"It's Like A Party On My Couch, and Everyone's Invited!"

Microsoft has been vying for a piece of the casual pie that Nintendo has been scarfing down since the launch of the Wii, and some of their results have been surprisingly entertaining.

Most of us self-proclaimed “hard core” gamers have friends and family that only play video games casually, or often not at all. Sometimes, our favorite games we want to show off to them have a steep learning curve, or complicated controls and concepts if you don’t already have experience with the console. You can end up spending the whole night explaining how to take cover, blind fire and rhody run. This is a surefire way to scare off people who just want to try out something fun and simple.

What can you, the core gamer, do when there is a shindig and you’ve got a hankering for some gamering?

Enter “Scene It? Box Office Smash!”. Not only is Scene It the first 360 title to have avatar support, it also uses the license of a series of DVD/boardgames that are already a big hit with the casual market.

Scene It is a movie trivia game wherein up to four players compete in multiple choice challenges. They have made this even easier by the inclusion of the “Big Button Controller”.

The entire game can easily be navigated using these. In the menus, you simply use the X (blue) and Y (yellow) to move the cursor up and down. A (green) for accept and B (red) for cancel. The big button’s color matches the character on the screen’s colored controller.

To make things more interesting, the questions are set up in the form of mini-games. There are 22 different puzzle types which vary from things like “Pixel Flix”, where you try to guess the movie by an 8-bit recreation of a famous scene, to crossword and anagram puzzles. There are some where you finish the quote from the movie, and others where you watch a real scene from a movie and then answer questions about it.

Brittany and I recently brought the 360, along with Box Office Smash, over to my brother Jeremy’s house to play with him and his wife, Stacey. Now, Jeremy is one of the older brothers I have previously mentioned that got me into gaming in the first place. He is one of the only people I know who has crushed Mother Brain, Mike Tyson and Medusa. He has an N64, but doesn’t game that much any more these days. Stacey has never really been into video games, but loves board games. We have even played one of the board game versions of Scene It with them in the past.

I have to say, this is a great party game if you have four people. The computer keeps everyone in the running by awarding points at the end of each round. It’s along the same lines as the Mario Party series in this regard, only they aren’t such hugely ridiculous numbers as to unbalance things completely. Maybe, if you are playing with someone who is over-the-top competitive, this feature might be a problem. For us, it kept us on our toes.

There is support for playing with others on Xbox Live, but I have not had the chance to try this yet. The first DLC pack is also out. For $7 (560 Space Bucks) it adds a new game type and over 800 new questions. I will most likely be picking this up in the not too distant future.

Considering this game comes with the big button controllers packed in, and you can find it most places new for $40 and under, I highly recommend this one for movie fans, and those that have non-gamer friends. It fits nicely with those plastic guitars and drums you’ve got strewn about your living room.