Review: Buzz! Master Quiz

Buzz! Master Quiz
SCEA, Relentless
Available for Playstation Portable

Buzz! Quiz the popular trivia game has always been on the Playstation console but now Sony has moved this fast-fingered game to the handheld market with Buzz! Master Quiz on the Playstation Portable. Our favourite Muppet-like host is bringing the trivia for some new and lightening fast fun and we’re grabbing our bag of useless knowledge in order to review this sweet game.

Much like the Playstation 2 and 3 version of Buzz!, Master Quiz plays out like a TV show quiz game with Buzz as your host guiding you through several unique rounds of trivia questions. Each round has its own way of making you answer the questions or earning your points. Top Rank quizzes have you ordering things such as "The," "Strikes," "Empire," and "Back" to form a Star Wars title and four actresses from the oldest to the youngest. Meanwhile, a Picture This quiz will show you a portion of a picture -- the game has more than 1,000 licensed images, videos, and tunes -- and ask you a question based on it. So, if you can identify David Bowie's chin from a revelled tile, answering a question about who sang "Fame" will be that much easier.


There are over 5000 questions to answer in the game and 9 different rounds to answer questions in. You have the choice of playing a solo game or a multiplayer game - local or online. Playing a solo game will have you playing through 15 rounds of trivia which takes about 2 hours to finish. You can save your progress through so don’t worry about the length of the games.

Though you won’t get the same full bodied avatars you get in the Playstation 3 version of Buzz!, you will get to choose an avatar to represent you throughout the game. They will be your profile and save all your information, trophies and records for the game. You will be able to save up to 3 different profiles, so your friends or family can have a profile too.

The local multiplayer mode will allow you and up to 5 friends play a game called Pass Around, where you use your one PSP and the game will randomly pick players to answer questions during the rounds. Each round is similar to the solo game with unique game play elements to make the trivia answering harder, however there will be a few differences to make the game a little harder for your friends to win.

With the Quiz Host mode, one person keeps hold of the handheld and asks questions for up to six players before inputting their scores onto the PSP. There's some fun to be had here, particularly when the game goes off the trivia path and requires hosts to set mini-challenges like seeing which of the players can make the best impressions of William Shatner, or awarding points to whoever can touch their tongue to their nose.

The wireless multiplayer mode allows up to 4 players to play from one disc via 4 PSPs. The host can set the number of questions, difficulty and categories. There are no media questions in this game though, only basic 4 answer trivia questions.

I personally am a huge fan of the Buzz! TV Quiz game for the Playstation and suggest that every PS3 owner have a copy in their collection, however playing on the PSP is much harder to have fast fingers without a colour-coded buzzer which made the game harder for me. Playing the console version, you can memorize the position of the buttons easily, but the PSP version was much harder to memorize and my answers and buzz time suffered greatly because of that.


Visually the game isn’t as cool to look at as the PS3 version, but when you’re dealing with a handheld game you don’t expect high-res graphics. Mostly the game is text based, rather than graphics but really when you’re playing a trivia game, do you care what it looks like? Buzz is still cute as a bug with his Muppet foam-like body and red shiny suit.

The sound is very low but you can still make out Buzz’s little witticisms if you crank the volume up. Much like the console versions, Buzz repeats himself a lot but you learn to ignore it after a while and just pay attention to the important stuff - the trivia questions.

Being a huge trivia buff, I love a good trivia game especially one I take on the road with me and share with friends. I would have liked to have seen the developer make a game with smaller solo modes but thankfully you can saved in the middle of game play. Buzz! Trivia is the probably the series of games on the market today, so I can’t help but suggest picking this game and any other game available to play with your family and friend. With a great line-up of questions, a quirky host and trivia rounds that keep you on your toes, Buzz! Master Quiz is the best trivia game for your handheld system and I hope Sony and Relentless make more games for the series.

Rating: 8 out of 10
Buy it!