Buzz!: Quiz TV (PS3)
The more games I play based on game shows, the more I come to appreciate a good host, and Buzz!: Quiz TV definitely has one in the form of the eccentric and unusual muppet-like character of Buzz. However, while making the host of the quiz show charismatic feels like an obvious touch, Buzz!: Quiz TV manages to take his role a little further, the avatars the player picks all having a good degree of personality as well that leads to them being the perfect fodder for Buzz’s commentary. If there was any fear of Buzz!: Quiz TV being some dry intellectual game, let it dissolve as you watch Buzz faun over the evil overlord in order to stay in his good graces or criticize the cheerleader for being an airhead.
Buzz himself is the only person who talks in Buzz!: Quiz TV, our well dressed host having a voice fit for a game show but a far more animated body than you might expect. As he introduces the rounds of play he puts his whole heart into making the delivery of familiar rules packed with energy, and while it is a shame he never breaks from the same presentation of that information, it at least makes some practical sense so everyone understands what’s going on. Buzz does introduce every new full game of Buzz!: Quiz TV in various ways, and during the actual gameplay he will respond to things like who is in the lead, who just got a question wrong, or any reversals of fortune with a lot of personality. He’s not a host who is blindly supportive but neither is he extremely rude, happy to give a ribbing to a player who made a mistake or got the question wrong but sometimes skeptical of a player who got a question right so quickly it seemed like a guess. He’ll draw attention to the losing player’s score, but he won’t lay it on so thick that it feels like he’s bullying them, and it helps there’s a layer of detachment in that players select a goofy character as their stand-in. Delivering a light tailor-made jab to the mime you’re playing as when you’ve made a mistake is a lot easier to swallow than something that truly feels personal.
One other aspect of Buzz that makes him a compelling host is how emotional he can get. At times he can seem almost titillated by the progression of the game, never outright saying anything raunchy but certainly looking to raise an eyebrow with some off-color humor. Winning a play session of Buzz!: Quiz TV will have him interact with your playable character in some silly way, sometimes going for the expected route like dancing with a disco-loving dude but at other times irritating the superhero character to the point Buzz gets punched into the stratosphere. The selectable cast of characters are all cartoonish exaggerations of mostly familiar archetypes, there being a cliche nerd, Asian schoolgirl, and a luchador who all overact whenever they get a question right or wrong. More unusual ideas are brought in too, such as someone who seems to literally be Napoleon, a jungle woman, and a vampire queen, so there’s plenty of choice when it comes to who you get to play as and what material Buzz is working with. Unfortunately, sometimes Buzz likes to lower his volume and there are no captions for his speech, so his commentary might not always land because you might just not be able to hear everything he’s saying.
Once you’ve started and picked your buzzer noise from a selection of silly sounds, you and up to 7 other players can begin a session of Buzz!: Quiz TV. To play Buzz!: Quiz TV you will need the special Buzz! controllers that are shaped like a remote but feature one massive red button and four smaller colored buttons beneath it. These can come packaged with the game and will be wireless if you buy the PS3 specific versions of them, but if you played Buzz! games back on the PlayStation 2 you can actually plug in the wired controllers from that set of games into your PS3 as well. While the controllers don’t really have any unique function to justify requiring them over a regular controller, they do perform their job well, the big button easy to press when it’s relevant to the quiz game and the four smaller buttons lined up in the same way answers will be shown on screen so you don’t need to pay too much attention to the colors. For some reason every play session of Buzz! Quiz TV will wipe out the user names you enter, and while it’s nice to be sent back to try out a different character to see how they act, inputting new names every time is a bit tedious if you want to do rapid fire rounds.
The shape of a single play session of Buzz!: Quiz TV will change based on how many players are participating. If you decide to go it solo, the quiz show will take on the form of three rounds of Stop the Clock, a game mode catered to the solo experience. After picking from a small selection of topics you’ll need to answer the questions that appear on-screen as fast as possible, an accurate answer providing an amount of points equal to the time left on the clock. All questions are read aloud but can sometimes be prematurely answered if you can read it before Buzz finishes introducing it, but in single player the only point is to try and set a high score by answering as quickly and accurately as possible. It’s certainly a fairly plain approach to a quiz show and hardly one worth indulging in, but the multiplayer is where Buzz!: Quiz TV shows off its more exciting mode concepts.
