Buzzkill!
Missing more than just the special controller... maybe they should have packed some friends into the box?
Published: January 29, 2010
Let's get one thing straight right off the bat. I love trivia games. I was all over the 1 vs. 100 Beta, I'll throw a few quarters at the MegaTouch XL 4000 that sits at the end of every bar in America, and I think Quizzes and Dragons is the most played MAME ROM in my collection. So from that standpoint, I though Buzz! Quiz World was an eminently playable product. It features almost all of the modes from the PS3 version, and even includes some video and audio questions. The presentation is a small scale version of the PS3 game, and there are plenty of bright colors and flashing lights to help set the quiz show tone.
The single player portion consists of 4 "challenges" where you unlock additional avatars for yourself by beating a series of Buzz! quizzes that cover all the gametypes; Quickfire, where you answer as fast as possible so you have more time to answer more questions; Points Builder, where each question is more valuable then the last, and a few other modes that all revolve around reading a question and then picking the right answer from among the 4 choices. In the end you have an extra long quiz and then you unlock said character. There are four of these total, and they comprise the entire single player portion of Buzz!, with the exception of downloadable Buzz! question packs made by users, which are just 10 questions on whatever random topic the designer chose.
The multiplayer is obviously where this product should shine. Unfortunately, this is where it falls flat. There are 3 main modes, a hotseat mod that supports up to six people in the same room passing the PSP around, and Ad-Hoc mode that includes gamesharing for up to four people with PSP's in the same general area, and an infrastructure mode for playing online. Each of these modes has glaring flaws.
The hotseat mode is the best of the lot, making one PSP enough to entertain a whole party. But only if entertainment is 5 people sitting around watching the other person stare at a tiny screen and answer a question before passing it to the next person. Not being able to actively watch and compete at the same time sucks a lot of the fun out of the game, but this still remains the most readily playable way to enjoy Buzz!.
The Ad-Hoc mode is of course limited by the fact that I don't really ever hang out with 3 friends and their PSPs in one house, and even if we did, well, you still lose the whole staring at the screen and furiously racing to pound the answer button before your pals. The Infrastructure mode could have been promising. While it would have still lacked that face to face interaction, at least you could get a game going with multiple people, anywhere, anytime. Except that I never once saw a single other person playing online every time I tried to initiate an online game. Not only were there not any games with empty slots, there were no games at all! I know I live in and odd time zones, but in a dozen tries at different times, I could not find a single person playing online. So thus there is NO Infrastructure mode to me.
There are a few other nagging issues too. The game really DOES lose something without it's cool bulky controller with it's special red button that hardly gets used. Searching for the right button on the PSP face can sometimes lead to giving wrong answers. Also, there isn't as much content as you would think. In just two series of single player challenges, I already began to see multiple repeats of the same questions. Of course, the user DLC helps keep things fresh, but the quality of quizzes is spotty at best. I DID ace the Modern Warfare 2 one some guy made though. However, you cannot download quizzes for later use, you have to be online at the time you are playing them, which definitely limits their usefulness.
Bottom line, while Buzz! tries hard to carry on the tradition of it's bigger brother, it's not making the transition to the portable medium well enough for anyone but the most hardcore trivia nerds to really care.
The single player portion consists of 4 "challenges" where you unlock additional avatars for yourself by beating a series of Buzz! quizzes that cover all the gametypes; Quickfire, where you answer as fast as possible so you have more time to answer more questions; Points Builder, where each question is more valuable then the last, and a few other modes that all revolve around reading a question and then picking the right answer from among the 4 choices. In the end you have an extra long quiz and then you unlock said character. There are four of these total, and they comprise the entire single player portion of Buzz!, with the exception of downloadable Buzz! question packs made by users, which are just 10 questions on whatever random topic the designer chose.
The multiplayer is obviously where this product should shine. Unfortunately, this is where it falls flat. There are 3 main modes, a hotseat mod that supports up to six people in the same room passing the PSP around, and Ad-Hoc mode that includes gamesharing for up to four people with PSP's in the same general area, and an infrastructure mode for playing online. Each of these modes has glaring flaws.
The hotseat mode is the best of the lot, making one PSP enough to entertain a whole party. But only if entertainment is 5 people sitting around watching the other person stare at a tiny screen and answer a question before passing it to the next person. Not being able to actively watch and compete at the same time sucks a lot of the fun out of the game, but this still remains the most readily playable way to enjoy Buzz!.
The Ad-Hoc mode is of course limited by the fact that I don't really ever hang out with 3 friends and their PSPs in one house, and even if we did, well, you still lose the whole staring at the screen and furiously racing to pound the answer button before your pals. The Infrastructure mode could have been promising. While it would have still lacked that face to face interaction, at least you could get a game going with multiple people, anywhere, anytime. Except that I never once saw a single other person playing online every time I tried to initiate an online game. Not only were there not any games with empty slots, there were no games at all! I know I live in and odd time zones, but in a dozen tries at different times, I could not find a single person playing online. So thus there is NO Infrastructure mode to me.
There are a few other nagging issues too. The game really DOES lose something without it's cool bulky controller with it's special red button that hardly gets used. Searching for the right button on the PSP face can sometimes lead to giving wrong answers. Also, there isn't as much content as you would think. In just two series of single player challenges, I already began to see multiple repeats of the same questions. Of course, the user DLC helps keep things fresh, but the quality of quizzes is spotty at best. I DID ace the Modern Warfare 2 one some guy made though. However, you cannot download quizzes for later use, you have to be online at the time you are playing them, which definitely limits their usefulness.
Bottom line, while Buzz! tries hard to carry on the tradition of it's bigger brother, it's not making the transition to the portable medium well enough for anyone but the most hardcore trivia nerds to really care.
