Cresskill, New Jersey is not the most exciting place in the world to be at any given time, but it is exactly where I found myself last weekend on a visit to the house of my cousin and his girlfriend. After several hours of talking and watching TV, we as a collective found ourselves swimming in boredom, unsurprisingly, with only the Xbox 360 to save us from ourselves.
Now, choosing a game we could all enjoy was not an easy task. My cousin’s girlfriend isn’t too fond of the usual sports and shooter fare, and we aren’t too keen on playing Lego Harry Potter for any significant amount of time, either. We tried to come to some sort of gaming consensus on what would occupy our time when the magical word popped into my head: TRIVIA! Yes, trivia was what we needed!
With renewed vigor, I logged onto his Xbox with my profile in search of the perfect brain-stumper. It turned out that the XBLA games You Don’t Know Jack and Scene It? Movie Night were our two best options. With me being the only master of random trivia in the room and them being amateur movie buffs, I conceded to ponying up for the game that would test our cinema knowledge. By the way, did you know that the human body contains 10 times more bacteria cells than it does human cells? Anyway, I gave Microsoft 800 space bucks from my account and downloaded Scene It? Movie Night. I could feel the boredom slowly dripping off as the gigabytes of my hard drive gradually disappeared. After minutes of anticipation, we fired it up and the game greeted us with a virtual red carpet that led straight into hours of fun. Sort of.
The visuals don't get more exciting than this! Really.
Presentation wise, Movie Night is visual. I don’t mean that in the sense that there’s a lot of great stuff to look at. I mean that in the sense that visuals do exist in the game, it’s just that none of them are really worth any praise, nor criticism. There are no flashy graphics or stylish set-pieces. Instead, what you have a simple and effective layout that displays the questions and the scores of each player in front of a simple, completely unremarkable background image. No need for anything more, and thankfully they gave us nothing less.
What is remarkeable, though, is the annoying “host” that chimes in between answers and rounds. While novel at first, his quips and insults became something to groan about as you could tell the VA doing the part was told to completely ham it up to non-human levels. I could tell my opponents wanted to reach through the TV and strangle the disembodied voice at times, and I would’ve been right there to give them some leverage if it was possible. He’s that bad. I actually didn’t check to see if he could be silenced in the Settings, but if the option is there, you would be better off exercising it immediately.
As a movie trivia game, the way Scene It? Movie Night plays our is pretty standard. You get asked questions and you get points depending on if your answer is correct and how fast you answered. During a game, you will watch clips from movies and answer questions, read quotes from movies and answer questions, look at 8-bit recreations of movies and answer questions, and be shown movies stills and, get this, answer questions. The questions themselves offer a nice variety. My group had a blast trying to figure out what movie a set of glasses belonged to and trying to decipher what movie a 3 year old’s drawing was trying to represent. The competition was fast and fierce as we each gladly flexed our movie knowledge muscles.
Our favorite portion of the game was when it showed you a brief movie clip and told you to pay attention to the scene so that you could answer questions about it afterwards. Oftentimes, the game would ask us about something in the background of the scene we were watching which you wouldn’t notice on first glance, or some obscure fact that only true fans would be able to get the first time around. The main problem me and my trivia-mates had was that the second time around came way too fast.
In this scene, is Eddie Murphy about to: A. Interrogate the store owner? or B. Get molested by the mannequin behind him?
Each game of Movie Night consists of seven rounds of four to ten questions each. The game promises hours of worth of new questions, which is why we were shocked and disappointed when we saw the same Beverly Hills Cop scene for the second time in only our third go around in the game. Sadly, this was only the start of identical rounds of questions being repeated to us within two hours of starting our trivia night. In three total hours of trivia play, we saw one specific set of questions involving The Da Vinci Code a total number of 4 times. That’s just inexcusable. Mind you, I know it is a downloadable budget version of the game, but repeating questions coming up so fast is deflating. This, with the lack of online play, completely kills the replayability of a game that has to rely on its replayability. Just a few more sets of questions would make this game more than worth its budget price, but sadly those won’t come without paying for them via DLC packs which aren’t even available yet.
Scene It? Movie Night turned out to be exactly what it wanted to be, a budget trivia game good for a couple of hours of party fun and not much else. My bored brethren and I enjoyed what it offered for a time, but when the same questions started getting asked over and over again, the boredom the game was supposed to rid us of came back in full force. If you need a quick diversion when with friends and have $10 to spare, Scene It? Movie Night might be worth the download. Otherwise, just hold out on finding the full-fledged boxed versions for a discounted price in a store if you want a movie trivia game that badly because chances are, you really don’t.
