Scene It? Movie Night Review

Sometimes I forget the joys of local multiplayer. I'm so enraptured by the likes of Battlefield 3 or Gears of War 3 multiplayer that I don't make the time to play in proximity to other humans. Rayman: Origins made a remarkable case for this. While it's not on the same level in terms of outright quality, Scene It? Movie Night hits similar high notes with the kind of entertainment it breeds.



Multiplayer movie trivia is pretty self-explanatory, so your best guess as to what you'll be doing in Scene It is probably accurate. Structurally, matches unravel like any of the past games -- watch a movie clip, answer some questions, grow tired of that announcer's sassy sass mouth. Questions aren't usually as broad or simple as naming the movie or actors present. They'll often cherry pick specific pieces of dialogue or background scenery to test your awareness and attention. Trivia outside the clips involves arranging related films' releases in chronological order, or naming a flick based on a pixelated or childlike drawing of it. If you've ever played a Scene It game before, either on consoles or the board game original, this is all going to look familiar.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Scene It subscribes to an "If it ain't broke..." sort of design ideology. The variety is in the trivia material (which, as my question-answering crew and I discovered after 4-5 hours of Movie Night) tends to fall back on and reference itself a lot. Learning about a film's history or details in one question could help a couple rounds later when a related question comes up. I like the intrinsic coil built into the core of Movie Night -- this gives it a sense of cohesion, a direct focus, rather than a scatterbrained bunch of all-over-the-place ideas.

It'll take at least two or three hours for that aspect to expose itself, so if you're worried relevance means repetition, you'll get a respectable amount of entertainment from it before then. It took a few hours before we started seeing the same When Harry Met Sally, Miami Vice, and A Few Good Men scenes again. Even then, my friends and I only saw a couple repeat questions. We still haven't fully exhausted the list. If we want to get nitpicky about what otherwise accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do in a damn fine way, Movie Night is...a bit hollow. The presentation is scaled way back compared to the lavish and extravagant fanfare usually associated with Scene It. It's a $10 downloadable game rather than a $40-$60 retail box -- it's a great price for a great game, so I'm willing to take the hit when it comes to fancy menus. I'm excited to play more when the DLC packs release -- sci-fi-specific questions? Bring it on. Better still, there's enough in Movie Night proper that these eventual add-ons don't feel exploitative.

Really, Scene It is what it is: movie trivia, take it or leave it. What mattered most to me wasn't connecting heroes to their accomplishments, or picking out Tom Hanks' only line in a Saving Private Ryan scene. Movie Night, like all Scene It games, created this fiery, emotional drive within our contestants that I rarely see in online games. There's something special about berating someone for confusing Die Hard with something else (come on), or pouring praise on yourself while everyone else struggles to remember who Bud White is.

L.A. Confidential, bam, points to me.

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