Back in 2007, Microsoft teamed up with Screenlife to release an Xbox 360 version of the latter’s popular movie trivia game Scene It? Lights. Camera. Action! Microsoft’s intention was to expand its audience, and given what the Buzz! games had done for the PlayStation 2, they thought it’d be easy. Of course, the Xbox audience, focused on action, sports and racing games, didn’t resonate quite as well with the movie trivia games as they’d hoped, so they’re trying it over again with Scene It? Box Office Smash, which adds a ton of multiplayer features along with a whole new set of questions.

Box Office Smash works in much the same fashion as Lights. Camera. Action! in that up to four players compete in a couple of rounds of movie trivia games, more than likely using a special bundled buzzer controlled called the Big Button Pad. Players compete over three rounds (each divided into a number of themed contests) answering questions about blockbuster, cult and classic movies from the 50s all the way up to the end of last year. Each question is a timed multiple choice question – the faster you answer, the more points you get. Once the standard three rounds end, players are taken to the Final Cut to watch a short clip and answer a final set of questions with higher stakes.


Over twenty different game types will pop up over the three rounds. Many of the games from the original return like Anagrams, where one must guess a movie or actor from a scramble of letters, Child’s Play, which involves determining a title from a sketch of a scene or Pictionary-style clue, Movie Clips, where players watch a 2-3 minute clip of a movie and answer questions about the scene or the film it’s from, and Invisibles, where players are shown a still of a movie and must identify the prop or object which is missing.

New game types mostly run along the same lines – Celebrity Ties asks a series of questions regarding a chain of actors, Credit Roll requires players to identify a movie based on its credits which gradually get more obvious as time ticks over, and Distorted Reality asks you to identify an actor based on a twisted up photo which gradually regains focus. The best game of the lot is Pixel Flix, which requires players to identify a movie based on a scene which is played out using old school video game style pixel animation, which are incredibly charming, but unfortunately not too numerous.

That continues to be the main concern throughout the rest of Box Office Smash – there just aren’t enough questions. It’s obvious that the number of questions is limited due to the large amount of space the movie clips take up on the disc, but it doesn’t make it acceptable. Players will start to encounter repeat questions after roughly 10 matches, which is really shocking compared to games like Buzz! The Movie Quiz, which had a heck of a lot more content. One downloadable content pack has been released so far, which for 560 Microsoft Points, adds (allegedly) 800 new questions, but it seems like a bit of a gyp.


Some of the games feature questions and clues which can seem really obtuse. For example, you can have a round of Movie Clip where the questions asked after the short will be almost completely unrelated to the clip you just saw. Some of the Props questions are from films with very few distinguishing factors that only a person with a photographic memory would be able to identify. Aside from that, the game rarely fails to provide a fair challenge (while the questions are fresh).

Along with the new match types, Box Office Smash replaces the original question announcer with two slightly less irritating, yet totally annoying announcers who work in lots of really grating puns and paraphrases of famous quotes. The game’s aesthetic is a whole lot more varied, with players travelling to different locations, rather than trudging around the back lot. The quality of movie clips and stills is top notch.

The main new feature in Box Office Smash is the addition of online multiplayer using Avatars. It helps extend the shelf life of the game for a bit longer, but the fact that everyone has already been exposed to the full set of questions in a short time span makes having a fair and balanced match online quite difficult for newcomers. Playing the game online works exactly the same way as it does offline, and runs pretty smoothly. If you don’t want others butting in, you can always play the new Solo game, which lets you run through about 10 different sets of questions, building a multiplier with each successful answer (though incorrect ones will reset the counter).

Scene It? Box Office Smash is a step in the right direction as far as more accessible gaming on the Xbox 360 goes, but it is shockingly limited in terms of content. Getting repeat questions after about two hours of play is really disappointing and it seriously limits the game’s potential for long term party play. What’s there is good, but we need a lot more of it.