E3 07: Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action Hands-On
Unveiled at Microsoft's pre-E3 press conference, Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action for the Xbox 360 is a trivia game in which up to four players will test their movie knowledge against each other in around 22 different challenges. Only five of the challenges were playable at E3, and having spent some time with all of them we can confirm that they're more challenging than those big-buttoned controllers that are shipping with the game might lead you to believe.
Those controllers, incidentally, are wireless, but require their own small receiver that you can place atop your TV. Each of the controllers requires a couple of batteries, and each of the four that will ship with the regular-priced game has a different colored large button that determined which player you are: red, yellow, blue or green. Those big buttons can also be used as directional pads, although they weren't used in that way in any of the Scene It games that we played. The four face buttons are used to answer multiple-choice questions, and the start, back, and guide buttons suggest that the controller might conceivably be versatile enough to navigate the dashboard and even to play other relatively simplistic games.
Anyhow, back to Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action. The challenges that we played included some that required us to use the large button to buzz in and others in which all four players had an opportunity to answer. In both cases, more points were awarded according to how quickly the question was answered, so the odds of any two players ever ending up with the same scores are very slim.
The challenges that we played were quite varied in terms of both content and difficulty. Finishing famous movie quotes wasn't too hard, for example, but identifying the names of movies or actors using a series of images that kind of spell them out phonetically was a lot harder for the most part. Answering questions on a two-minute clip of a movie was as much a test of memory as it was of movie knowledge, and the same could arguably be said of the challenge in which you're tasked with identifying which item has been removed from a single movie frame--without you first getting to see the complete picture. Perhaps the strangest game of the five on show was the one that recreated famous scenes from movies piece by piece in the style of a colorful illustration. Among those that we were asked to recognize were Psycho, North by Northwest, and This is Spinal Tap--all of which looked quite amusing in the challenge's art style, while doing little to convince us that Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action will be quite as child-friendly as Microsoft claims.
Currently scheduled for release toward the end of this year, Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action will feature over 1800 all-new questions, and it seems reasonable to assume that additional question packs and the like will be released on Xbox Live eventually. We look forward to bringing you more information as soon as it becomes available.
