Review: Scene It? Box Office Smash

Mike Bantick
Friday, 01 May 2009 07:45

Entertainment

Scoring is based on when an answer is logged, using a countdown decreasing score bar to reward the quickest answer.

The puzzles themselves are generally entertaining, ranging from a consistent dose of Movie Clip, where a short clip is shown and followed with a bunch of questions, to the more original games such as Crosswords (get crossword clues to solve the intersecting movie related word), Pixel Flix (name the movie as depicted by some eighties style video game graphics) and Pictograms (figure out the movie or actor frim the visual clues).

Some games don’t quite work, Sequentials, where you need to name movies in their chronological release order, is just kind of annoying, and some of the static images from films are a little small and/or obscure on screen to identify an answer readily.

The questions themselves are quite U.S centric as well – I mean, sheeesh  Airplane?  I know it as Flying High.  As befits the nature of the game though, the topics of interest don’t tend to stray away from the mainstream – there is not much here for big screen art house fans.

At the end of each round, in a strange decision, points can be enhanced by certain rewards.  These include winning the round, stringing a combo of answers together, or even getting a bunch of answers incorrect.

It would have been nice to make these bonus points an option to the game being played; it can unbalance the whole quiz.

The Final Cut is simply four questions, where stringing correct responses together will increase a score multiplier, which works pretty good as a catch-up round for those close to the leader.

Other reviews of BOS point out the annoyance of the voice-overs in the game, I found the humour okay, and did not have an issue with a grating of the nerves in this area.  Here I go again, but I do prefer the game-show approach of Buzz in this area.

You can go online, team against team, and download content from Xbox LIVE, and whilst I didn’t experience any doubling up of questions, some movies get the lions share of the content (Tom Hanks I need to research your work), it will be nice if this release gets lots of content love from Microsoft and Krome.

Best played with people that have similar cinematic likes, BOS will respond with a tight contest right to the last buzz.


7 Big Button Pad’s out of 10