The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

While walking through Best Buy before the giving of the thanks, I was going through the PS3 aisle. See, I was sure there were more PS3 games I should pick up, now that I had one. It was there that I passed a big box labelled Buzz! Quiz TV!. I knew this was the old version for PS3, as I had watched an excellently entertaining Giant Bomb quicklook of the new one. It didn’t seem like a great game, but still something my friends and, more importantly, my parents could get into. I’m always on the lookout for games I can play with my parents. It looked like the perfect thing to play over Thanksgiving!
The kicker, though, was the price. The boxed set with all the little Buzz controllers was on clearance for $30. That’s a value. I bought it.
Obviously, I was sick in bed over Thanksgiving, and we really didn’t get to play it then. But I have gotten some games in since with the parents anyway.

The game itself is, well, a trivia game. It’s fairly straightforward in that regard. Some of the categories, however, do rely on some gamer skills. For example, there is a category called “Pie Fight” where you have to time button presses to take out other opponents. For a gamer, it’s not hard to time this to take out who you want. My parents, however, had great trouble with it, and it is perhaps a round that is a little less casual friendly because of it.
The other major complaint is simply one I have with a lot of games nowadays. The text in the games is fairly small, which is an issue when you’re trying to read answers quickly. Again, I didn’t have TOO much problem with it? But my parents often had trouble figuring out what the answers were. There really is no reason that text couldn’t be bigger on the screen, as there is a lot of empty space.

The buzzers themselves, when compared to, say, the Scene It! buzzers, feel really cheap. I mean, they’re not bad. They haven’t fallen apart or anything? But they lack weight that makes them feel like toys. They also give the impression of being complex to set up. They aren’t really that bad, but since they have to do this weird wireless syncing thing (as opposed to the simple RF of the Scene It! buzzers) it feels like a pain to get them going. You certainly have to devote some time to setting them up, which you never had to with the Scene It! ones, and there’s no way to know which controller is the “first player,” etc, until you’re setting up the game and see which one responds to which. The tiny USB dongle seems much easier to lose than the RF receiver for the Scene It! buzzers as well, which is something to think about.

Overall, though, I think I am totally getting my $30 worth from the game. It’s really hard to mess up trivia, and Buzz pulls it off fairly well. Still, if you aren’t finding a copy of Quiz TV! in a bargain bin somewhere like I did, it would probably be in your best interest just to get the new one, Quiz World. From that quicklook, it certainly seems like the more polished product, with less bullshit round types, not to mention that people like my parents would get a kick out of Buzz saying their name in game. That’s a benefit that I think could probably be overlooked, but shouldn’t.
But yeah. Buzz! is pretty nice. Now I just need to find a set of wired PS2 Buzz Buzzers I could buy for cheap so we could play the game with 8 players.