Never one to let another company's idea get in the way of creating their own 'interpretation' at a later date, Microsoft first announced at this year's E3 that they'd teamed up with DVD Game producer Screenlife to adapt the Scene It? brand for Xbox 360. A two-fingered strategy to Sony's own Buzz! series of quizzes on PlayStation 2 and a cornerstone of their new roadmap to widen the Xbox 360 fanbase beyond the hardcore gaming market, Lights Camera Action has been perceived with some degree of scepticism not least because it typifies Microsoft's desperate attempts to get a piece of the casual gaming market.

But casting dispersions aside has Microsoft managed to achieve the cynically improbable task of delivering a fun, family-friendly, casual gaming experience on the biconcave cream behemoth? TVG set off to the Hollywood Hills to make the final cut...

Creating a buzz on Xbox 360

Greeted by a disembodied voice who, despite the overly-confident US accent, fails to usurp the charm of PlayStation's Buzz character (voiced by Jason Donovan), players find themselves thrown into a movie lot that wouldn't look out of place in Lionhead's 2005 title, The Movies. Drenched in saturated colours and stylised characters that wander around the back lots and studios, Lights Camera Action is devised of two game modes, though the touted Xbox Live multiplayer functionality revealed at its unveiling in July has been quietly dropped between then and now.

Packaged with four wireless 'Big Button' controllers similar to Buzz!'s but without the wires...oh, and they're 'Xbox 360' cream too, Scene It? follows the path set by SCEE's quizzical series. Featuring over 1,800 questions, far less than the 5,000 in Buzz!: The Mega Quiz, together with movie and audio clips from the likes of The Wild One, Grease, Jurassic Park, and Monty Python & The Holy Grail, Scene It? straddles decades of movie history, enabling a broad spectrum of movie fans to take part.

At first glance a cynical attempt to cash into the growing craze of casual gaming doomed to a mediocre existence post-release, Scene It? Lights Camera Action offers a bigger surprise than getting slapped around the face with a wet fish by actually being...well, fun. Offering the sort of variety in its box of tricks rarely fond outside of a tub of Christmas biscuits, the twenty plus different types of rounds range from straightforward movie trivia, guess the movie from the poster, pictograms, observation, and finish the quote, to name but a handful. Less fun for one, but more rewarding when played with a group of friends (especially if you win by several thousand points), Scene It? pretty much covers every round you could imagine in a quiz show, and as such feels very much like the complete package.

But whilst the main mode features the sort of experience that you'd expect from a quiz game, the appearance of the Party Mode is a little more perplexing. Top of the box office list of most confusing gametypes in videogaming could very well be Scene It?'s 'Party Mode', which decimates the idea of competitive gameplay: other teams can see your chosen answer, and points don't get deducted at all during the game.

Join us next time...

The future strength of the Scene It? brand on Xbox 360 has to rely on additional expansion packs coming through at regular enough intervals, either through Xbox Live Marketplace or new packs at retail. So far, Microsoft is keeping mum on exactly what its strategy for the future of the franchise is, but it will be no surprise to see expansions covering music and general knowledge in the coming months.

It's key weakness is that it's far from being a platform seller for the mass market, despite the recent push for casual customers with the launch of Xbox 360 Arcade. But if you're an Xbox 360 owner and looking for something that family can all enjoy this year after the Christmas dinner is demolished, you couldn't do much better than Scene It? Lights Camera Action.