Bakushow review

Are you fed up with watching Chris Tarrant and Anne Robinson hosted quiz shows on TV? Would you like to create your own quizzes for your friends and family? Well if so Bakushow for DS could be just what you’re after, so you best read some more of this Bakushow Review and find out.

We like a bit of quiz action here at Gamesweasel Towers and Bakushow is a rather interesting title that took us by surprise. This was not only because it is quite unique in being the only fully fledged quiz creator for the DS, but also that you cannot play this game with just one player. Bakushow requires a minimum of two players (and two DS’s) before it will even load, we can’t think of another DS game that has this requirement. Bakushow supports 2-4 players with wireless connection and single card download play, meaning you only need one copy of the game and everyone can share it for the single cost of the £19.99 RRP.

As soon as you boot the game it starts up the DS download service and waits for at least one extra player to connect and download the game software, it doesn’t take very long to transfer across but if you’ve decided to load the game for a quick single player go, you’ll be staring at the screen for a very long time indeed (until the battery runs out in fact).

Upon pressing Start player one becomes the first Quizmaster and is faced with a blank screen, a choice of pen size and eraser. It’s time to come up with a question or task for the other player(s) to answer/complete. You write or draw the question/task onto the screen and when you’re happy with it press the Done button to continue. You then get to choose how much time to give your friends to draw their answer, the choices are: 60 seconds, 3 minutes or Unlimited. Once you’ve chosen the time setting your question is beamed over to the all the other players and it’s now time for everyone (including the quizmaster) to scribble the answers down.

Once all the answers are complete and sent back to the quizmaster he/she can then choose in what order they would like to reveal everyone’s answers as well as the correct one. At this point everyone is given three starts to use in a vote which decides who actually got the right answer (or if no one was right, the closest), oddly though you can even vote for yourself. After all the votes are in the scores are tallied and the winner of the round is announced and they get the choice of being Quizmaster for the next round or choosing another player to take that role and after tapping the desired choice, the cycle begins once more.

And that’s pretty much it, Bakushow does what it promises and provides you with the basic engine of a quiz game leaving you to come up with all of the questions and decide who wins and who loses.

Bakushow is a nice budget priced title and it does actually work but does require some effort to get the best out of it. We recommend you think of categories and a schedule before you start playing or you could end up staring at a blanks screen trying to think of a question, not only that but your friends will soon tire of the god awful tapping game to keep them ‘amused’ whilst you’re coming up with a question to stump them with. It really is a shame there is no single player mode but is understandable given how the game works (we can’t help but worry some people may buy this thinking they could play it on their own though).

The graphics of Bakushow are very basic, as are the sound effects and music - the emphasis really is on the quiz game and if you want to see nice drawings you’ll have to do be drawing them yourself.

We would’ve like to have seen some example categories and perhaps even 100 built in questions to get us started but alas there are none which forces you to dive right in. The manual shows the logo for Internet Play but this is actually incorrect, sadly there is no online play to be found here which is a great shame, it would have been ideal for an online game and I feel it would have improved the recommendation to purchase Bakushow greatly.

For being a fully functional quiz creator with absolutely no frills or single player mode we have to award Bakushow for DS a good but not great 6 out of 10. Oh yes, the Bakushow release date is: 12/9/2008 so if you do have someone with a Nintendo DS to play with why not give it a look.

Related: Buzz TV review, Colour Cross