By Ned Jordan

Buzz has been around on the PS2 for a while, but it's taken almost two bull years for it to make its debut on the PS3. With Buzz Quiz TV the quiz show game finally goes next-gen, but how next-gen is it?

You will see the first sign that Buzz is advancing with the times when you open the game box. Quiz TB comes with a set of wireless controllers for the game dubbed "Buzz Buzzers". This is a godsend for Buzz fans because the old wired version of the buzzers had an amazing propensity for becoming hopelessly tangled. The controllers work with a dongle that you insert into one of your PS3's USB ports. The process for binding the dongle with your controllers is a little awkward and may have you fumbling about for a bit before all four controllers are ready to go, but things seem to go smoothly once you complete this exercise. One dongle will support four controllers and the system will support two dongles, so you can get eight players into a game if you'd like. The downside is that each controller requires two AA batteries, so you'll probably want to invest in some rechargeable batteries if you're going to be playing the game regularly.

Before I get into the specifics of the gameplay, I'd like to offer a word of warning to those of you who are Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit fans. Buzz Quiz TV comes with 5,000 questions on the game disc but none of those questions are all that difficult. The only real challenge you'll get from the game will come from trying to press the answer buzzer faster than anyone else. The questions range from easy to medium difficulty, and the fact that they're all multiple choice also keeps the difficulty level down. However, all is not lost for trivia buffs because Quiz TV comes with a couple of features that can expand the question base beyond what is included on the game disc. First, Sony will be providing new question packs on the Play Station Store. Whether or not any of these packs will provide questions that are more challenging than those that come with the game remains to be seen, but the potential is there. There is even more potential in the second option for adding new questions to the game: Buzz Quiz TV supports user created questions.  By visiting the Buzz website, you can enter a series of questions and answers and save your quiz either for your own private use or submit it to the community to make it freely usable by anyone.  Needless to say, this makes the potential question-base virtually unlimited, as well as making it possible to find questions that fit your desired level of challenge.  Players can rate the quality of the publicly available quizzes, which can help you sort through all of the quizzes available for download.  There are a couple of issues with the user created quizzes.  The first is that they are limited to eight questions, so each one will be good for only one round in a game of Quiz TV.  The other issue is that they're really only good for one play.  Once you've seen the answers there's no reason to use the questions again.

Buzz Quiz TV is not much of a game in single player mode.  You answer three sets of questions and are scored on how quickly you provide correct answers (incorrect answers yield no points).  There are no AI contestants, so it's just you versus the clock.  After you answer a few questions the end credits roll and that's about all there is to it.

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