I’ve got great news for you all:Buzz! will be hitting shelves across Europe from Wednesday 20 October, and this time it’s all about music!

That’s right – Buzz! The Ultimate Music Quiz brings thousands of music questions, brand new rounds and exciting new features.

• Choose the rounds you want to play, the music genres, the length of the game and enjoy your favourite music quiz with up to seven other players at the same time.

• Get in the centre of the game thanks to the new Paper Face mode: simply take a snap of your face using a PlayStation Eye camera, choose a theme for your contestant and take your place alongside your rivals in the Buzz! studio.

• Put your Buzz! Buzzers down for a moment and get hands-on with four hilarious brand new rounds using PlayStation Move. Wield the flaming quiz hammer in Hammer Time, zap the unidentified flying answers in Master Blaster and become top of the pops with a giant dart in Pop Life.

That’s it for now – I hope you’ll enjoy Buzz! The Ultimate Music Quiz as much as I do!

Stay tuned – a PSP Buzz! version is coming soon…

Delivering over 500 brand new questions designed for everyone from the casual supporter to the most expert fan and covering everything from the sport’s most legendary players to the games that made history. Get yourself match fit alongside the world’s biggest football event by challenging your friends to a trivia showdown.

To get you warmed up, try these on for size:

• Who finished his career with an infamous headbutt in the 2006 FIFA World Cup final?
• Which Englishman was famously shown a red card for kicking out at Diego Simeone at France ’98?
• What type of animal is Zakumi, the official 2010 FIFA World Cup mascot?
• Which continent has provided the most teams for the 2010 FIFA World Cup?
• Which manufacturer won the contract to make the official 2010 FIFA World Cup ball?

Got the answers? Find out if you’re right and pick up the World Football Quiz Pack for Buzz PS3 available now on the PSN Store at £3.19/ €3.99.

Do you think you really know your Facebook friends? Buzz!: The Friend Quiz will help you find out by creating completely personalised quizzes from your shared photos, status updates, fan pages and more.

You can challenge your friends to single or multiple games to see who the best is. There are leaderboards for you to check your current ranking and a range of trophies to collect for great play, as well as message boards for each game you set up, so you can write as much smack-talk as you like!

Each quiz is 8 rounds long (up to 3 questions in each) and covers a different area of Facebook, so there are questions about which of your friends appears in a displayed photo, who wrote a particular comment on their profile, who posted the following link and more. Some of the answers about your friends can be very funny (and enlightening!)

I hope you’re all really going to enjoy it. The app is only in English right now, but we’re busy preparing the French, Italian, German and Spanish versions which will be ready before the end of this month; we’re hoping to add even more languages very soon too. Keep an eye here for more info soon.

Buzz!: The Friend Quiz has just gone live now on Facebook, so head over, try it out and let me know what you think!

(Please note: Buzz! The Friend Quiz is not compatible with the PS3, but works perfectly in any of your favourite PC browsers.)

We’ve come to the world-famous La Tomatina festival in Bunyol, Spain to find out which one of our 14 National Champions is going to win a fantastic MINI Clubman!

It’s been 5 months since we started the hunt for our first Buzz! World Champion, and have found our best 14 National players from over 8,000 contestants.

Our stage is ready to roll and later tonight, we’ll know our one final winner!

Our World Champion isn’t just going to be the proud owner of a new MINI. They’re also going to have the once-in-a-lifetime experience of starting the world’s biggest tomato fight at La Tomatina, tomorrow. If you haven’t heard of La Tomatina, it’s a massive throng of over 40,000 people (who’ll fill the empty street below!) throwing over 10 tonnes of tomatoes in a one-hour frenzy!

Best of luck to all our finalists for tonight!

Here’s our line-up of National Champions:

• Belgium – Jean-Marc Koder
• Denmark – Zejn Ljuti
• France – Romain Mabil
• Germany – Cornelia Schmid
• Netherlands – Marcel Kuil
• Portugal – Nadine Malhado
• Poland – Andrzej Holus
• Spain – Juan Maria Hernandez
• Sweden – Paul Svensson
• Switzerland – Armin Diethelm
• UK – Ian Stewart Clark
• Austria – Rudolf Havlicek
• Norway – Rune Sageflaat
• Finland – Mikko Heinonen

Check back on Thursday for news of who won and pictures from the amazing Tomatina!

