Scene It?: Lights, Camera, Action

While it shares its name and some elements with the popular DVD-enhanced board games, this version of Scene It? features no tokens or dice — it was created with the 360 in mind. Players still watch movie clips (some in HD) and answer questions about what they’ve seen, from 12 Angry Men to Sixteen Candles. In other stages, you’ll try to unscramble movie titles, guess the flicks from childlike drawings of famous scenes, or identify movies by listening to snippets of dialogue. But instead of waiting around for each player to take their turn, every stage becomes a four-player, gameshow-style, button-pressing showdown where speed is rewarded as much as accuracy. It’s pick-up-and-play awesomeness that, despite the grating announcer’s best attempts, doesn’t need explanation. It’s an accessibility that many games in the Xbox 360 library sadly lack. (Our guess: Someone at Microsoft has been keeping an eye on the Wii.)

Most of that user-friendliness comes from the aptly named Big Button Controller, four of which come packed with Scene It? The digital equivalent of lollipops, these responsive, lightweight gadgets simply beg to be pressed. Even the most console-phobic member of your household will find these Big Buttons welcoming and uncomplicated.

But what about the gamers outside your home? The biggest crime here is that Scene It? doesn’t support Xbox Live play. As Uno has proven, this is exactly the kind of casually competitive title that would lure non-hardcore players online — its no-show here counts as the stuff of stupid legend. We see the menu item for downloadable content, but we don’t want new questions as much as we want new opponents.

Though that decision is undeniably brain-dead, the Scene It? designers made several smart choices, too. So long as you’re logged into a profile, the game keeps track of what questions you’ve received, so you should cycle through a good chunk of the game’s 1,800 quizzes before seeing a repeat. Most of the other wrong answers are plausibly correct, so you really are rewarded for paying close attention. And whereas some trivia games try to make with the funny with dumb answers, Scene It? uses that technique sparingly, so when you do spot a joke — sadly, John Malkovich’s middle name is not “Malkatraz” — you might actually laugh at it.

After just four or five enormously fun games of Scene It?, we’d racked up 27 Achievements worth over 600 points — great! We just can’t comprehend why there’s no online film festival.