Quizmaster

First things first: I hate that Buzz host guy. I just don't like the look of him. But he's far less obnoxious that the overplayed voiceover guy from You Don't Know Jack, so that's a plus.

The game, however, is a hoot. Rhonda and I did three 1-on-1 matches tonight, and each was no longer than 20 minutes... so it seems nicely brisk for multiplayer. We also did one online multiplayer game, and I think that was even shorter. In summation, nice short chunks of gameplay rather than dragging it out for an entire evening, a la Mario Party.

Some of the trivia games skew towards unfair. There's a hot potato style game that penalizes whoever is holding the potato when time is up, and you have no idea when that is... effectively making it entirely random. The Pie Fight game lets you choose which opponent to hit with the pie by clicking when his or her name is highlighted, but it also includes you in that list so if your timing is off, you whack yourself with a pie. These are small design mistakes that are accentuated in a two player match; both would be less annoying with three or four contestants.

Anyway, most of the games are fine. Some include video clips or Getty Images style still photography, which is nice.

The PSEye integration is pretty classic. The host will spur you to pose for photos at certain breaks between games, but it will also take photos without telling you. That is fantastic and probably dangerous. At the end, the winner is told to ham it up and that photo is nicely displayed as part of the Buzz virtual set, and it looks great. After you're done playing, you can browse all the photos (about six per game) in a album gallery.

The online mode lets everyone in your house play against everyone in up to three other houses simply by making all the controllers active. So everybody can ring in, even though your team is represented by a single sleazy female avatar onscreen. We won our first online match tonight on the final question... it was a game where you have to wager money on the category before the question is revealed. The category was baseball so we only staked the minimum, while the three other loons had wagered the maximum and all lost. (Note: baseball did NOT derive from cricket!)

My fondest hope for Buzz Quiz TV is that they take the Rock Band route and treat it like a gaming platform, not a series of single retail releases. They have started this thinking by offering three expansion packs as DLC, for prices ranging from $6 to $8. The PS2 Buzz games flowed like wine, with different full-retail games showing up in various categories. This is bad. I want the ability to buy only the quiz packs I prefer, at minimal pricing. Since Buzz Quiz TV has been out for a few months in Europe, our edition launched with a pair of free updates, adding a few more sleazy female avatars and PS3 Trophy support.

I bought the Video Games DLC quiz pack, which purports to have 500 new questions. Although so far I've seen FOUR about frickin' Kung Fu Panda: The Game, and a more-than-acceptable amount for The Golden Compass: The Game, so I have to question Sony's true motivation. I bet there's no Nintendo-related questions in there!

But that can be remedied: you can make your own quizzes. You log in to MyBuzzQuiz.com with your PSN account, and type up as many quizzes as you like. (Folks without the game can go there to take free Flash versions of these same quizzes, which is a very classy touch.) Your custom quizzes that instantly show up in your game and can be browsed, searched and played by anybody.

I noticed a low-rent Marvel Super Heroes Real Name quiz, which went for all the obvious, easy characters... so I put together three DC Heroes Secret Identities quizzes with some truly obscure names. If you go to the site and search for "StocDred", you'll find my stuff. The site is all jacked up Flash, so I can't link directly to my profile page.

Custom quizzes are limited to eight questions, but you can create playlists that link quizzes together.

I also did a Fatal Frame General Trivia quiz that is serious. No softball questions in there.

I had the bright idea to make a kid-friendly no-reading quiz for Clark, where the "question" would be something "banana" or "leaf" and Clark would have to press the button that matched in color, but then I remembered that the game automatically scrambles the multiple choices. He's just going to have to learn to read someday.

Soooooo, good stuff. Looking forward to pulling this out on a party night.