Buzz! Quiz TV Relentless Interview

Brain straining takes on a new dimension as Buzz! for PS3 brings gamers into the creative process. We chat with Relentless about its new game.

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The disc comes with over 5,000 questions in five channels or categories: Music, Movies and TV, Sports, Knowledge, and Lifestyle. Amor says that coming up with them all is tougher than you may think, calling it something a science.

"When I first started making this game, I thought, This is easy, you can just tap them out. But there's a real skill to making sure that you care about the answer. It needs to be interesting. You need to make sure that it's not so hard that it turns people off. You have to make sure that the wrong answers are funny and there's a sense of humour about it. You need to make it concise. There's a real skill to it."

"We actually took turns to write the questions, but it turned out we were no good at it. So we hired professionals," Amor jokes.

The questions on the disc, however, are just the start. Much like Sony is already doing with SingStar's SingStore on PS3, the company is planning to offer a continuous stream of paid-for downloadable content. Downloadable content will be used to fill important holes in Buzz's repertoire, including quizzes about games themselves. Also coming later is support for the new PS3 camera, the PlayStation Eye.

The relative ease of creating Quiz packs means that the team will be able to create more topical challenges, tapping, as Amor says, into events that are in the zeitgeist. "We always wanted to be able to give a wider variety of things but we've been limited to what we could fit on a disc," he says.

Amor gives the example of a quiz based on the most recent season of Big Brother as something that's possible to do with this new setup. And while the packs will carry a charge, he concedes that there's no reason why there couldn't be free ones that carry some sort of sponsorship.

But perhaps more important than Sony's downloadable content is the role that users themselves will take in the life of the game. Using a web-interface on the MyBuzz community site, users will be able to submit quizzes of their own.

Want to make a quiz about the groom as part of his Stag night festivities? You can do it. Just hop online, create the quiz and send it to your PS3. If you want to challenge the wider audience, you can make the quiz public, which will let anyone try it out - either on MyBuzz or on their PS3. The site will use familiar tools to rank user-created quizzes so that you can stick to those vetted by the community if you choose.

"Like good community sites like YouTube, we just let people do whatever they want," says Amor. "The community decides if it's good or it's bad. When you play the game then you get to vote about how many stars you think it should be. So the good ones bubble to the top and the bad ones bubble down to the bottom."

"I think it's going to be massive," he says.

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