If there are two things I enjoy, they are tests of knowledge and film. There are film quiz games in which I was nationally ranked. I eagerly await the arrival of the Cinelinx game and I am no longer allowed to play Scene It with my family.
Ultimate Movie Quiz was a disappointment. There are the reasons that are potentially out of the control of the developer, namely that the images were incredibly blurry on my huge phone. But there were other, more pressing issues that continued to persist over the multiple levels.
I’m not knocking it for points because it was easy. It was, in fact, incredibly easy. If you’ve seen a popular movie in the last fifteen years, you’re set. The first round includes all three of the Christopher Nolan Batman films. It’s a quiz game targeted as the standard movie fan — it’s not going to ask you to correctly identify Lawrence of Arabia.
Where Ultimate Movie Quiz ultimately fails is in execution. The game is simple — you are given a snippet, usually a movie poster and you must type in the name of the movie. It’s a concept that’s about half dead. Except that Ultimate Movie Quiz is less forgiving than Mathlab. Sorry, you typed “Fast 5” instead of “Fast Five.” Those are clearly two completely different answers.
The game is less forgiving than when you forget your mother on Mother’s Day, while simultaneously reminding you every day a month prior that Mother’s Day is, in fact, coming.
This difficulty meant that I typed in five different answers to a picture that was clearly Twilight: New Moon (the advertising for that movie was always in shades of brown, cause, y’know werewolves) and the answer that the game ultimately decided was the correct one was “the Twilight Saga Eclipse.”
This segue’s rather nicely into another problem point. Whoever put together posters is clearly not familiar with the properties they were referencing. Hilariously, this meant the confusing the super sexual film Closer with the drama-comedy TV show the Closer. It also meant that the picture for No Country for Old Men included just pictures of old men. Sequels were almost impossible to identify. A picture of Matt Damon looking slightly winded. Probably a Bourne movie. But which one? Better try them all.
But again, the game was not difficult. Probably because it was giving it away like a liquor distributor at a AA meeting. Several posters would just have the titles on them.
To keep the air of mystery, the game designers simply smudged it lightly with the airbrush tool in Paint.
Generally speaking, you should avoid this game. It’s free, but laden with cumbersome advertising that occupies the play space in an unfortunate way. The joy you’d get from crushing the game would eventually be washed away by the acknowledgment that this game, is in fact, awful.
Published: Feb 13, 2014 01:59 pm