For years, we ate all kinds of quizzes on TV. And we liked that, dreaming one day of being in the place of the candidate more excited to go on TV, finally, than to think of his possible gain. Too shy to try our luck, we switched to board games and the Trival Pursuit evening has become an institution. Not as exhilarating as passing in front of the cameras, but already more accessible and more user-friendly! Then came Buzz!, on PlayStation 2. We had already had Who Wants to Be a Millionaire ? before, but Sony's game had the brilliant idea of putting a real buzzer between our legs. In addition to its playful qualities, with varied and very fun events, as well as its real TV game look, its playability has made it a must, an unequaled experience. It's quite stupid, but ending up with the mushroom in your hands (no bad Maxime valve please...) and four big colored buttons, it made the games much more fun and above all more accessible. Despite identical functions, the buzzer was much better assimilated by non-gamers (you know, dad, mom, girlfriend...) than a classic joypad. There, you say to yourself "he's blabbering, he's dragging the line, he's going to end up talking about the game he's testing anyway?". But this long introduction was necessary to address Scene It?, which would probably not have seen the light of day without the success of Buzz! Inevitably, when you see the controllers supplied with the game, you can't help but think that at Microsoft, we were slightly inspired by the competition.
Wireless Buzzers...
And that's not a problem in itself! After all, there aren't fifty ways to design a buzzer, so let's look forward to enjoying them now on Xbox 360. Especially since they're wireless, a real treat for anyone who's known the joys untangling the cables on PS2... Two batteries are required per machine, but they are provided in the bundle. Nice initiative. In order to maintain a correct price (60 € per game + the four buzzers), they do not use the wireless technology of classic joypads but infrared, so there is a small sensor to plug into the console via USB. Once the equipment is installed, we are ready to test our cinematographic knowledge. If we choose a long game, we embark on three rounds, each comprising various tests drawn at random. Cinema obliges, we are fortunately not satisfied with purely textual questions: sounds, images and videos serve as support. This involves, for example, carefully watching an excerpt before answering several questions relating to the film shown, or even to details of the scene. Or even to finish a cult line, to find the actor or actress in a photo that is being recomposed little by little, to guess which film belongs to a poster whose elements appear little by little... Depending on the case, it is It is either to directly press the button corresponding to the correct answer, or to buzzer first before answering. The faster you answer, the more points you earn, the amount being reduced as the seconds pass. But be careful, if at the beginning the wrong answers are not penalized, later they lose as many points as the good ones win. In summary, as the saying goes, "it is better to be silent and look like a fool than to speak up and leave no doubt about it."
More seriously...
In concept, as long as there are three or four of us, it's frankly very fun and we really have fun. The tests are well thought out and varied enough so that we do not see the time passing by chaining the parts. What a pity that the dressing is not up to par! We feel an effort in the presentation with small animations and reconstituted film sets (the projection room, make-up room, the studio...), but we are far from the fun and crazy atmosphere of a Buzz! The universe of Scene It? crazy cinema ultimately remains quite cold and impersonal, it lacks a bit of the second degree even if we are entitled to a few blagounettes. We can also regret the absence of choice in the language of the extracts or quotations proposed for the amateurs of VO That said, the French localization is very successful with a lot of references to French cinema. The spectrum of works covered is also very wide, with classics, recent films, slightly less well-known balls... It might have been interesting to offer several levels of difficulty as an option, a story that the groups quite homogeneous in cinematographic knowledge can directly access the most appropriate questions. And since we are in the reproaches, let us also mention the absence of Xbox Live mode. Admittedly, the game is much more fun with four players in front of the same screen, but playing online could also have been very nice, especially if the game had used the camera to display the head of each player like an Uno on the LiveArcade.
