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IGN Review of Buzz: Quiz World
A year ago, Buzz! Quiz TV knocked my socks off. After reviewing a ton of entries in Sony's peripheral-based game show, the presentation, online functionality, and ability to make your own quizzes in Quiz TV captured my heart and made for the best Buzz game ever. Still, there was no voicechat for online games, you couldn't save profiles, and there were a number of other issues that took out the title's legs.
Buzz! Quiz World fixes that stuff, keeps what worked from the last game, and has a level of polish that's nothing short of outstanding.
Buzz is back.
If you're part of the unwashed masses and have never heard of Buzz, this is Sony's flagship quiz show franchise. The disc comes packing more than 5,000 general knowledge questions and tosses those into an array of quiz show rounds that range from being the first to buzz in during Fastest Fingers to trying to answer questions correctly so that you can dunk your opponents in a pool of slime during Over the Edge. Rather than have everyone rocking a DualShock, Buzz is a one to eight-player game you control with wireless buzzers. These tiny devices pack one big red button and four smaller colored buttons that you'll need to hit in certain ways depending on the round.
That's Buzz in a nutshell, but there's so much more to Quiz World.
Let's start from the top -- the presentation has been completely overhauled. The menu is super-simple so that it's easy to jump into a game with or without your friends, check out photos the game has snapped via your PlayStation Eye, or jump to the PlayStation Store to pick up downloadable quiz packs.
The simplification continues when you choose to play. Rather than task you with creating your own game round-by-round (although you can do that), there are a bunch of preset games for your to dive into. You can choose a 15-minute game, a 45-minute game, a game consisting of just serious rounds such as Point Builder and other straight trivia modes, a game made up of silly rounds such as Pie Fight and Short Fuse, a game made up of just the quiz packs you've downloaded, and so on. There are even new single-player challenges where you see how many questions you can answer before getting dumped in the goo and how many points you can bank in Stop the Clock -- when you scroll over these modes, the leaderboards for your system and the online landscape pop up.
All of this is a great improvement over the more complicated selection we saw last time.
Also in the "awesome boat" is the addition of some new modes. While you're still hurling pies like so many Buzz games before, Boiling Point (be the first to get six questions right and fill your thermometer for massive points) and On the Spot (you vote if you think your opponent will know the answer, the result gets turned into a point value, and the opponent either gets that or loses that based on his or her answer) are brand new. A couple rounds even spell out the possible answers now so it becomes a guessing game as to if the word being spelled in the woodwind instrument you're looking for or whatever the correct answer may be.
While that's cool, the stuff that really speaks to me is all the stuff Buzz himself is doing. When you start a game, you'll get to either create a profile -- enter your name, gender, character, costume -- or load one of the 30 profiles you can have saved. Here's where everything starts getting awesome. When you enter your name, you enter the first letter and then get a list of names to choose from starting with that letter. The name you choose will then be called out verbally by Buzz in the game.
No longer are you just a nameless player -- this Australian Muppet knows you, man!
This profile saves how many times you've played and when the last time you played behind the scenes so that when you're going, Buzz can let the noobs pick rounds and comment on how well you did last time. Of course, Buzz has always been a bit of a dick as he calls you out for being super-slow on the buzzer and not being able to get anything right, so start mentally preparing yourself for those verbal barbs to hurt a bit more than usual because he's using the name your mother gave you.
The Final Countdown is back as the endgame, and after missing it last time around, a rendition of Europe's "Final Countdown" is here as the round's theme. In the end, Buzz presented the winner with a (purposely) terrible prize.
When the match is over, you can choose to jump back into a rematch or out to the main menu, but another delicious touch is a set of scrolling "credits." Here, the game recaps who had the most incorrect answers, the fastest fingers, and used their taunts the most. It even goes the extra step of letting you know who has the most correct answers ever and the all-time slowest fingers. There's nothing like finishing a competitive game with evenly matched friends only to be reminded of your one friend who played forever ago and was terrible (see: IGN News Editor Jim Reilly). It's stuff like this that make Quiz World feel like a much more polished product.
Of course, there's always room for improvement. Although Buzz moves around a lot more while introducing the rounds, he usually introduces them from the same area each time -- whenever it's time for the Final Countdown, Buzz springs off the wall and lets you know what's up. Even though I haven't seen all of the prizes available for you to "win" at the end of a show (there's a Trophy attached to the feat, so I'd notice), I have seen Buzz give away the UFO more than a few different times. It would be nice if this stuff was more varied.
