The act of running a blog carries with it a few minor benefits, one of which is the discovery, acquisition and storage of useless information. Yes, we bloggers are a noble and courageous bunch, and as self-appointed custodians of human culture we’re always in search of a higher purpose for all of the meaningless junk that has accumulated in our brains. So far, the only thing I’ve come up with is trivia games.

Needless to say, movie trivia games are pretty much the ultimate trivia experience for myself and the Film Junk crew, and we have indulged in more than a few heated matches of Trivial Pursuit and Scene It! in the past (most of which ended in shouting matches and/or fist fights). Last year, Scene It! even released an Xbox 360 version of the game that came packaged with 4 buzzer devices. This innovative idea blew my mind, until I found out that they actually ripped off the concept from another video game series that has existed for years on the Playstation 2.

Relentless Software have been doing the Buzz! series of games since 2004, and in that time have released Buzz! The Music Quiz, Buzz! The BIG Quiz and Buzz! The Mega Quiz (among others). Their latest release is Buzz!: The Hollywood Quiz, and let me just say that if you were a fan of Scene It! on the Xbox 360, this game trumps it on almost every level.

Yeah, the graphics aren’t the most impressive, but does anyone really care about poly counts and high res textures when you’re playing a trivia game? I sure don’t. Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz boasts over 5000 different questions (as compared to the 1800 total queries in Scene It!) and a ton of different game modes each with varying lengths and difficulty levels. There are multiplayer, team play and single player modes, and a Quickfire Quiz that trims out all the fat and just gives you a fast-paced stream of questions. Heck, the Quizmaster Mode even gives you the option of writing your own trivia questions and just using the game as a tool to maintain order and keep score. It’s not necessarily an option most people would use, but it shows just how much thought went into this game and how much value they managed to pack in.

The main multiplayer game mode consists of the following rounds: Hollywood Stars, Fastest Finger, Fact or Fiction, Top Rank, Pie Fight, Rollover, Point Stealer and The Final Countdown. Things like Fastest Finger, Fact or Fiction and Top Rank all have equivalent categories in Scene It!, but I thought the Pie Fight and Point Stealer rounds in particular added some creative twists to the multiplayer experience by allowing you to gang up on the front runners and take them down a notch.

I gotta say, the questions in this game can actually get pretty difficult (with the exception of the Top Rank questions that ask you to put four-word movie titles in the proper sequence), and I haven’t even tried the “Film Fanatic” level yet. Compared to Scene It!, where a lot of times they just show a clip and test your memory of what you just saw, in Buzz! you can be completely hung out to dry if you’re not familiar with a film. Buzz! also seems to cover a much wider variety of topics and offers up some fascinating facts to accompany the questions. The actual movies featured are still very much mainstream fare, although they don’t necessarily favour really recent flicks over older ones.

On top of this, the game has some fun little customizations such as the ability to choose your character, outfit and buzzer noise, and it all adds up to a pretty impressive package. Sure, the host delivers puns that are just as corny as the guy from Scene It!, and your mileage may vary depending on your group of friends. Don’t get me wrong, Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz isn’t going to tear you away from GTA IV anytime soon, but when you’ve got some fellow movie buffs over, it’s a great party game to have on hand. Plus, more importantly, with the game acting as the final judge of who’s right and who answered first, it also helps keep the fist fights to a minimum.

Definitely recommended. — Sean