With a few unfortunately unable to attend at the last minute due to sickness the night began with three rounds of Buzz! seeing each contestant play for a place in the semi finals. Only two from each group could go through and after a nail biting couple of rounds our semi finalists were whittled down to the FINAL FOUR.

The final four consisted of Andrew, Ian, Glen and Tony of whom you can see below in the final photo. It was a nail biting finish and the final countdown round proved that anything could happen as the contestants podiums constantly fluctuated in height, battling for that place in the World Final.

We’d like to congratulate Ian for winning stage two and being crowned Buzz! Brain of the UK. We, the UK team, would like to wish Ian all the best in the World final, we know you can do it! Go and make us proud Ian

A huge thank you must also go out to all the contestants that came to the event and competed. We hope you all had a great time.

The event was held in an old food market in Madrid city centre last Saturday 18 of July. The finalists were the best Spanish players from the first round of the World Championships competition held in May, and played through Buzz!TM ¿Qué sabes de tu país? online on PlayStation Network.

The finalists, aged from 18 to 48, met last Saturday face to face for the first time with the aim to become the Spanish national Buzz! champion. After a really close competition, Juan María –36 years old and native of Madrid- prevailed over the rest of competitors in the very last minute of the last round minute.

He will be the one to represent Spain at the Buzz! : World Championships Grand Final that will take place on the 25th and 26th of August at a very special location. We wish Juan María the best of luck for the big day!

Just to let you know that the Buzz! HQ and Studio spaces are now back!

Take on all comers and prove you’re the biggest brain in PS Home…

And remember, if you want to see your PSN ID up in lights, you too can submit questions for the quiz via MyBuzz!

Jump on in and happy buzzing!

Even now, one year on, we’re still seeing more than 4,000 brand new quizzes being created on the site every week by MyBuzz Fans. This all adds up to a massive collection of over 1.75 million quizzes ready for you to play right now – that’s equivalent to 350 Buzz! discs, or 115,000(ish) episodes of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

MyBuzzQuiz is open to everyone – you don’t need to own a PlayStation to take part, simply head to the site and start creating your own quizzes – or just play the quizzes already there. However, if you do own a PS3 you’ll be able to upload your MyBuzz! web quizzes to your console to play in-game. All pretty cool!

So huge thanks to everyone who’s created their own quizzes and helped keep the MyBuzz! community site such good fun for us here and all the Buzz! fans over the last year.

Here’s a look at the most popular quizzes on the website for each of our language communities – be sure to head over, check them out, have a play and add your feedback:

• English – merlinpants: “Trick question quiz” (15,200+ plays and counting…)
• Spanish – alex8496: “UEFA EURO 2008” (9,400+)
• German – ChrisTheKing911: “WM-2006-Quiz” (8,000+)
• French – erwan44: “terminez la chanson ….” (7,800+)
• Dutch – PrimeNL: “Maak deze Nederlandse Hit af…” (3,200+)
• Norwegian – powergitt: “Lurespørsmål” (2,300+)
• Italian – VFR800m: “completa la canzone 2” (2,200+)
• Swedish – Fictionman: “GODIS” (1,950+)
• Portuguese – MadeiraMan: “Só Música Pop!” (1,600+)
• Polish – nightrunnerPL : “MetallicA cz.2″ (1,470+)
• Finnish – Routamaa: Mitenkäs se biisi menikään 2 (1,450+)
• Danish – Morteno: “Klovn ‘Serie’” (1,100+)

So here’s to another quiz-filled year. Now for some celebratory cake *nom-nom-nom*

Cheers, Ian

Following Round 1 of the Buzz! World Championships, our 32 Finalists were invited to the French final in Paris, which was the first of the National Finals events. The French final took place in a nice old cinema called “Ciné 13 Theatre” near to Montmartre in Paris.