In the end, this is the only place repetition pops up, and I'm fine with that. I'd rather it be here than in the questions you see, and due to the fact that I don't think I ever saw a repeat in the hours and hours of Quiz TV I played and haven't seen any in Quiz World, I'm satisfied for the time being.
It's the Final Countdown!
Next on my improvement list is getting more names in the see-and-say Buzz database. It's depressing to have friends over and have everyone find their true name except for "Daemon" and "Kristine." Also, the process of setting up who's playing could use some simplification. Right now, it's a bit chaotic in eight-person matches to have everyone buzz in to play and start scrolling all at once with no real idea who is who. In the same vein, it's a bit weird to force everyone to finish the step they're on before the entire group can move on to selecting characters and costumes. There were plenty of times during my Buzz party last night that I was chiding someone to select something so that we could move on only to discover the game was waiting for me and not whomever I was yelling at. That one interface can be that confusing.
A small gripe for Trophy whores like myself is that you can't sign in multiple PlayStation Network Profiles like you can in LittleBigPlanet. For a game with so many nifty trinkets for scoring 3,200 points in Stop the Clock and stealing from every player in Point Stealer, it'd be awesome to award those honors to the appropriate player rather than just giving them to the owner of whatever system you're playing on.
Keep in mind, those complaints are me nitpicking. Buzz! Quiz World gets just about everything right that I -- or any quiz fan -- could ask for. I know I mentioned that voicechat is in the online mode, but there are more changes here as well. For starters, you can now have up to four local players go online and compete individually with opponents on the PlayStation Network. See, last time, you and I could play online on my system against PSN opponents, but we'd only have one character on the screen and we'd be competing against each other to have our answer compete against the online kids. Basically, it was goofy and backwards and now it works the way you'd expect it to. Plus, you can have eight-player matches online now.
The interweb connectivity doesn't stop there. User-created quizzes are back and are still a blast to use. You can browse the thousands and thousands of gems that cover topics such as Family Guy, CJ's Hot Wings, and everything else under the sun via your system, jump into the one you want, and rate the baddie when you're done. You can also log on to MyBuzzQuiz.com to assemble playlists, try out quizzes, and create your own 10-question masterpieces. All of the user-created content from Quiz TV is here, and that library, which is already nearly infinite, is only going to get larger when Quiz World hits next week.
Oh, and all the downloadable quiz packs from Quiz TV will work with this game.
©2009-11-06, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Buzz! Quiz World fixes that stuff, keeps what worked from the last game, and has a level of polish that's nothing short of outstanding.
Buzz is back.
If you're part of the unwashed masses and have never heard of Buzz, this is Sony's flagship quiz show franchise. The disc comes packing more than 5,000 general knowledge questions and tosses those into an array of quiz show rounds that range from being the first to buzz in during Fastest Fingers to trying to answer questions correctly so that you can dunk your opponents in a pool of slime during Over the Edge. Rather than have everyone rocking a DualShock, Buzz is a one to eight-player game you control with wireless buzzers. These tiny devices pack one big red button and four smaller colored buttons that you'll need to hit in certain ways depending on the round.
That's Buzz in a nutshell, but there's so much more to Quiz World.
Let's start from the top -- the presentation has been completely overhauled. The menu is super-simple so that it's easy to jump into a game with or without your friends, check out photos the game has snapped via your PlayStation Eye, or jump to the PlayStation Store to pick up downloadable quiz packs.
The simplification continues when you choose to play. Rather than task you with creating your own game round-by-round (although you can do that), there are a bunch of preset games for your to dive into. You can choose a 15-minute game, a 45-minute game, a game consisting of just serious rounds such as Point Builder and other straight trivia modes, a game made up of silly rounds such as Pie Fight and Short Fuse, a game made up of just the quiz packs you've downloaded, and so on. There are even new single-player challenges where you see how many questions you can answer before getting dumped in the goo and how many points you can bank in Stop the Clock -- when you scroll over these modes, the leaderboards for your system and the online landscape pop up.
All of this is a great improvement over the more complicated selection we saw last time.
Also in the "awesome boat" is the addition of some new modes. While you're still hurling pies like so many Buzz games before, Boiling Point (be the first to get six questions right and fill your thermometer for massive points) and On the Spot (you vote if you think your opponent will know the answer, the result gets turned into a point value, and the opponent either gets that or loses that based on his or her answer) are brand new. A couple rounds even spell out the possible answers now so it becomes a guessing game as to if the word being spelled in the woodwind instrument you're looking for or whatever the correct answer may be.