When you play with two or more players, there are seven rounds that you will usually find yourself playing in the same order every time. Things kick off with Point Builder where all players are presented the same questions for the sole purpose of racking up some early points. There are no bonuses for being the first to buzz in and everyone can get points if they answer correctly, but these points are crucial to the next round: Short Fuse. In this game type a player is given a bomb and needs to pass it off to another player before it explodes, but to do so they need to answer a question correctly. Short Fuse can be a surprisingly tense round as the bomb’s timer changes each time. A bomb will get rid of a good chunk of points when it detonates on a player and you go through a few bombs before Short Fuse finally ends, but here we already get some of the strategy found in playing this quiz game. The player with the fewest points gets to pick the subject for the questions, and you can try to tailor it so a player struggles to get rid of the bomb or you’ll be easily able to pass it off when it comes your way.
This topic picking strategy continues on into pretty much every mode going forward, the next game type in a regular session of Buzz!: Quiz TV being Fastest Finger. This is, in essence, Point Builder again, but the player who picks the right answer from the multiple choice selection first gets the most points and anyone buzzing in after gets fewer and fewer points for it. Pie Fight leads to some more direct competition though, players now trying to buzz in their right answer so they can hurl a pie into the faces of other players. If a player is hit by two pies they drop out of Pie Fight, with the last one standing getting 1000 points and the other players receiving smaller amounts based on when they dropped out. In two-player this round type is fairly short and not too exceptional, and both it and Short Fuse aren’t present in games with more than four players since it would likely drag or lead to unfair situations, but a Pie Fight with a bigger group can lead to a bit more strategy in who you want to wipe out rather than just picking your only option.
Point Stealer is exactly what it sounds like, players now able to claim another person’s points directly if they’re the one to answer a question correctly first. High Stakes is more of a gambling round without direct competition, players able to make point wagers ranging from 50 to 250 based on how well they think they’ll do on an upcoming question based on a certain sometimes very specific category. Sometimes it could be something as broad as cars, other times it might be incredibly specific like a certain decade’s sitcom intros. This does lead to different wager sizes as people will react differently to varying levels of specificity, but gambling poorly here can make the final round much harder to win since those points are converted into time for The Final Countdown.
The Final Countdown has players rise up on towers that are proportionate to their point total, and as Buzz starts presenting question to the players, the towers will slowly go down with every tick. If someone’s pedestal reach the floor, that player will be eliminated from this final round, but if you answer first you can gain more height for your tower. Answering correctly but too slowly will prevent any further descent until the next question, but a wrong answer pushes you down a bit. The Final Countdown’s structure definitely rewards a player for making it that far with a lot of points but doesn’t guarantee that player a win, a speedy player who can pick the right answers able to potentially overcome the deficit and snag a win.
While maybe varying up the round structure on repeat plays or adjusting them more to player count like making a more involved two player Pie Fight could help Buzz!: Quiz TV be more diverse, the round structures are varied enough to change how you approach a specific part of the play session without losing focus on the quiz game at heart. Buzz!: Quiz TV has a mix of general knowledge and pop culture questions that it classifies under five branches it calls channels. These channels are called Music, Movies & TV, Brainiac, Sports, and Lifestyle, there being many subcategories within these channels like Gadgets & Gizmos or Food. The main reason the channel system is important is players can choose to have a session of Buzz!: Quiz TV only draw questions from one of the five channels, and while you won’t get anything too outside of the header’s supposed umbrella for something like Movies & TV, Brainiac is a general trivia subject with a lot of potential sciences or focuses and Lifestyle can involve things like diet, medicine, or the human body.
During the many round types of Buzz!: Quiz TV you’ll be selecting from the subcategories of a channel, but even within one of these it’s not always too clear cut. Someone might pick Gadgets & Gizmos expecting to breeze through questions about electronic devices, but cars can be found in this category and throw a bone to players who might not have overly specialized knowledge on the subject. In regards to pop culture the game does try to go for the big hits or classics and usually tries to put decade headers in when its something like a specific era of music, although in the sports category it can seem to require some very specific knowledge and the game might overestimate the importance of things that occurred in its release year of 2008. More than some quiz games it seems to try avoid dating itself with a focus on current events of the time, so even if you choose to play with all channel questions in the same game or go for one of the more specific experiences, a person with a good amount of general knowledge can likely hang in there well enough even if certain categories will favor certain players. With over 5,000 questions too it’s not likely you’ll see repeats any time soon, even within the same categories.
