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Buzz! The Music Quiz review

Game: Buzz! The Music Quiz
Platform: PlayStation 2
Genre: Unknown
Developer: Relentless Software

Reader review by goldenvortex

January 31, 2006

If you’re a student in the UK, chances are that you’ve come home drunk on a Saturday night and found yourself watching Quizmania on ITV. For those not in the know, Quizmania is a four hour long game show that runs on throughout the early hours of the morning. It is the true epitome of crap television, just as Buzz: The Music Quiz is for video games.

Buzz is definitely an innovative approach to the small “video” game show genre. However, it stands out from the small crowd by allowing you to play with specialised controllers instead of the regular PS2 pad. The controllers have four coloured buttons on the front and one flashing red one at the top. Thankfully, you get four free when you buy the game and don’t have to worry about shelling out more cash for extra ones. They create a decent game-show atmosphere, but the necessity of them is rather questionable. Especially when the charm of the game has worn off and you have four big ugly sticks cluttering up your space.

Buzz: TMQ is divided up into a handful of rounds, which all involve guessing either the artist or the song title of a track before the other players do. Using the buzzers, you select your answer from a choice of four before the time runs out. Certain variations occur in later rounds where you can steal hard earned points from your fellow contestants and add them to your own or, they’ll see you having to pass a bomb to others by getting your questions right. This will throw the bomb to the next person until it explodes, eliminating the person who still has it.

This is enjoyable for the first few games but after a while, the incredible tedium kicks you in the face. This is mainly due to lack of music clips and the quality of these clips. The first few games are quirky and enjoyable but it gets rather painful to hear the same tracks over and over again, especially when you’ve played the game twice and are already beginning to hear the same songs over and over again. This isn’t helped by the fact that the quality of the songs is pathetic, sounding like something that you’d hear on one of those toy keyboards that you got for Christmas in 1992.

Buzz has a few other annoying problems on a more peripheral scale. Although, the mechanics of the game are bland as hell, a handful of other factors drag it through the mud. The game show host (who looks like the bastard child of Johnny Bravo and Ernie from Sesame Street) has to be one of the most annoying game characters of all time. He’ll run and jump around like a child on crack and spew out some really cringe-worthy phrases that make that Quizmania crap look like Shakespeare.

It’s also a game that requires four players all of the time as the single player mode gets incredibly monotonous after the first question. However, when you play it with three of your friends, you can oversee these flaws and have a laugh with what little fun the game has to offer. If you’re at a party with friends and have a bit much to drink, then Buzz: TMQ can be an enjoyable and short-lived experience. It’s also fun to compete with your friends over points and heckle at them for getting obvious answers wrong but even this has its limits and is clearly not something that can last for a long time.

Buzz: TMQ is rather enjoyable at first but gets old unbelievably quickly. Playing it alone is extremely slow and painfully dull, and playing it with friends only cushions the mediocre feeling that comes down on you like a kick in the balls. The simplistic game play gets incredibly old very quickly and the in-game joke and characters get extremely irritating at a similar rate. True, it does introduce old people and girls to video games but it won’t do anything to enthral those who play games on a regular basis. Unfortunately, Relentless Software are planning to flog this already dead horse even more by releasing movie and sport renditions of this title which means that we’ll be seeing plenty more of Buzz in the near future.

How relentless of them!

Rating: 4/10

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