Review: Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz

Sony’s Buzz! trivia series has been a massive hit across the pond in Europe, but only now is it beginning to make its way here stateside, starting over the ’07 holiday season with the US debuts of Buzz! The Mega Quiz and Buzz! Jr.: Jungle Party. A few months later, the next two entries in the series have arrived, starting here with Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz (the other being Buzz! Jr.: Robo Jam, which I’ll also be reviewing soon).

If you’ve already played a Buzz! game before, you’ll be right at home with The Hollywood Quiz, as most of the modes, menus and overall presentation are virtually identical. For the uninitiated, though, Buzz! is a straightforward party trivia game clearly inspired by all the top TV game shows, with more than a few resemblances to You Don’t Know Jack as well. The main draw of the series is using the cool buzzer peripherals — featuring four colored answer buttons and a giant red buzzer button — that come with and are required to play the game. While there is content for the solo trivia fanatic, all Buzz! games support up to eight players and are truly meant to be played with friends and family. When you have a set or two of buzzers, party/social gaming doesn’t get a whole lot more entertaining than the Buzz! brand of trivia.

For The Hollywood Quiz in particular, the trivia content is focused solely on the film industry, with over 5,000 questions that are sure to test even the most knowledgeable movie buff. Sony tapped too many movies to even count in order to amass this enormous question count — from all the latest animated flicks to old black-and-while classics (there’s roll of credits you can watch to see the entire list) – even securing rights to use thousands of pictures and movie clips to provide a greater, more authentic TV-style presentation. You won’t find a game with a deeper collection of Hollywood trivia than this, that’s for sure.

Many of the trivia round types are holdovers from The Mega Quiz and simply offer different outcome variations to getting a question correct, like Fastest Finger (first to answer correctly gets most points), Pie Fight (first to answer correctly gets to throw a pie at another contestant) and Point Stealer (first to answer correctly gets to steal points from another contestant), but there are a few games brand new to The Hollywood Quiz that spice things up a bit. The best new round is probably Fact or Fiction, which is pretty self explanatory game of true or false. It’s a lot of fun though, not to mention full of interesting oddball facts most movie goers have probably never known about certain actors and films. Top Rank, though not entirely new to the series, works great with the Hollywood format and is probably my favorite of the lot. During Top Rank, you are given four answers and asked to put them all in the correct order. In some cases a question will require four words to be rearranged to form the appropriate movie title, while another may give you a list of films and ask you to put them in chronological order. It’s a nice challenge.

As fun as the new rounds can be, because The Hollywood Quiz is limited to a single topic – celebrity culture – it lacks the all-encompassing trivia variety found in The Mega Quiz and is thusly more niche in its appeal. For that reason, I’d really only recommend The Hollywood Quiz in standalone form for those who already own the first game and a set of buzzers. Buzz! newcomers will want to start with the excellent The Mega Quiz first and then think about giving this a try.

Pros:
+ New and improved game rounds like Fact or Fiction and Top Rank are a blast
+ Tons of interesting movie trivia
+ Buzzer controllers work great and make for the perfect party game atmosphere

Cons:
– Trivia questions limited to one general topic limits the variety and overall appeal

Game Info:
Platform: PS2
Publisher: SCEA
Developer: Relentless Software
Release Date: 3/11/08
Genre: Trivia
Players: 1-8