Genre: Trivia
Publisher: SCEA
Developer: Relentless Software
Release Date: March 11, 2008

Everyone loves a good trivia game. Whether you're simply tossing random bits of information back and forth at a barbecue or participating in a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit, there's just something fun about challenging your friends in obscure pop culture or history knowledge. That appears to have been the basis for the creation of the Buzz! Buzzer, a set of four controllers, each one featuring a giant red "buzzer" and four multicolored buttons, very much like you'd see on any modern game show. It plugs directly into your PS2's USB slot, turning your console into an impromptu game show, with up to four players competing to earn virtual money and prizes. The best part about the buzzer is that it's actually being supported, as Sony seems to realize the powerful casual appeal of an at-home trivia game. Their first release, Buzz! The Mega Quiz was met with surprisingly positive reviews, and hot on its heels is the first expansion, Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz.

The Hollywood Quiz is, quite obviously, built around Hollywood trivia, so there are no science or math questions here, just queries on the inner workings of Jackie Chan, Will Smith and Jessica Alba. With over 5,000 unique trivia questions available, you'll find yourself busy for quite a while. While some trivia questions are text-based, others might require you to identify a snippet of a movie or identify a picture as it unblurs. The only thing missing from The Hollywood Quiz is actual clips from the movies. Occasionally, you'll see a few brief seconds of a movie, but these rarely last very long and don't really allow for extended shots. Compared to games like Scene It! available on the next-generation consoles, this poor PlayStation 2-era title might seem a bit outdated.

The Hollywood Quiz is fairly easy to set up. You pick one of a group of wacky characters, select your costume, select the sound of your buzzer, and in you go. A single-player game is fairly simple: Once you've chosen your character, you're thrown into "Time Builder" mode, where you answer as many questions as possible to earn time. Then you enter Hotseat mode, which is a rapid-fire barrage of questions that lasts until your time runs out. The single-player mode is a nice idea, but it doesn't work out well; while it's fun to answer a few trivia questions, it isn't really satisfying or entertaining. Once you get through a few Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks questions, you'll probably have a better time searching for actual movie trivia on IMDB instead of playing against yourself.

The real fun in The Hollywood Quiz comes from the game's multiplayer mode. The title has a much more robust multiplayer mode than the lackluster single-player offering. Instead of being stuck with Time Builder and Hot Seat modes, there are actually seven different types of multiplayer rounds you'll encounter. Hollywood Stars is the simplest: Hit the right colored button to score points. Fastest Finger shows you a photo and gives a reward to the first to buzz in with the correct answer. Fact or Fiction is sort of a simplified Hollywood Stars, where you're given a question and have to determine if the trivia therein is true or false. Top Rank has you put four answers in correct order as quickly as possible, and obviously, the faster and more correct you are, the higher your score. The most fun of these modes is Pie Fight, where you earn a pie for answering a question correctly, and you can throw it at one of your opponents. Get hit by too many pies, and you're out of the game. Rollover is a modified version of Hollywood Stars; whenever you miss a question, the points you would've earned go into a community pool, and next person to correctly answer will get them. Point Stealer, the final of the regular modes, involves quickly guessing an answer. Do so, and you can steal points from an opponent, but if you're too slow, you'll end up losing all of your points.

Once you've completed a number of rounds, your team enters the Final Countdown level, which is a multiplayer version of Hot Seat. All of your points are converted into time, and the more points you have, the longer your time lasts. The overall goal is to outlast the other opponents, which is easy to do when you've got a bunch of points, but difficult when you're running on empty. Almost all of these minigames are fun. While few can match the satisfaction of giving a friend a pie in the face in Pie Fight, there's a subtle fun in correctly answering Fact or Fiction or draining your friend's score in Point Stealer. If you end up not enjoying any of the games, they can even be disabled from the game's menu screen, ensuring eager gamers a chance for a Pie-free game. However, none of the modes is an obvious dud, and gamers who keep everything on should find themselves having a perfectly good time.

If The Hollywood Quiz has one major flaw, it's that it probably isn't going to challenge any real movie trivia buffs. Even the hardest questions tend to be very simplistic, but that is really about the worst that one can say about The Hollywood Quiz, and it's certainly not a large issue. It makes the game quite accessible, even to those who can't tell Luke Wilson from Luke Skywalker. Obviously, the more fond you are of movie trivia, the easier a time you'll have with the game, but the wide variety of gameplay modes ensures that anyone can have some fun with it. Perhaps the only other problem with the title is one that should be quite obvious from the outset: The Hollywood Quiz is a multiplayer game through and through. Sure, you can technically play it single-player, but why would you? The unsatisfying single-player modes are not particularly fun, unless you've got a real desire to build up your movie trivia skills. If you're not planning on using more than one of the buzzers, then The Hollywood Quiz isn't a game for you.

All in all, Buzz! The Hollywood Quiz is a fun trivia game. It doesn't exactly break new ground do anything particularly new or innovative, but it's good, clean fun for the whole family, in the vein of games like Trivial Pursuit. If you've already got the buzzers, then The Hollywood Quiz is a fun addition to your collection. At $39.99 for the buzzers and game, it's also not a bad deal, although significantly more expensive than a Trivial Pursuit box. For those seeking a fun family game for the PS2, you could do significantly worse than The Hollywood Quiz.

Score: 7.5/10