Buzz! Quiz TV

Slowly but surely, Sony's plan to woo the casual gamer is starting to become clear. Drawing obvious, yet understandable inspiration from proven internet concepts, it's now pushing the trendy idea of user-created content far more aggressively than their rivals. There's SingStar, of course, with its YouTubey karaoke video uploads. Eventually there'll be LittleBigPlanet with its drag-and-drop physics playground. And here we have Buzz! Quiz TV, the PS3 debut of Sony's mammoth quiz franchise. The nuts and bolts of the game should be familiar to most fans - Jason Donovan returns as Buzz, the smarmy host - and will be covered when the time comes to dust off the review trousers. For now we'll be taking an early look at the new features added for the PS3.

Anyone who's ever dabbled in Facebook and been inundated with "ZOMG Try my awesome harry Potter Quiz!!!!!" messages can probably guess what the integration of online means for quiz fans. Yes, you can now create your own quizzes, which then get added to a central database from whence they can be played and rated by other Buzz players. At the moment you can only rate quizzes on a general "how good is it?" four-star scale, and I can't help feeling that maybe some way of rating the difficulty as well might help players find their preferred level of challenge as the database fills up.

The quiz creation tool is simple and intuitive, although it can't be accessed from within the game itself. Instead you head to the special Buzz website - you can use a USB keyboard and the PS3 browser, if you don't like moving from the sofa - and get to work. Each quiz is made up of eight multiple-choice questions, which feels a little on the light side (why not a nice round ten?) but should still provide ample opportunity to placate the budding quizmaster in most people. The number of characters allowed sometimes feels a little stingy, forcing you to rethink the phrasing of your questions, but when you consider it all has to fit into the allocated text space in the game it's an understandable compromise.

There's not a lot of room to improvise or stamp too much personality on your creations, but this ultimately helps create a uniform template that keeps everything coherent. Given the sprawling horrors that crop up on Facebook, a little forced brevity could prove to be a shrewd idea. There's no option to add pictures to your quiz, either, which seems a shame but then you realise the legal and logistical nightmare that would follow when people started uploading copyrighted material or "identify the pornstar tits" quizzes. Or worse. So, multiple-choice text questions it is.

Pass The Bomb, just one of the rounds you sadly won't be able to play against anyone not in your lounge.

Once created, you can assign your quizzes by subject, but there's an impressive selection of sub-categories that break things down even more specifically. So, for example, if you were worried that your highbrow quiz about the French New Wave would get swamped by questions about Adam Sandler movies, don't worry - there are separate categories for blockbusters, movie history, specific movies, celebrities and so on. You can also decide whether you want your quiz to be just for personal use, available to your friends or open to everyone. Quizzes can also be flagged from mature content, and you can report any transgressors that peddle muck in the name of entertainment.

Of course, once your quiz is submitted, you can scoot back to the game and play it on the PS3 - or have a search around and see what other people have been coming up with. Quizzes can be added to a favourites list - both in game and on the website - so you can sneakily line up your evening's entertainment (and crib the answers, I suppose) while at work. It certainly excites the trivia gene that I suspect most of us share, and if you ever dreamed of hosting a pub quiz, or just bamboozling your family with arcane facts, it's easy to spend many happy hours dreaming up new ideas for quizzes. There's certainly plenty of incentive to see if you can be the most prolific, or most popular, quiz-maker.

Just playing on the test servers, it's already fun to trawl through the quizzes uploaded by the development team and other journos. The game keeps track of which ones you've played and by the time the gates are thrown open to the general public, the result should be impressive - oodles of free quizzes to elongate your playing time, a rarity in this age of premium downloadable content. That's not to say there won't be paid ways of expanding your question repertoire. Five additional question packs - Rock Legends, Sci-Fi Movies, UK Culture, Australian Culture and Videogames - will be available on the PlayStation Store at launch.

Of course, there's more to online that just the giddy thrill of Web 2.0 user magic. Traditional online multiplayer appears in the guise of the wonderfully titled Sofa vs Sofa mode. Much as it sounds, this pits you - and whoever else crams around your telly - against up to three other teams. The quizzes that follow draw from the same 5000+ question pool as local multiplayer (and single player, if you're weird), but the available round types are limited to just four: Stop The Clock, All That Apply, High Stakes and Fastest Finger. As fun as these rounds are when played remotely, it's a shame that the more outrageous rounds like Pass The Bomb haven't made the online cut.

The system for handling invites is simple and streamlined, and all done in-game, though you have very few set-up options as the host. You can't choose which rounds get played or when, nor can you dictate quizzes based on specific subjects. Maybe it's just because so many action-oriented online games have spoiled us by allowing every aspect to be fine tuned to our exact preferences, but having an online game where you basically wait for everyone to be ready and then take what you're given takes some getting used to. Certainly, if you're going to play at being quizmaster, it'd be nice to tailor the experience a little more to the people involved.

You really can create quizzes about anything you like...

That minor grumble aside, Sofa vs Sofa is a lot of fun and offers a subtly different experience from the offline game. For one thing, everyone in the room with you suddenly becomes an ally rather than a rival, and it feels more like a pub quiz atmosphere as everyone throws suggestions at the person holding the pen. Or, in this case, the wireless controller. Reaction times seemed razor-sharp during our sessions, especially important in a game where being a fraction of a second faster than your rivals can make all the difference. What is missing is any communication with the other players and/or teams, though this is apparently something that Relentless is planning to add sooner rather than later. In-game voice chat and maybe even EyeToy compatibility are both areas the developer has told us it's keen to explore, and either of those would definitely liven up an already entertaining gameplay mode.

So is Buzz! Quiz TV just more of the same in a shiny new shell? To a certain degree, yes, and that's no bad thing. The steps towards a fully connected 24/7 quiz network are slightly less ambitious than I'd hoped, but then there's always room for incremental upgrades once the game is actually populated by you lot. And, let's not forget, Buzz is the only console quiz game to even offer these sorts of features (the 360's Scene It? was bereft of any online functions whatsoever) so it's probably unfair to scribble these wistful musings in the negative column just yet. Having spent several weeks tinkering with the quiz-creation and online quizzes against industry foes, my overriding reaction is that I really can't wait for the thing to go on sale so I can see what everyone else does with these tools. Don't let me down, eh?