Buzz! The Mega Quiz Review (PS2)

By Paul Munn | December 6, 2007

Buzz! The Mega Quiz is Sony’s original IP, first-party foray into a trivia game show for the PlayStation 2. Relentless Software developed it for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, and once I noticed where the game was made I looked for but didn’t find any noticeable localization problems or language differences. While the game itself is really a very good quiz game show from Sony that was fun for me and my wife, I did find a definite show stopper if you plan to play this game on a PlayStation 3.

The Rundown
Nestled securely in a $40 blister pack at retail you’ll find the Buzz! PS2 game, and four wired USB controllers. The blister pack is just as hard to open as it looks, but the contents are of pretty good quality. The four PlayStation-branded Buzzers plug into a single USB port and all parts of the game use the buzzers, leaving the regular controller by the wayside. Indeed you can’t even use a regular controller to play the game should you want to add a fifth player. Another set of Buzzers will work, bringing the maximum number of players in this offline-only game to 8. It even supports the Eye Toy and, according to the manual, it can take a snapshot of you when you miss a question and show it in-game for the studio audience to laugh at. (I no longer have the PS2 Eye Toy so I did not test this feature.)

The Good
There’s a lot to like about this game show and trivia game. It looks good, the voice work of the game show host and assistant aren’t grating, and the spoken instructions for the game are pretty clear. There are quite a few types of rounds you’ll see during a given game giving it impressive gameplay variety. I had fun playing it with my wife who as a general rule plays no video games and we would play it again.

The Bad
The only bad thing I found about this game had to do with what I reviewed it on and it reflects an embarrassing lack of attention from Sony since this is a first-party title. I played this game on my 60GB PlayStation 3, the model known for being very highly backwards compatible. The US compatibility database doesn’t list any “major issues” with this game (search for “buzz the mega quiz” with “sony” as the publisher). This makes me think this problem was entirely missed by the page full of SCEA (not SCEE, SCEA) Quality Assurance personnel listed in the manual. There’s a nasty bug in the game that can bring on a black screen of death in two circumstances that it took me quite a bit of tinkering to isolate and find the very easy workaround for.

There are two times that full-motion video plays during the game. The first time is the opening video where you see the contestants getting assembled which lasts one minute and thirty seconds. The second time is when a game is over and the game credits roll. (Why the game rolls credits after each and every game is beyond me, but it does do it.) If you click any of the buttons on the Buzzers while the video is playing the screen goes dark and instead of loading it stops cold roughly 80% of the time. The workaround is simple enough — don’t click anything and wait out the opening and closing videos. Others reporting this issue on the PlayStation Forums couldn’t figure this out, but a bevy of game restarts and some time tinkering filled me in.

To be clear, as far as I know this problem only happens on the PlayStation 3, and not on the PlayStation 2, but this is a first party title and is clearly a screwup I never expected to see on what is otherwise a very good quiz game.

The Future
This franchise clearly has potential, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw this appear natively on the PS3 with question packs sold via the PlayStation Store. If it had voice support and PlayStation Eye support for video snapshots while we played online it would be even nicer. But that’s all pie-in-the-sky and wishful thinking. Right now I’d have been satisfied with a PS2 game that ran perfectly on my PS3.

The Now
If you’re going to play it on a PS2, my guess is that it will work fine for you and be a score of 4 out of 5. Why on earth do I have to remind Sony that the PS3 is the current generation and that they should check these games before they go out the door? For forgetting to check this game on the PS3, I give it a score of 2 out of 5.