The 32 Online Winners had to go through several Buzz! rounds until they reached the final round: four of them played for the title of “Buzz!: Le plus malin des francais”

After some rounds of Buzz! like fastest finger, pass the bomb and more, the winner was decided. It was: MichaelRomsfield (PSN ID) aka Romain Mabil from Paris.

The French PlayStation Office wishes Romain all the best for the Buzz! World Championship Final!

P.S.: Calling all French guys and girls out there: If you want to support Romain Mabil for the Buzz! World Championship Final, then join his Fan page on Facebook right now!

Hi everyone, I’m really pleased to let you know that the new Buzz! HQ space in PS Home is now live!

This space lets you play multiplayer MyBuzz! quizzes by running around to stand on the correct answers. You can choose to play in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish, and there are lots of exclusive Buzz! PS Home items to be won too.

You can head straight there by selecting Buzz! HQ from the World Map and try it out.

Let me know what you think of it (and if you’ve won a game yet!) in the Comments below.

Happy buzzing!

Rob.

The PSPgo was officially unveiled on-stage by Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. CEO, Kaz Hirai. It’s 50% smaller and 40% lighter than the PSP-1000 and with 16 GB internal flash memory, it’s designed for those who like their digital media “to go”, as they say over here. It will be released on October 1, 2009.

Complementing this new evolution of PSP is a host of fantastic games coming to both UMD and PlayStation Store. Kazanouri Yamauchi, the mastermind behind Gran Turismo, arrived to show GT PSP, which will feature 800 cars, 35 tracks and will run at 60 FPS. He was followed by another legendary Japanese developer, Hideo Kojima, for the reveal of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a brand new mission for Solid Snake, only on PSP, which takes place during the 1970s.

Completing the portable line-up were a brand new Resident Evil title; Buzz! Quiz World, which will also be on PLAYSTATION 3; and the news that Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines features interoperability with Assassin’s Creed 2 on PS3. And to make sure we see plenty more stellar titles for PSP in the future, Jack Tretton announced that the price of PSP development tools will be cut by 80%, expanding the opportunity for developers to create content for PSP.

Moving onto the PS3, Richard Marks of SCE research and development showed us a new motion sensing controller that works with PlayStation Eye to enable 1:1 movement response. The crowd was impressed by tech demos that allowed him to play sports, wield a giant sword and shield, aim guns and even write with astonishing precision. He spoke of “sub-millimetre accuracy,” which I like to think of as a metric shout-out to us Europeans.

There were absolutely loads of PS3 games on show, including a live demo of the opening scenes to God of War III; a gorgeous video of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves gameplay that climaxed with Drake taking on a helicopter; the trailer for Team ICO’s latest creation, The Last Guardian; a look at ModNation, which applies LittleBigPlanet’s mantra of play, create, share to the kart racing genre, allowing players to build playable tracks in a matter of seconds; Agent, a new exclusive title from Rockstar North; the surprise announcement that Final Fantasy XIV is coming next year, exclusively to PS3; and the first trailer for Gran Turismo 5.

The strength of this E3 line-up was best summed up when Tretton proudly announced that 364 games are coming out on PlayStation platforms in the next year. That and the number of semi-colons in the above paragraph.

So there you have it, which bit was best for you? I’m off to see what the rest of the SCEE guys are up to, although the words lying and down were being used quite a bit earlier.

Very soon, we’re going to launch a brand new space in PlayStation Home called Buzz! HQ, where you can chat and meet up with other quiz fans in a new lobby area or take part in a multiplayer Buzz! quiz game extravaganza.

The game works by making you run around the studio to answer questions, all of which are taken from the best content that you’ve created on the MyBuzzQuiz.com website. Four coloured answer buttons are laid out on the floor and you need to make sure you’re standing on the right answer when the time runs out. The winner’s decided over four rounds, and there are a number of exclusive prizes up for grabs for the greatest players. I’m hoping this is going to be really great fun, and bring a great new Buzz! multiplayer game to PlayStation Home.

So keep your eyes peeled for the new Buzz! space, which will be live very soon. In the meantime, check out our pictures of the space and let me know what you think.

Happy buzzing!

Rob