Name: Trivial Pursuit
Genre: Board, Trivia
Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii (Reviewed on Xbox 360)

After EA announced their deal with Hasbro, complete exploitation of every board game under their brand was expected. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With a growing trend of connectivity, the idea of bringing classic family-style entertainment to consoles seems like a sure bet, and there’s no reason that the shift towards casual can’t mean great things for gamers of all walks of life. Trivial Pursuit might be the most hardcore of all of the casual experiences, as it demands as much knowledge as Scrabble and as much strategy as Connect-Four. It also has a good deal to gain from taking this jump due to the possibilities of downloadable content; it’s not like Scrabble is going to be getting any "Letter Packs" anytime soon. Is the console port good enough to shelf the board game for good?

To justify putting the game on the current era of consoles, EA has bumped the graphics up to be more fitting of the high-definition generation. The game board is presented well, the menus are incredibly sleek and stylized, and the puck skips, swims, and flies from place to place after the die is rolled. An announcer (who can be turned off) commentates the action, but his voice becomes grating after a few minutes, a fact made worse when he soon starts repeating phrases and jokes. The typical question text is sometimes accompanied by images or a map, but nothing changes the game drastically from classic Trivial Pursuit. It’s still a very familiar game, and focuses on one to four players as they move a small game piece around a board, collecting wedges as a trophy for correctly answering questions broken into six categories: Geography, Entertainment, History, Arts & Literature, Science & Nature, and Sports & Leisure. Fairly standard stuff, especially for anyone who has played Trivial Pursuit before.