While that's cool, the stuff that really speaks to me is all the stuff Buzz himself is doing. When you start a game, you'll get to either create a profile -- enter your name, gender, character, costume -- or load one of the 30 profiles you can have saved. Here's where everything starts getting awesome. When you enter your name, you enter the first letter and then get a list of names to choose from starting with that letter. The name you choose will then be called out verbally by Buzz in the game.
No longer are you just a nameless player -- this Australian Muppet knows you, man!
This profile saves how many times you've played and when the last time you played behind the scenes so that when you're going, Buzz can let the noobs pick rounds and comment on how well you did last time. Of course, Buzz has always been a bit of a dick as he calls you out for being super-slow on the buzzer and not being able to get anything right, so start mentally preparing yourself for those verbal barbs to hurt a bit more than usual because he's using the name your mother gave you.
The Final Countdown is back as the endgame, and after missing it last time around, a rendition of Europe's "Final Countdown" is here as the round's theme. In the end, Buzz presented the winner with a (purposely) terrible prize.
When the match is over, you can choose to jump back into a rematch or out to the main menu, but another delicious touch is a set of scrolling "credits." Here, the game recaps who had the most incorrect answers, the fastest fingers, and used their taunts the most. It even goes the extra step of letting you know who has the most correct answers ever and the all-time slowest fingers. There's nothing like finishing a competitive game with evenly matched friends only to be reminded of your one friend who played forever ago and was terrible (see: IGN News Editor Jim Reilly). It's stuff like this that make Quiz World feel like a much more polished product.
Of course, there's always room for improvement. Although Buzz moves around a lot more while introducing the rounds, he usually introduces them from the same area each time -- whenever it's time for the Final Countdown, Buzz springs off the wall and lets you know what's up. Even though I haven't seen all of the prizes available for you to "win" at the end of a show (there's a Trophy attached to the feat, so I'd notice), I have seen Buzz give away the UFO more than a few different times. It would be nice if this stuff was more varied.
In the end, this is the only place repetition pops up, and I'm fine with that. I'd rather it be here than in the questions you see, and due to the fact that I don't think I ever saw a repeat in the hours and hours of Quiz TV I played and haven't seen any in Quiz World, I'm satisfied for the time being.
It's the Final Countdown!
Next on my improvement list is getting more names in the see-and-say Buzz database. It's depressing to have friends over and have everyone find their true name except for "Daemon" and "Kristine." Also, the process of setting up who's playing could use some simplification. Right now, it's a bit chaotic in eight-person matches to have everyone buzz in to play and start scrolling all at once with no real idea who is who. In the same vein, it's a bit weird to force everyone to finish the step they're on before the entire group can move on to selecting characters and costumes. There were plenty of times during my Buzz party last night that I was chiding someone to select something so that we could move on only to discover the game was waiting for me and not whomever I was yelling at. That one interface can be that confusing.
A small gripe for Trophy whores like myself is that you can't sign in multiple PlayStation Network Profiles like you can in LittleBigPlanet. For a game with so many nifty trinkets for scoring 3,200 points in Stop the Clock and stealing from every player in Point Stealer, it'd be awesome to award those honors to the appropriate player rather than just giving them to the owner of whatever system you're playing on.
Keep in mind, those complaints are me nitpicking. Buzz! Quiz World gets just about everything right that I -- or any quiz fan -- could ask for. I know I mentioned that voicechat is in the online mode, but there are more changes here as well. For starters, you can now have up to four local players go online and compete individually with opponents on the PlayStation Network. See, last time, you and I could play online on my system against PSN opponents, but we'd only have one character on the screen and we'd be competing against each other to have our answer compete against the online kids. Basically, it was goofy and backwards and now it works the way you'd expect it to. Plus, you can have eight-player matches online now.
The interweb connectivity doesn't stop there. User-created quizzes are back and are still a blast to use. You can browse the thousands and thousands of gems that cover topics such as Family Guy, CJ's Hot Wings, and everything else under the sun via your system, jump into the one you want, and rate the baddie when you're done. You can also log on to MyBuzzQuiz.com to assemble playlists, try out quizzes, and create your own 10-question masterpieces. All of the user-created content from Quiz TV is here, and that library, which is already nearly infinite, is only going to get larger when Quiz World hits next week.
Oh, and all the downloadable quiz packs from Quiz TV will work with this game.
©2009-11-06, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved