Ever since we turned in (actually eBay’ed) our iPod Classic, we’ve been yearning for a little trivia time ala the iQuiz game available on our old click-wheeled friend. If you’re not familiar with the iQuiz title, it’s a game that scours your iPod music library and presents a wonderful trivia experience based on your music collection. That’s what we’ve wanted for the iPhone and iPod touch for some time now.
Unfortunately, Apple never released an iQuiz app on the App Store. But with the release of iPhone OS 3.0, developers have had the chance to access the iPod library and create one of their own. A quick search for “music quiz” in the App Store, and you’ll see a variety of apps fighting to be the next iQuiz. Do any of them seriously contend with the original? Today we’ll look at Music Quiz Frenzy from the developers at Josss.
Upon first launch of Music Quiz Frenzy, you’ll notice that the visuals are somewhat flat yet modern. Much like a flash developed game using the provided button graphics. The visuals are funky, although a bit 1-dimensional. Choose to play Solo or Battle with a friend. Once a game mode is chosen, Music Quiz Frenzy takes a bit of time to load your library. This isn’t a huge time span but we suggest Josss gives a loading status bar so players don’t quit the app out of impatience. Better yet, speed up the load.
Once the library loads, a playlist or the entire library can be selected. You can also decide if the game will be based on Artists, Titles, Cover Art, or Random. Normal game type takes you through a user-determined-number of questions while listening to snippets of a songs. Scoring is based on speed with the quicker answer receiving more points. A time meter is counting down at the top of the screen so be quick about it! Kamikaze game type adds a little more excitement to the mix by threat of elimination with the first mistake.
One aspect that Music Quiz Frenzy does bring to the table, which iQuiz never had, is split-screen dual-player battles. Set the round options as before and duke it out. One downside to this approach is that the owner of the iPhone will most likely be more familiar than the opponent with his/her library.
Overall Music Quiz Frenzy provides a neat personalized music trivia challenge for your iPhone. Does it match the prowess of iQuiz? No. We have yet to find a music trivia app that shines with comparable visuals, sound effects, and bonus challenges of iQuiz. But Music Quiz Frenzy is a fun time-waster. Is it worth the $1.99 price tag? Considering it relies heavily on your own library and cover art without too many other frills, we say a $0.99 price tag is more suitable.
Music Quiz Frenzy gets our AppSmile 3-Dimple rating:
