Buzz! The Sports Quiz

On your marks. Get set. Buzz!

Actually . . . don’t, if you can avoid it. The first two Buzz! games were good, solid multiplayer fun – something you could get into with a few friends, and have some laughs with. But something went wrong with number three; Buzz! Sports was perhaps never as promising, just based on its subject matter, but it has failed to live up to even the low expectations I had for it.

I think sports was maybe a bad choice to begin with, being too selective a genre of knowledge. But the questions turned out better than I expected. There are a lot of complete blank-drawing sessions, but also a few easy answers. I still wouldn’t say I’m a fan of the Sports quiz, but this isn’t really where the big problems lie.

What does start bugging me instantly is the game’s overtly themed nature. Everything is about the sports, and it starts to get a bit much – and distracts from playing the game. Sporting-themed backdrops I can handle. The characters’ appropriate new styles are even quite well done. I don’t like switching to medals to show who is in first place, but I can see at least why they’d want to do it. But Buzz without his clothes on?! As if everybody’s least favourite toilet-roll-shaped presenter wasn’t previously obnoxious enough (and apparently he wasn’t, because the irritating comments seem to have been stepped up a notch), the opening sequence subjects us to him changing in a locker room!

And the thematic changes don’t stop there. There are now a number of new sports-themed rounds, like World of Sport, Finish Line, and Expert. They’re not good – not good at all. World of Sport is a confused and apparently random romp across a badly-rendered globe (there’s no excuse for such poor graphics in this day and age, but I wonder why the creators didn’t simply opt for a 2D world map). Finish Line is similar, with players on a treadmill, right answers moving you forward and wrong ones back. And whoever makes it first wins a whopping 750 points. Losers get nothing, and the whole round ends up being for naught if no-one crosses the finish line in time – very frustrating! Expert had its heart in the right place (though again it’s a matter of one person claiming a single points haul), but making players answer a series of questions one at a time turns out to not be that much fun: the player on the spot feels pressured, and everyone else just gets bored.

More effort has been put into the visual effects, but it’s wasted effort at best – except maybe the video clips, which are a welcome upgrade. (Perhaps we could have a movie-themed Buzz! next time, and these would come in handier.) And at worst, the visuals are confusing, ugly, and, all-in-all, a time-consuming distraction.
Speaking of time: in addition to the aforementioned delays (and as always far too many hellish moments spent listening to the host’s horrible chatter), Buzz Sports has some of the longest loading times I’ve experienced on the PlayStation 2. And given what it is – a trivia game, and a disappointing one at that – such waiting is ridiculous, and unacceptable.

Getting to the end of even a standard length game was a chore for the four of us (I dread to think what the long would have been like – or answering the hard questions!) Admittedly, we weren’t a roomful of heavy sports watchers; but I honestly don’t think I could even recommend this game even to those of you who are. Oh Buzz, where did it all go wrong?