit question sets (eight questions per set), in standard multiple choice form. You can write the questions on whatever you like and share them with the world. With the ability to rate quizzes you’ve played it shouldn’t be too hard to see which are worth trying and which aren’t worth the digital paper they’re written on. It’s still early days, with the servers only going live days before this review was written, but the signs are promising. Any game that lets us download numerous quizzes based on 80s cartoons is a winner in our book.

While Quiz TV’s strength lies in its online functionality, elsewhere it’s hard not to be a tad disappointed. For anyone who’s been playing the games over the past few years the questions will likely be far too simple. If you’re at all clued up on music, sport and movies you’ll find most games are determined by who is the fastest on the buzzer rather than who has the most knowledge. This changes somewhat if played with a more rounded group of friends, but many people will need to use the downloadable quizzes to get a real challenge. There’s also no option to set the length of the game, which is something previous Buzz! games on the PS2 allowed you to do.

Buzz! Quiz TV isn’t quite the brilliant PS3 debut we wanted it to be, but it’s still one of the best quiz games on the market. Its superb production values and impressive online functionality, including user created quizzes, make it a must own for anyone who watches quiz shows on a regular basis or anyone who fancies themselves as a bit of an egghead. The wireless buzzers are the icing on the cake. Although not a reinvention of the formula, we’ll be playing Buzz! Quiz TV for many months to come.