Scene it? Lights, Camera, Action!

So apparently somewhere along the way, I managed to make some friends who wanted to come over and play some games. Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit LIVE! weren’t really cutting it anymore so I  set out in search of a new title. Scene it? Lights, Camera, Action! is a party game to fit the bill.

It was released in 2007 which is probably why I managed to get it for less than £9 including the four game specific controllers. This also left me and my friends at a major disadvantage as most of the movies we had watched and paid attention to were released in the last 8 years.

The game sees you play a series of rounds in different circumstances, or ‘puzzle beds’ if you will. Some of these are fairly straightforward. A few examples include watching a clip and then answering questions, although very rarely do the questions actually relate to the scene you’ve watched and sometimes they don’t even relate to the movie. Another example is Distorted Reality where you have to guess who or what the picture is of despite the fact that it’s impossible to work out quickly unless you already know the answer. Oh yeah, and in all questions you are assessed by how quickly you answer.

That’s my biggest criticism of the game really. Take 3 and Star Trailers are two of the more prominent examples. These rounds have loads of questions which are completely ambiguous until the last few seconds of the round where three of the four possible answers could still be true. This makes a time-based scoring system pointless because you have to answer before you actually know it in order to score high. Unless, of course, you already know the answer but more on that later.

One round which is quite fun, and doesn’t have an ambiguous nature to it, is the one where you have pictures of famous people when they were younger. This is fine because you are presented with all of the information needed at the start and so it’s an even playing field from the get go.

The sound effects in the game are some of the worst ever. There is this voiceover guy who is sinfully annoying and has some of the worst and over-repeated one-liners and quips ever heard.  Plus, he is dick every time you do badly.  The music itself is also very ‘cheap budget Hollywood’ which after five or six games becomes really depressing.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 42 Achievements

So the idea of the game is to answer questions about movies and the idea of the achievements is to basically keep doing this until you make the game redundant as a party game to play with your friends.

There are three achievements for the offline against friends mode (which can also be done with two controllers) for winning a match, winning a round of a match and just playing the game. The rest can be earned by playing by yourself, a process that is uninspiring, boring and frustrating all at the same time.

All the achievements they are pretty straightforward and if you are really stuck, you can pause and use the internet to find the answer. This is all well and good for some rounds but the picture rounds and film clips can be tricky if you don’t know the movie. Again though, and I’ll cover this in the last achievement, you will eventually know all the answers anyway. This covers answering all the questions of certain types and all the round-based achievements.

The only round-based achievement which is a royal pain in the ass is Sequentials. You have to put four films in the order they were released. This is horrible for two reasons. The first reason is that if you don’t know the order, (which is likely) you have to look up four individual bits of information on IMBd. The second irritation is that you also have to get the right film released on the right year which is easier said than done in a world where most films are on their third rerelease by now, even accounting for the 2007 information cut-off.

Another achievement that doesn’t make a lot of sense is the Assistant achievement for answering ten questions within one second. This doesn’t say they have to be answered correctly but they do and once you get to the second round and start losing points for answering incorrectly, this is counterproductive in terms of trying to do well in the game and get the achievement at the same time. Basically, you have to start a game and just hit A for every answer until it pops and completely ignore the fact you will be on zero points at the end of it.

The worst achievement, the last one I earned, and the game breaker for me is the Scholar achievement for answering three (that’s right, three) documentary film questions. ‘Three questions you say? That’s not hard is it.’ Now consider the fact that the game has over 1,800 questions and only 6 of them relate to documentaries. Forget doing this quickly and forget ever wanting to play the game again after you’ve done it. Needle in haystack pretty much sums this one up.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Scene It? Lights, Camera Action! was an enjoyable experience for the first three games but after playing for the Scholar achievement, it removes all enjoyment from it completely. It also means my friends won’t want to play with me when I can answer every question within five seconds.