Football Genius: The Ultimate Quiz

I’m beginning to hit that age, approaching my mid twenties, where people have no idea what the hell to get me for Christmas. Gifts now fall into three categories; clothes that look bizarre, too many toiletries for one man and football stuff. Now I adore football, it’s a huge part of my life but that doesn’t mean I want the myriad of rubbish that I receive yearly with a football on it. Football socks, football gaffs DVD’s, football slippers and the crème de la crème the football quiz DVD. The latter is one of those DVD quizzes but football based, every year the same boring old questions and the same clunky interface…the ultimate cash in at Christmas. Joyously it seems that this market has spread to my other big hobby as Football Genius: The Ultimate Quiz is now on XBLA with the promise of testing your football knowledge in various exciting game modes. Could this be the entertaining exploration of football trivia desperately needed by football fans?

Football Genius is very much in the same vein as the aforementioned DVD quizzes with playing by yourself missing the point really, it’s all about you and friends getting around a console or on Xbox Live for fun. As such there is support for avatars (albeit stretched a bit), the Scene It! buzzers and most of the nine game modes directly involve other players. Aside from just answering questions the game modes vary the rewards for getting answers correct (getting double points, stealing opponents points, disqualifying other players) or giving you Question of Sport style picture questions and picture puzzles. The game modes are fun enough and the questions reasonably varied although with a fair bit of focus on English football compared to everything else. The general presentation is suitably bland with generic football pictures providing the backdrop to the quiz, the avatar use is sporadic and seems shoved in with the Xbox Live Vision Camera supported in very much the same way as in Uno.

Beyond that there is not much else left to discuss. The game modes are as fun as your friends and you choose to make them, with a bit of competitiveness they give the experience any other quiz can give. The 3,500 questions will fly in though, soon enough you will be left repeating questions and it becomes less about trivia and more about memory, this could be rectified with DLC however whether or not that emerges remains to be seen. As such even with avatars, Scene It! buzzers and even Live Vision Cam support there is a big issue of simple value even at 800 points, particularly when compared to its competition. The robust Scene It and the upcoming 1 vs 100 offer far superior quiz experiences and the latter offering sports nights during the beta further weakens Football Genius’ claim to your points. Taking that into consideration Football Genius: The Ultimate Quiz has to be put into the same category as Totemball and Texas Cheat ‘Em, games that people didn’t ask for and don’t need.