We went to PAX 2008 this weekend, and Sony was running competitions in their booth to win the new Buzz! game for the PlayStation 3 before it is released later this month.

Everyone played a round of “fastest fingers” — there were four rounds, each with four people, and the person with the highest score out of all the rounds would win the prize. The topic for each round was being selected from some of the various user-generated topics available online. One of the rounds was Nascar — not a good topic for people in Seattle. Luckily, neither Carmel nor I were selected for that round. There was another round after that, that people were pretty bad at. Carmel and I got selected for the third round. What would the topic be? Another Nascar-like topic would sink us, and we had the misfortune of being selected into the same round, so we’d be competing against each other for points. Fortunately, the topic was fast food. Everyone was getting the questions right, so it came down to who would answer the questions the fastest. Luckily, Carmel had the fastest fingers that day… I was slow on the draw. She scored a massive 2350 points!

Now we had to wait for the results of the final round. The next four people came up… and their topic was classic cartoon characters. This could be bad. However, the person writing the quiz focused a lot on the Hanna-Barbera characters from Space Ghost and the Herculoids — stuff I was familiar with from TV I grew up with, but the twenty-somethings playing this round didn’t have a chance. With them having bad rounds, Carmel won the prize!