Empire movie Quiz
Think you know
everything about movies? Confident that you can beat your significant other and
leave your friends basking in the radiance of your superior entertainment
knowledge? If so then the Empire Movie Quiz is a must purchase to while away
those cold winter evenings.
These interactive quiz
DVDs are certainly all the rage at the moment, Empire Movie Quiz is the second
I’ve reviewed in as many months. Empire, for those that have never heard of it,
is a monthly film magazine and has been running since July 1989. Published by
Emap Consumer Media, it is the biggest selling film magazine in Britain. In
this modern electronic world Empire have also created a presence on the
internet (Empire Online) and have now extended the franchise with this
interactive DVD quiz covering a very broad range of film topics.
The graphics of the
DVD throughout try to make it feel like you’re at the cinema. The start-up
screen represents the curtains that cover the screen and you’re presented with
several options:
Play – starts a game
Instructions –
explains the workings of the quiz
Trailers – pretty self
explanatory
On top of the written
instructions there’s a voiceover which again reinforces the cinema experience. It
sounds like the typical voice over man you get on film trailers. The music for
the front menu screens sounds very cinemaesque and in fact wouldn’t be out of
place in an Indiana Jones film. On choosing the play option you are then
presented with four other options:
Solo Game
Two Teams
Three Teams
Four Teams
For this part of the
review I’ll cover the Solo Game option and I’ll go over the multiplayer options
later. Upon choosing the solo game option you then have to choose a character
to represent you. You can choose from The Producer, The Femme Fatale, The
Director or my personal favourite (delusional I know) The Action Hero. After
choosing your character you’re then presented with Easy Rider or Hard Boiled
difficulty levels. The first few times I played it through I tried Easy Rider
and managed to complete the game two out of three times. I then ventured to try
the Hard Boiled option and have yet to get anywhere near completing it. Let me
tell you that they weren’t kidding when they named it Hard Boiled!
The aim of the game in
single player mode is to achieve an Empire 5-star rating. You get one point for
each correct answer and one star for every 4 points, so after a little mental
arithmetic you have to answer 20 questions correctly to get the coveted 5-star
rating. It’s not quite that easy though because you only have three lives to
loose on your way to those 5 stars. Loose them all and it’s game over.
Once you’ve
successfully negotiated all those options the game begins and you get to choose
the category of your first question. The full category list is:
Heros & Villains
The A-list
Classic Scenes
Make ‘em Laugh
Popcorn (Does actually
have questions about popcorn in, also has some general film questions)
The Winner Is
Turkeys
The Horror The Horror
The Golden Age
Behind the Lens
Toon Time
So Sci-fi
You only get a choice
of four categories from the above list chosen at random. This means that there
may be a time when you can’t choose from any of your favourite categories which
makes things a bit more interesting. On the downside there’s a fair chance that
one of your favourites (So Sci-Fi, Heros & Villains, The A-List & Toon
Time in my case) will be there and you can choose the same category as many
times in a game as you want, as long as it’s one of the four options.
Questions are purely
text, the voice over guy doesn’t read them out which is a real shame, I think
the developers of this DVD missed a real trick here as it would have added a
lot more atmosphere to the quiz if the questions were voiced. The questions are
multiple choice, one answer from four options. Simply move the cursor with the
directional controls on your DVD remote and hit select. There’s no time limit,
which I personally prefer, no mind blanking panic as you see the timer running
down. In Easy mode some of the questions have options that are obviously wrong
(for the question, who did the make up for the werewolves in An American
Werewolf in Paris, Max Factor was one of the options!), but in Hard mode all of
the answers look plausible, so if you don’t know the answer it’s a one in four
guess.
After answering a
question, you find out if it’s right (it also tells you what the correct answer
should’ve been if you get it wrong which isn’t good for longevity) you then go
to a screen that tells you what your score is. When you reach a multiple of
four then it takes you to another screen and gives you an Empire star.
Reporting the score after every question gets a bit tedious after a while, it
really slows things down and I found myself getting impatient after a while. If
you answered four questions in each category and then reported the score at the
end of the four questions I could understand it, but you only get one question
per category so your score goes up in ones which I can easily manage to keep
track of myself. After answering a question then it’s back to the choose a
category page with, hopefully, four different categories to choose from.
Another thing that
lets this film quiz down are the infrequent film clips and pictures. Don’t get
me wrong, there are some film clips and images in there, there just aren’t nearly
enough. I think it was about the second time I’d played it through before I saw
my first picture and the third time through before I saw my first film clip.
More of these would’ve given some variety to the questions but unfortunately it
seems like 95% of them are just plain text questions.
I’ve mentioned that
you choose a category from four chosen from random from the above list of
twelve. If the same category does come up you can keep on selecting it. If you
do choose the same category twice in the same game there’s a chance that you’ll
get the same question as before. I don’t know how the software for these
quizzes works, but from playing a few others where this doesn’t happen I’m
quite sure there’s a way of coding it so it remembers which questions have been
asked in any one game and not repeating them. Some sloppy programming here.
With these quizzes the
repetition of questions between games is a big thing. If you’ve only played it
through a couple of times and seen all of the questions then it has very little
replay value. If however you’ve played it through several times and there’re
still plenty of new questions coming up then you’ve gotten good value for
money. Empire Movie Quiz quotes over 1000 questions. If we assume exactly 1000,
and that the questions are allocated evenly across the categories, then 500
should be for the easy section and 500 for the hard option. Divided amongst the
12 categories then means that you’ve got approximately 41 different questions per
category fro each of the difficulty settings, which is pretty good. After
playing through the game about 5 times and tending to select my favourite
categories whenever possible I was still finding new questions.
Multiplayer
If there’s more than
one of you to play then you can split up into different teams and compete
against each other. Unlike before you don’t get to choose a character to
represent your team, the program allocates them. There’s also a difference in
the way the game is played, it’s now split up into rounds (seven in total I
think). Each team still gets to choose one from four categories but now you’re
faced with the option of taking easy questions for one point or hard questions
for two points. Instead of one question per category, in team mode you now get
two questions per category. After one team has answered their questions it’s
back to the category selection screen (which can contain different category
options than the previous team had) where the next team chooses its category.
There is the possibility that this may bring about a few arguments, should you
have some very competitive teams as one might be faced with worse category
choices than the other team who may get lots of their favourites to choose
from.
A good touch in the
multi-player is that one of the rounds adds a little variety as well. Round
four doesn’t consist of the same old multiple choice questions, instead a
question is revealed and it’s the first team to shout out the right answer (you
could ideally do with an impartial adjudicator here as I can see some arguments
over this!). There’s a timer to the question after which it asks which group
got the right answer (there is an option for none in case nobody knew!). After
that it’s back to the same question format as before for the remaining rounds
and the team with the highest score at the ends gets all the plaudits.
Overall
Good Points – Broad
range of films and subjects, good selection of questions gives pretty good
longevity, different format for multiplayer gives a bit of variety and
introduces some measure of strategy, do you play it safe with an easy question
or risk a hard question for double points?
Bad Points – Shame
that the questions weren’t voiced, shortage of images and film clips, hearing
the score after every question in solo mode gets annoying and you can get
repeat questions asked in the same game.
I think this quiz is
interesting to play through on your own a couple of times, but comes into its own on multi-player where it adds variety making it better than similar interactive quizes I've played.