With their acquisition of the Hasbro license, EA seems hell-bent on bringing all the board games you spent your childhood flipping over in a teary-eyed rage to consoles. Trivial Pursuit is their latest effort to destroy your controller and sanity. Trivia games on consoles used to be a dicey endeavor, but the advent of downloadable content makes them feel a lot more at home on this generation. Trivial Pursuit delivers the same basic gameplay from the board version, filling an empty game piece with slices of colored pie for six different categories. The same categories you remember from the original make a return here: Science & Nature, Art & Literature, Geography, Sport & Leisure, History, and Entertainment. Gamers make their way around a board, shaped somewhat like the hallowed pie game piece they control by rolling the dice. The number you roll with the dice generally provides you with several available places to land on the board, leaving you with a decision as to which type of question you tackle next.
The larger headquarters spaces still grant the category's colored pie wedge if you correctly answer a question after landing on it. The game still ends when a player collects all six category wedges, races to the center of the board, and answers a random question. Question subjects range from as recent as Twitter to as old as matching ancient poets to quotes. Those afraid of the multiple-choice layout sapping some of the difficulty can relax, as more often than not the smart additional choices leads to second guessing yourself. With the core gameplay intact, the game does a nice job of offering a fresh twist on the classic board game with two additional modes - Clear The Board and Facts & Friends Multiplayer. Clear The Board is the game's offering to solo quiz fans. The goal is to get some combination of the highest score and fastest time when plowing through the board. Each correct answer on a regular category square awards two hundred points and, more importantly, increases the score multiplier on that category's headquarters square.
The base score awarded with a wedge is five hundred, with the current multiplier you earned increasing the score appropriately. Each time you give an incorrect answer for a wedge question, the multiplier drops one. The finish-line space at the center of the board takes all the multipliers you build up on the six headquarter spaces and adds them together, for a massive score bonus at the end of the game. Playing through the board, whether you answer a question correctly or not, the regular spaces are no longer valid, with all matching color spaces disappearing from the shrinking board when you earn a wedge. There is a steadily decreasing timer for all questions, though your score is not dependant on how quickly you answer, simply limiting your ability to Google for correct answers. The Facts & Friends Multiplayer mode takes things in a completely different direction, allowing all players to use the same game piece to move about the board and rewarding only one wedge for each category. The game turns into a frantic race to capture a category before your opponents can. The twist is that you do not need to land on a headquarters space to earn the wedge.
You technically do not ever need to answer a question correctly to get one. Before a player can answer the upcoming question, another player has the opportunity to 'bet' on the results. Each correct answer and bet earns a portion of the appropriate wedge. Get enough correct, and you can earn the wedge without ever landing on the headquarter space. The trick is that your opponents get to see the question and bet on whether you will get it correct or not, or possibly 'steal' the question for themselves by selecting 'I know it'; allowing them a chance to answer first. Once a wedge is earned, the regular spaces of that category are removed from the board; shrinking it similarly to the Clear The Board mode. Making the mode last a bit longer, there are 'bonus' spots on the board where you spin to select a bonus ability; including doubling the points of the next question or allowing you to steal an opponent's wedge.
Once all the wedges are dished out, the game moves to the final round. Each of the wedges you earned on the board turn into 'lives', which are deducted with each incorrect answer. The last player with at least one remaining life wins the game. The mode is an absolute blast, and can last quite a while between the bonus spaces and difficult questions. Those looking for the straightforward board game version can still play through it as they remember it under Classic mode.The game could use a little more polish in the audio/visual department. The presentation is decent, though a bit bare bones in terms of menus. For a board game, the graphics get the job done with easy to read questions and solid layout. It is the little details that make up for what they lack visually, like the detailed historical stats for each player. The inclusion of Live Avatars is smart, choosing to use just the head in the scoreboard and statistical crawl at the bottom of the screen. Selecting correct answers with your left stick, and confirming with the A button, works well.
The game pulls up a map, zooms in, and places four possible locations on the map for players to choose from without text indicating what the name of each is. It is a nice concept, but the game would have done well to at least show borders for states within the US and countries outside of it. The dry announcer lacks personality, delivering a lifeless commentary on the game that gets repetitive quickly. At the very least, the low-key, soft jazz inspired background music is relaxing. Trivial Pursuit earns high marks for accessibility and coming up with fresh gameplay ideas for a game older than most 360 owners. With one free downloadable question pack already available, the game looks to have plenty of legs despite the lack of Live multiplayer. With Live mulitiplayer, this would be the must-have quiz game for consoles. Without it, Trivial Pursuit still proves to be a solid purchase for fans of the genre.
