It's only taken almost half a year, but the latest game in the Scene It? series, Box Office Smash (from here on in BOS), is finally available in Australia since its U.S release last October. The Scene It? series has quite a long history since starting out as a regular old DVD and board game and is now in its second instalment on the Xbox 360. Clearly trying to take on the Sony ‘Buzz' series the aim is to get the whole family gathered and enjoy gaming together. Not a bad idea at all but if you're a miserable loner, Xbox Live Support is included as well.

Being someone who never really enjoys board games such as Trivial Pursuit, truth be told, I also never played the first Scene It? game and always wondered where the appeal came from. If there's one area that's extremely lacking in the 360's game lineup, it would have to be fun party games though so it's good to see some titles like this slowly being released. Obviously I don't include the Fuzion Frenzy games because, well basically, they're crap and even my kids hated them.

BOS is a movie trivia game that comes packed with 4 nice big colourful controllers that feature the standard Xbox 360 controller face buttons and also a big button that you try and smash as fast as you can when answering questions. Also included is a wireless dongle that plugs into a controller port and that's it, once done, the controllers get detected instantly and away you go. True, I've never had any major issues with any of the Xbox wireless gear, but the ease in which the controllers were setup was refreshing and allows other ‘non gaming' family members to easily get into the game without having to rely on someone else setting it up for them. If you already own the controllers the game is also available by itself for $20 - $30 less than the game/controller bundle.

The great thing about BOS is that all the sound, video clips (in High Definition) and images from all of the movies are all licensed (so no lame impersonations) and that the 360 Avatars are supported. The game features quite a diverse range of puzzle challenges such as a movie clip being shown and then everyone having to buzz in and answer questions about it, guessing an actors name from a photo collage, completing a classic film quote or solving a crossword made up from clues about the movies title. That of course is only a few of them and there's a stack more including an extremely clever one called ‘Pixel Flix' which shows a film clip that's been converted to look like an old 8-bit video game.

The way in which the questions can be answered varies between puzzle types. Some allow everyone to see the 4 multiple choice answers at the same time and a point counter decreases the longer you take. If you answer quickly and get it correct, you get more points and the longer you take to answer, the fewer points you get awarded. It's a good system that makes things a bit fairer as it still allows you to take your time and make an educated guess if you don't know the answer. Of course if you get it wrong, no points for you!

Other questions don't show the choice of answers straight away and wait until someone buzzes in before displaying them. If you don't answer quickly enough, or get it wrong, other players can quickly buzz in with the advantage of having seen the answers. It's moments like this with 4 players that make BOS a lot of fun. Not so much when there's one smart arse getting every answer correct, but when the first person gets it wrong and everyone else is trying to answer as quickly as possible to grab the points.

It's an interesting point to note that the game is actually more fun when the people playing it don't know the answers so perhaps keep that in mind when inviting people over to play it. Of course a smartarse can still spoil the party by answering every question immediately. But no one likes a smartarse anyway and you should avoid inviting them over.

As mentioned, the movie clips are in High Definition and overall the game has a pretty good look to it, if overly cartoony (mostly from the use of the 360 Avatars) but it's not too cheesy (the voice over guy is another matter however). Over a 5 hour period we never saw the same movie clip twice and it was pretty cool to see clips from some older movies such as Planes, Trains & Automobiles as well as an ample selection of newer movies.

No doubt if you spent more than a few weekends with the game you'd start to see the questions repeated and to solve that, hopefully there will be some plans to release Downloadable Content for it in the future (something that was promised, but never delivered for the first game) or some cheaper priced add-on discs.