Around my house party games are pretty big. We love a good, beer-soaked night of Karaoke Revolution topped off with a few rounds of Catch Phrase or Cranium. When I found out about Buzz! The Mega Quiz for the PS2 I was cautiously optimistic, hoping for another game to add to our rotation. Really, games are never more fun than when you're playing with a bunch of friends. Concurrently, victory is never more sweet than when you've proven how much smarter you are than them also...even if it is with meaningless pop culture bits interspersed with "real" questions.

Over the past few nights I was able to play through (and win!) a couple of rounds so after the jump I'll give you the lowdown on what I thought.

One of the concerns I had were with the included (and required) controllers. Quality wasn't the question considering that they've only got five buttons, what's there to mess up? The major concern was how they would connect to the PS2. I was expecting Sony to be Sony and force you into buying a four player adapter but luckily they made all the controllers funnel into a single USB connection that plug into the PS2 (click on the picture to see for yourself). This is easy to use for the casual players and leaves the other USB slot open since the game enables up to eight people to play simultaneously. The only problem with this is that as of this writing I could not find a single place to buy the controllers separately from the game. We have an email in to the published to find out if and when they'll be available.

The set up for the game is easy and fun, as the game guides you through character selection and name creation. The game's strong personality really comes through as soon as you start to set up a game. The fourteen available characters are all quite quirky and range from a grumpy old grandmother to a Mexican Lucha Libre wrestler, all with appropriately voiced celebratory lines. Somewhat surprisingly there are a few pretty good options for setting up your game. There are a few different difficulties and game lengths to choose from making it fairly customizable for your situation or tastes. You can also play the game where someone acts as the "Quiz Master", creating all the questions from scratch for a completely unique experience.

After you're all set up you head into the game show-style main draw of the game. Once the intros are done you get set up with randomly selected ways to ask you a series of questions, though the styles don't really change that much. Looking at the controllers it's easy to think that you'll be trying to "buzz in" quicker than those you're playing with when in reality this is rarely the case (at least in the basic style of gameplay). Mostly the questioning involves just picking the right answer and occasionally being quicker that the other person. This realization is only disappointing very briefly as the rest of the game is fun enough to make you quickly forget it.

I plan on getting some friends together over the upcoming holiday weekend to play a few more rounds and to try out a few different game modes. I'll have a more in-depth review next week.

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