The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Essner decided we should go to Lambert’s for no reason, and I decided eh, why not? That meant we had a very long wait ahead of us, so I busted out an app I had grabbed for free awhile back: Movie Cat.

Basically, Movie Cat is a movie trivia game. You get 9 “lives,” which represent how many incorrect answers you can get. The different difficulties make you lose different amounts for a wrong answer. On medium, for example, you get one “grace” wrong answer before losing a life, though it does cost you points. The idea is to play all five rounds without losing all your lives, and score as high as possible. Fairly straightforward.

They’ve got a pretty solid mix of categories here. There are several standard trivia categories, like “Award-Winners” and “Chick Flicks,” but there are also categories like “Cat Chat,” which shows you a section of a script from a film, “Dressing Room,” which shows you cat-ized versions of costumes from a movie, and the one I thought was the most clever, “DVD Chapters,” where you have to guess what the movie is by the titles of the chapters on the DVD release. You have to complete 5 random questions to move on to the next round, but you have three “shuffles” per game, where you can draw different categories for that round, if you don’t like what’s up there.

Essner, the movie buff, seemed to think the questions were fairly easy. For me, though, who doesn’t have a mind like IMDB, I thought the questions were of a fairly good difficulty level, having both fairly easy questions and fairly hard ones. I have had trouble getting through all five rounds sometimes. Essner, of course, could breeze through them, no problem.

The only flaw I can find with this app is that it’s single player trivia. I find trivia to be a multiplayer event. That’s why I liked QRank so much: it made it multiplayer by having all your friend compete on the same set of questions. Even if you wanted to compare Movie Cat scores (you can upload your results to Facebook, if you’re that kind of person) you can’t compare them in a meaningful way, because the questions are always randomized. Still, if you like movie trivia on the go, this is by far the slickest and most complete product I’ve enjoyed on iOS. Of course, my only comparison has been the Cash Cab game, which is alright, I guess, but the interface is kind of shitty and it isn’t great. Movie Cat oozes polish. It has that going for it.

Would I pay $2 for it? I’m not sure. I don’t think I would play it a lot alone, which makes that 2 dollars something probably better spent on another iOS game or two. That’s completely personal, though. If you want a trivia experience on your iPhone, especially movie trivia, this is one of the best I’ve seen by far. It’s a quality product that I have certainly had some fun with.