The Ultimate Simpsons Trivia game?

I had a pretty darn good Christmas (and thank you for asking). I came out of it like a bandit, partly because my family listened to my list and got me a lot of what I had written down, such as No More Heroes for the Wii, Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks for the DS, and The Simpsons Scene-It? Deluxe Edition. I discussed Scene-It? last fall but I didn’t cover a specific edition of the game in great detail. I’ll be darned if I do the Twilight edition (because I didn’t get it of course!), but now that I’ve played the Simpsons version a few times I can tell you what works well and what doesn’t.

So Hard To Please

To make one thing very clear right away: Scene-It? is extremely tough to find a group that matches perfectly for the game to be really fun. I’m assuming it’s much easier if you have a whole party devoted to the loving of the subject of the game, such as Harry Potter or Twilight, but otherwise you’ll always have the two extremely well versed players competing against each other while everyone else watches and interjects every so often with shaky answers. This is unavoidable, even if you’re a diehard fan of the series.

Also, I'm kind of disappointed the pieces aren't actual Simpsons characters.

The Simpsons version of Scene-It? is naturally for fans of the show. I happen to be one of those. I recently spent the past half a year showing my wife the first 12 seasons currently on DVD. I had seen them many times before but this was her first go-through. We played The Simpsons Scene-It? and found that she could answer roughly a third of the questions, but only because they weren’t noggin-scratchers. I, however, was getting bored with extremely simple questions on the one side and questions that no one in their right mind would ever know on the other. This can make the game very uneven and at times downright dull.

Like Watching a Really Good Clipshow

The highlight of the game comes down to the My Play and All Play challenges that appear on the DVD. The My Play challenges are great because they show clips from the show, so everyone gets a funny clip to see before either answering the question that comes afterward or providing the line that comes next. But there’s a problem here as well. They’ll pick extremely well-known scenes from the show for the “Know Your Lines” questions, so much so that I’m able to correctly identify the next line before they even ask it (“The answer will be ‘I’m not gay, but I’ll learn.’ Yeah, I know this, I’ve seen this episode a dozen times.”).

Also, for the scenes where they ask a question “regarding the scene,” most of the time the answers are pitifully simple (“What was the first word Bart said in this scene?”), to questions that had nothing to do with the scene at all (“What’s Reverend Lovejoy’s first name? No, we didn’t mention it in the scene, but he was in the scene, so what’s his first name?”). It kind of just makes me want to see a comp...