Scene It? Box Office Smash, like its predecessor, Lights, Camera, Action, comes in two flavours; an under £20 standalone trivia game and a higher priced box set that contains the game and four of Microsoft's Big Button Pads, a remote control style re-imagining of the original controllers that's designed to appeal to a wider audience of non-gamers who shy away from the average game pad. Both versions of the software offer the same thing though; straight up movie trivia through a series of rounds and puzzles for one to four people.

Well, the game says one to four people, but it's no surprise that single player Scene It isn't exactly a fascinating experience, despite a solo high score mode. Just like the successful board game franchise that Scene It is based upon, the real fun here is just as much about playing with friends as it is about the game itself. As with most trivia games, the formula of the more people, the better it is, holds true here, and while the game is fun with two players, it really shines with four or more (you can always double up on the controllers in a party situation). Xbox Live play is also included and works well, although the effect of the game is diminished significantly when the other players aren't in the same room; multiplayer trivia simply doesn't feel as competitive when you can't see your competitors, although the mode is still a thoughtful and welcome inclusion.

The game itself is a fairly straightforward affair that will be familiar to anyone who has played a console or even a DVD trivia game in the past, consisting of three rounds plus a final round with the highest score determining the winner. Exactly how you play depends upon the settings you choose and Scene It offers a reasonable amount of customisation. Game modes are split simply between long and short games, although the short mode seems to only come in at about five minutes less playing time than the long mode, so there's not as much distinction as you might have hoped for. Similarly, there are no options to choose a custom length or define the number of rounds to play.

One of the options allows you to set the game up so that you lose points for incorrect answers, which significantly changes the way that people play and stops them from mindlessly guessing when they really have no idea. By far the most useful option, and one that may well save the game for some people, is the ability to turn off the announcers' voices; Scene It, like the original and nearly all recent trivia games, features lame, camp humour and terrible voice acting that, unless you're really young, detracts quite considerably from what is otherwise quite an elegant and polished game.

The humour is pretty much the only aspect that hasn't been updated from the original, though; everything that has been carried over has been improved, if not in actual gameplay than at least in terms of its presentation. Each mode is introduced by players flying off on a magical sofa to a different movie themed location, be it Aztec temples or King Kong inspired skyscrapers; these backgrounds fit the game much better than the dull movie studio set up of Lights, Camera, Action and the film-inspired musical soundtrack actually manages to be entertaining without grating the nerves after five minutes - quite a feat for a trivia game.

There are a healthy number of different puzzles on offer, including the trademark Scene It movie scenes in which you watch a short clip from a movie and then have to answer questions based upon that title. Most of the movies included tend to be a little on the old side but despite a seemingly strong Eighties bias - no doubt motivated by expensive licensing of modern films - they're all from popular films and good fun to watch, which is fortunate because they pop up in every one of the games three rounds, as well as serving as the basis for the multiplier-heavy final stage.

Some of the new modes are absolutely brilliant additions; the Pixel Flix mode, for example, displays an 8-bit recreation of a movie that any fans of pixel art or classic video games will enjoy, challenging you to guess the film and then answer questions about it. Other new modes like Celebrity Ties, which asks you to answer why or how certain celebrities are connected, don't quite share this ingenuity but certainly don't detract from the experience either. The classic modes return and work just as well as before, including Movie Soundtrack and Audio Clips, where you try to guess which movies the sound clips come from, Celebrity Who Am I, where clues about an actor's life are slowly revealed on screen, and Sketches, where a film clue is slowly drawn onto the screen, Pictionary style.

Very few of the games modes can be criticised as they provide a good balance and each has their own way of presenting what is essentially the same idea, although there are a couple of exceptions; the anagram round, for example, where you have to unscramble words to form the name of an actor or film, has nothing to do with movie trivia and everything to do with how quickly you can spot two of the same letters on the screen. Unlike Scene It's other well designed modes, you could take the words and replace them with any subject at all and the game would still work fine. Another small complaint can be levied at the Movie Poster mode, which while fun and inventive displays the posters in a tiny segment of the screen, making potentially important sub text and tags really hard to read unless you're right up next to your television screen.

The scoring starts fast and runs high, especially when the game isn't set up to detract points for incorrect answers. The games are a mixture of simply answering questions and requiring you to buzz in, either with one of the shoulder pads, the d-pad or the big button on the supplied controllers. The quicker you answer, the more points you get. At the end of each round, the players receive rewards for a number of different achievements, such as answering the quickest or the slowest or getting perfect rounds. Rewards are given for bad performances as well, balancing out the scores somewhat without seeming particularly unfair to the best players.

I gathered a selection of friends; gamers and non-gamers, diehard movie fans and people who haven't even watched The Matrix, and set them lose against my own rather sporadic knowledge of film. Despite a slow start, we ended up having great fun with Scene It; true to its purpose, the game provided us with a good hour of entertainment, with very few complaints coming from any of my friends. The questions go deep enough to please movie fans but remain broad enough to allow casual DVD renters to at least join in and have fun, plus each round provides brief instructions and the reliance on colour rather than any controller function means that non-gamers are unlikely to feel alienated or overwhelmed. As one of the first games to take advantage of the new avatar system on the NXE dashboard, Scene It becomes even more accessible and personal for people used to a more visual experience on the Wii.

If a party game can take a selection of friends and provide them with an interesting, competitive and varied hour of light entertainment then it has done its job very well; the length of any trivia game is finite but a question tracking system that logs which questions have been asked, as well as the future possibility of Xbox Live question packs, should give Scene It a better start than last generation or DVD-based trivia games, though it would have been nice to see more movie clips and more from modern films - perhaps those will come in future downloadable content.

If you enjoy party games and trivia and you'd like another game to add to your "360 as a rival to the Wii" list then you've got a winner on your hands with Scene It? Box Office Smash and you shouldn't be afraid to grab it even if you don't know much about movies or games. Whether you need to go all out and buy the wireless pads is another question, however; unless you've got some really console-phobic family members and friends then spending nearly double the price of the game on what is essentially a d-pad and four buttons seems like a bit of a stretch. However, the hardware version does come with all four controllers, so if you don't already have a full compliment of 360 pads then it might still be worth the extra cost, especially as you can use the pads with Lights, Camera, Action as well. Even with Xbox Live there isn't exactly a flourishing trivia market on the 360, so an easily accessible and well-presented game like Box Office Smash is impossible not to recommend.

Reviewed by Francis Clarke for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).