Buzz! The Ultimate Music Quiz PS3 Review

Publisher – Sony Computer Entertainment Europe – Developer – Relentless Software – Genre –  Party/Trivia – Players – 1-8 – Age Rating – 3+ – Other console/handheld formats – PSP

The very first Buzz! was released back in 2005 on the PS2, it was a music game. Now that the series is celebrating its fifth anniversary, perhaps developer Relentless Software thought it would be a good idea to return to where it started. Buzz! The Ultimate Music Quiz is certainly going to go down well with those who enjoy listening to music.

The first thing that fans will notice is that Buzz himself has had quite a significant makeover. He’s still Buzz, although his body is more realistically proportioned, he has teeth and he appears less cartoon like. The new design came as a bit of a shock, but has since grown on me. If you preferred the old one and want to show your disgust or just find Buzz (this time quoting various song lyrics in his dialogue) mightily annoying and want to get on with the trivia, then this time around you can turn him off altogether.

The Ultimate Music Quiz comes complete with 5000 new questions and it’s possible to use any packs that you have purchased from the PlayStation Store and to once again play questions created by other players. But those worried about this being a lazy update for the series can calm their nerves now; The Ultimate Quiz has a fair bit of new content to play around with. Indeed, the new musical questions are just the start.

This is the manner in which question categories now appear to you. As you can see more categories pop up, which is a neat improvement.

Those who like scanning the options before playing will notice that there’s now a handicap feature, which allows certain players to place a handicap on their profile to perhaps make it fairer on younger and less able players. When turned on, this will reduce the amount of points won following a correct answer, and, for those who’ll be making use of it, they’ll find it to be a great little feature.

Games can once again be played over a set 15 to 45 minute duration by up to four players, although there’s also options to customise the number of rounds of each game. There’s some familiar rounds (Pie Fight, High Stakes, Over the Edge, Pass the Bomb, Point Builder etc) alongside some fresh ones. Speaking of which, there’s two new rounds included: Tune Warp, a round that speeds up or slows down various tunes, leaving you to do your best to recognise it, and there’s also Watch It!, in which a snippet of a music video is shown to you and you’ll then get questions based on that video, with keen observation skills being a must during this round. Both are good rounds and are very much in keeping with the music theme of the game.

There’s also the separate and returning Quickfire Quiz mode. In this mode you just answer question after question with no pause for rounds, with options allowing you to have as few as 20 questions or as many as 100 to answer. The faster you answer the more points you’ll receive, if you get a question wrong or fail to answer within the allotted time then you’ll lose points, it’s as simple as that. Guess what? It’s another brilliant option.

Those with brand new Move controllers haven’t been left out either. Four rounds have been specifically built with Sony’s motion controller in mind, which all still revolve around answering questions, but in an entirely new way. One round has you using a hammer to hit your desired answer, another has you carrying answers and dropping them in a bin, and the final two involve shooting the answer and popping balloons. These rounds are a nice spin on the usual Buzz! game, and makes for a nice change every now and again.

There are some fresh contestants in the game alongside some familiar faces, and they’re all as charismatic as ever.

Finally, new features also come in the form of custom buzzer noises and the paper face. The custom buzzer option allows you to record your own buzzer sounds, which means you can use pretty much anything you want. As for the Paper faces, this fits the Buzz! series very well and allows you to use your PlayStation Eye camera to pop your face into a template and you then see yourself as the head of your chosen character, complete with flapping mouth, South Park style. It’s a fun feature, even if it’s only a novelty one that some will forget about after a few rounds.

Buzz! The Ultimate Music Quiz has a lot of pleasing new content, and music fans are going to lap it all up as they test their knowledge on the virtual stage. It’s hardly as significant an upgrade as Quiz World was, although it’s much more than the lightweight Brain of the UK turned out to be as far as features are concerned. If you like music and you like Buzz! get this for hours of fun quiz sessions, you certainly won’t regret it.

8/10