How does a 64-player trivia game work on PlayStation Home? Players gather on a gigantic game board with four colored squares. Questions are pulled from the MyBuzzQuiz.com website. When a question is asked, players have a limited amount of time to gather on the color corresponding to the correct answer. The winner is decided over four rounds, with Home prizes up for grabs for the best question answerers.

It's an amazingly chaotic way to put on a quiz show. I love it. No word on an official release date for the space, but the PlayStation Blog did supply a nifty video of the game in action to tide us over.

Catchy, eh? Yes, very. While the UK-based Relentless Software isn't divulging details on its "Secret Project" yet, it has put out the human resources feelers, looking for currently unemployed talent who know how to keep a secret.

Relentless merely teases the title with a quartet of carefully mosaicked screen shots, which might lead one to believe it to be based on Japanese hardcore pornography. Not so! Secret Project is almost guaranteed to be a multiplayer game with a casual bent, as the company's web site notes "We've taken everything we've learned about making social games and the result is what, for the time being, is known as Secret Project #1."

Whatever the game is, it looks like Sony isn't publishing this one. Relentless says the game is planned to be a "self-published" affair. Could they be making their way to another platform? Will it be digitally distributed, without the need for a publisher? Or do these guys just have something to prove?

Guess we'll know in "the coming months."

Secret Project [Relentless Software via Eurogamer]

Announcing Buzz!™: Brain Bender on PSP™(PlayStation®Portable) - on show now at Games Convention, Leipzig

Buzz! dons a lab coat and injects his unique style into the brain game genre 16 mini-games to improve memory, observation, calculation and analysis Single player and multiplayer modes for the ultimate brain bending experience Leipzig Games Convention, August 20th, 2008: After giving your quiz reflexes and general knowledge a good workout on Buzz!™: Master Quiz on PSP™ (PlayStation®Portable), Buzz! returns to the handheld entertainment system with Buzz!™: Brain Bender from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. On shelves in time for the Christmas season, Buzz!: Brain Bender sees Buzz! step out of the studio and into the laboratory for a mental workout with all the trademark laughs you’d expect from the Buzz! franchise.

Buzz! Brain Bender will feature on the PlayStation® stand with a playable teaser demo available to give your brain and your sense of humour a workout. The full game will offer sixteen mini-games that test your skills of analysis, observation, memory and calculation including:

Analysis Games: Path Finder: A maze game where players have to quickly decide what path leads to the centre. Power Struggle: A decision game based on who can win “tugs of wars” battles between different vehicles
Observation Games: Match Up: Can you tell how many pairs of contestants there are in a puzzle? Pattern Match: A puzzle style game where players need to identify the correct shapes to fit into a missing grid.
Memory Games: Take Away: A card game where players need to identify the missing cards from a series. Sound Bites: A game based on sounds made by animals or objects. Players have to correctly recall the order they were played out. Calculation Games: Blot Swot: Can you still solve maths puzzles when they’re full of missing numbers? Sliced Up: A game where the player must decide what portion of the food on display hasn’t been eaten.

Buzz!: Brain Bender is designed for both solo and multiplayer fun, with all of the above and more to test yourself, your friends and family. The extensive single player mode has three different ways to enjoy the mini games. Training Mode lets you warm up your brain with a variety of mini games, Challenge Mode gives you all sorts of different objectives to achieve in each category of game and Test Mode allows you to track your progress over a period. Hilarious prizes are awarded based on your brain power output in Kilojoules (kj), for example 700kj is a vacuum cleaner and 1500kj is a juke box.

In a colourful shake-up to the dry science that marks other ‘mental ability’ titles on the market, Buzz!: Brain Bender brings colour, comedy, accessibility, social multiplayer fun and the all-important trademark Buzz! humour to the genre. Up to six people can take each other on in the ‘Brain Battle’ Multiplayer Mode by passing around a single PSP – giving you a sociable gaming experience where the winner can claim victory over his or her opponents

Key features include:-

· Sixteen brain-bending mini games across 4 categories: Analysis, Observation, Memory and Calculation.

· Extensive single-player mode that offers three ways to enjoy the mini games: Training Mode, Test Mode & Challenge Mode

· Multiplayer ‘Brain Battle’ Mode where players take on 6 friends on one PSP passing it around

· Four player profiles can be saved – compare your progress with friends and family

A completely new and different Buzz! experience, Buzz!: Brain Bender reaches parts of the brain that previous Buzz! titles never have before. Let Buzz! test your brain and tickle your funny-bone when Buzz!: Brain Bender is released this Christmas.

The thing about how the D&AD Awards works in advertising is you have to pay a truckload of of money for every entry (your creative work) you submit, in hopes that you win a yellow pencil so that your work can then be bound in a $150 book called the D&AD annual that showcases that the "winners". Winning a yellow pencil is how everyone is advertising knows they're the nacho chip with the most cheese, and the annuals are always "a way to steal a good idea" (thanks expensive art school teacher for the tip - I know why you went so far in life!).

What will be interesting to see is how Playstation and Nintendo can actually pick up a D&AD Award for their innovative work they do without winning an award for the way their games are marketed. Kim Phu

Sony, Nintendo nominated for D&AD awards [Games Industry Biz]

I came across some new details on Nintendo's Wii party tour by way of a reliable source.

A bit ago I reported that Nintendo was going to be promoting the Nintendo Wii grassroots style by using a series of private sessions with regular gamers and non-gamers across the country.

Nintendo is going to use some mysterious formula to calculate buzz and cool and then select a few people as "hosts" for this private Wii parties. The plan, it sounds like, is for Nintendo to select a few of these hosts for each city.

Then the host gets to invite a couple dozen friends, family and the like. The hope, I hear, is that it won't be just a Wii and 30 Nintendo fanboys. What Nintendo really wants is a nice mix of soccer moms, dads, grandmas, worker bees, technophiles and, yes, some hardcore gamers.

The event will feature a number of Wii games, but the only two I've been able to nail down are Wii Sports and WarioWare: Smooth Moves.

So think of this as a private Wii party. I wonder if Nintendo will pack the Black Eyed Peas in their cross-country tour. That would so kick ass. Not that getting a chance to hang with a bunch of friends and some Wii would be bad on its own.

The tour is going to hit multiple cities across the country. So far I've noodled out that Los Angeles, Austin, Texas and... wait for it... Denver are on the list for a Wii visit. That's right baby. Colorado's got Net Devil, Sony Online Entertainment and now, a Nintendo Wii stop.

If either of the Denverites reading this make the list, you better invite me. :) Brian Crecente