One interesting change to the question structure involves moving away from the four answer multiple choice questions towards ones involving images or music. Players might be told to identify the band who played a song and the game doesn’t go for any trick questions with that approach, but considering I’m someone who sometimes struggles to remember which band played which song, the questions where you instead have to put the song to an image of the band were certainly challenging. However, having questions that include audio or visual components does lead to some variety within the round types, especially in the rounds where it might have the game shift through a set of images and everyone is waiting to buzz in when they see the right one rather than just giving the answer the moment they know it. The rounds being fairly quick means you can eventually exit a topic if you’re struggling with it and gain ground in a different subject, and while having a wider range of knowledge will likely earn a player a win pretty consistently. The systems in Buzz!: Quiz TV to help the losers catch up do just enough to keep it from being a foregone conclusion.
Unfortunately, one of Buzz!: Quiz TV’s big draws is no longer available, the online servers taken down and the MyBUZZ! feature inaccessible because of it. This mode allowed player to download new questions and answers made by the community, the possibility for custom quiz sets now completely lost. Admittedly, an offline version would be hard to make compelling since whoever creates the questions would know the answers already and thus the feature would be hard to extract much value from unless you were fine sitting back and letting others try your quizzes.
THE VERDICT: Buzz!: Quiz TV pretty much hits all the required marks for making a good quiz game. The round structures vary up how questions are answered without distracting from the information save for the tension of realizing time is running out, the questions themselves are quite varied but don’t normally require narrow areas of knowledge, and the comeback mechanics for players lagging behind are effective without feeling unfair. Players can pick categories to avoid dipping into subjects they don’t like and even pick a broad channel umbrella to make a play sessions based all around one big topic, so while the now absent MyBUZZ! custom quizzes are gone, you can still adjust your multiplayer session a good bit. Some rounds like Pie Fight only really shine with a very specific group size though and single player is a very dry experience, but in the game’s intended multiplayer setting, you get a delightful host whose interplay with your selected absurd character adds a bit of humor to this light-hearted but well-tuned quiz game.
And so, I give Buzz!: Quiz TV for PlayStation 3…
A GOOD rating. Buzz! Quiz TV manages to be an accessible quiz game even for people not into video games both because of its controller types and because of its range of questions. While Buzz!’s multiple different round types means it probably wouldn’t work as an actual game show, it does hit on that important spread of general knowledge questions that makes watching quiz shows so appealing. You have a good shot of knowing the information Buzz!: Quiz TV expects from you, and if you are completely oblivious to certain topics you can either avoid them by not picking the subject, pick a channel so you only focus on what you know for a whole game session, or can make up lost ground come the next round. The format means guessing can save your bacon too, but knowing the answer will definitely mean that you’ll more reliably earn points by picking right. In a lot of ways Buzz!: Quiz TV feels like a good standard for quiz games, having solid comeback mechanics without sacrificing the importance of earning points and not getting too lost in gimmick rounds or unusual question phrasing. It’s a test of knowledge that can tilt based on which questions are presented and how little variations to the format can close a small amount of the knowledge gap without feeling heavy-handed. Throw in Buzz’s hosting hilarity and some kooky player characters and its a quiz game with some charm on top of solid round structure.
Buzz!: Quiz TV may have a weak single player and some more customization options would be nice to vary up the format a bit more on repeat plays, but it might be the best game in its surprisingly long-running series when it comes to hitting on the general quiz show theme and presenting it without any unusual frills. Here you get a broad selection of quiz questions presented in easy to understand rounds and in an appealing format. While you can certainly get a more exciting quiz game with some more off-the-wall concept or a more specialized question set could appeal to specific players, Buzz! Quiz TV feels like it’s what most people would expect from a video game quiz show without at all feeling generic as it does so.