Buzz! Mega Quiz Hands-On

While the sights of many are set on the PlayStation 3, there are plenty of people that are perfectly happy with their PlayStation 2. SCEA's Spring Gamers' Day showed that the PlayStation 2 still has plenty of life left in it, thanks to games like Buzz! Mega Quiz, a trivia game that's already testing the intellect of Europeans and will be doing the same in America come October.

The game will ship with a set of four unique controllers that all connect to a hub, which in turn connects to the PS2 via USB cable. You can also use a second set so that up to eight players can match up in a battle of intellect. Each controller is designed to be held in one hand, and they all have a large red button on top and four colored buttons on the side. Some games require a press of the red button to buzz in, while other games simply require you to press the button that matches the color of the correct answer.

There are difficulty settings for the dullest and sharpest of intellects, and you can choose to play a short, normal, long, or custom game, depending on how much time you have. When you go to start a game, you'll pick from a list of 16 interesting characters, such as a mime, nerd, wrestler, and even a Napoleon look-alike. Each character has three costumes to choose from, and you can customize the buzzer to sound like a laugh, yodel, neigh, or other bizarre sounds.

Think of Buzz! Mega Quiz as a high-tech mix of Name That Tune, Trivial Pursuit, Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego?, You Don't Know Jack, and Jeopardy, all rolled into one. There are between 5,000 to 6,000 questions about movies, music, film, TV, sports, science, and nature. In the first round, we had to listen to and then name the title of Kool and the Gang's "Celebration," name a character in a Harry Potter movie, and then show off our Hawaii Five-O knowledge. The second round was called "winner stays." Here, the goal was to be the last person to miss a question. The game showed a picture of a cow and a pig and then asked which one ate the most. Then, we had to answer the same question with a cow and a giraffe, and then a hippo and a giraffe. One of the most difficult games was called Globetrotter. There's a large globe on the screen and a small plane that flies to a random country. As it flies, it plays the national anthem of the country it's headed to. Once it arrives, the game asks a question about that particular country. You might have to know what a popular Belgian lunch consists of or what the French word is for bathroom. Another fun game was Top Rank, where you have to put a list of four items in order. Here, we were tasked with putting four Robin Williams movies in chronological order, as well as putting four letters from a keyboard in order from right to left.

It's not all trivia in Buzz!--there are some minigames to break things up a bit. You might find yourself shooting ducks in a carnival-style game just after winning a close round of Pie Fight, where you get to hit one of your opponents with a pie if you answer questions the fastest. The last two rounds were two of the most fun we played. Points Stealer let you steal points from your opponents if you were able to figure out what was going on in a series of scrambled pictures. In the final round, you've got a limited amount of time (determined by your score to that point), and the goal is to be the last person standing. If you answer a question incorrectly, you lose time; if you answer it correctly, your time stays the same. Also, if you are the first to answer, you'll earn some bonus time. When the final round is over, the game tallies up your score, and the person with the most points wins--but it's not quite over yet. Both good and dubious achievements are honored with awards like the genius cup, itchy trigger, loser's medal, and the slow coach award, which goes to the slowest player of the group.

Our brief time with Buzz! Mega Quiz was quite enjoyable. The questions were hard but fair, and they covered such a wide variety of subjects that there's sure to be a category for just about anyone out there.