Review: Scene It! Lights, Camera, Action

Movie-muscle flexer

Scene It: trivia game that is ideal for parties.

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Scene It! Lights, Camera, Action

For: Xbox 360

From: Microsoft Game Studios

Classification: PG

Score: three and a half stars

Obviously seeing how popular Sony's party games like Buzz! are, Microsoft has released its own version of a quiz game, one for the Xbox 360 based on a DVD board game series.

The Scene It! DVD games quiz participants on movie trivia, and the Xbox 360 version is no different, offering 1800 questions covering a range of movies over the past 50 years.

The game comes with four wireless buzzers called the Big Button Pad, mainly because each has a giant red button on the top and four colour-coded buttons.

Having wireless buzzers is a nice touch.

The 21 game modes range from having to try to guess the movie from a sketch that slowly develops in front of you, and unscrambling letters to guess a movie's name to watching a movie clip then answering a skill question about it to listening to sound clips.

Movie buffs will love Scene It! as it will give them the chance to flex their movie-knowledge muscle, and will be best played with a group of friends where the competitive spirit will come to the fore as each person tries to outguess the other.

I feel, though, that Scene It! will stand and fall on whether it offers downloadable content over Xbox Live, which will extend its replay value, but judging by the game box it doesn't indicate whether it supports downloadable content as an option -- at least not at the moment. Let's hope things change in the future.

Sometimes the movie clips are a little too long and become repetitive, and the game's narrator is downright annoying.

I wish there was an option to turn off his banal, repetitive quips at the end of each round -- they just got on my nerves.

That said, Scene It! is a good party-game first effort from Microsoft, and kudos for branching out and offering games that don't just revolve around shooting aliens and driving fast cars; but only time will tell whether it will grow to be as popular as Sony's Buzz! series.

- © Fairfax NZ News