Smarty Pants Review

Platform: Nintendo Wii
Genre: Trivia
Number of Players: 1-4
Publisher: EA
Writer: Trina

Rating 8.0

Rent

Are you a Smarty Pants?

I love trivia games. Unfortunately, I am not great at them. Especially games like Trivia Pursuit where most of the questions seem to be from before I was born. Smarty Pants is from EA?s Casual Entertainment label. This is not to say the game is easy. The game uses a unique system to pick out questions for the people playing.

Graphics:
The graphics are very simple. Everything is drawn to be like a cartoon version of a game show. There is no real reason for realistic or amazing graphics. This game is all about game play.

Controls:
To answer a question you just raise your hand. Which means pretty much anyone can play because the controls are intuitive and easy to learn. As usual, you will want to leave space between you and others so that you don?t hit each other. There are bonuses you win to block or steal a question from another player. To activate those bonuses you press the B button on the Wii Remote. This is basically the one problem I ran into in the game. The B button is extremely sensitive. Just brushing your finger over it and raising your hand for a question could activate it. To prevent that from happening, I put my fingers lower on the remote. Problem solved!

Sounds:
The sounds are typical to a game show. Everything from the host to spinning the wheel.

Flow:
The trivia game never felt too long. There are multiple game modes which include 4-player game or a team based co-op. The questions come pretty quickly, especially in the rapid-fire competitive mode. Perfect for a party where you want to keep things moving.

Fun Factor:
I found the game to be very fun. There is even a trivia category about video games. It was fun to see what I knew. Smarty Pants is unique in that it takes into consideration your region and your age for targeting trivia questions that are appropriate. This means no more questions about things that happened before you were born!

Female Aspect:
Not really an issue. This game is non-gender specific and non-age specific which is great!

Replay Value:
In my opinion, Smarty Pants definitely becomes one of the titles in your Wii collection that you can bring out whenever people are over. It?s easy to play/pick up. This will probably encourage even more people who might be intimidated by games. Will you play this by yourself? Probably not. The one thing that could add to this title is online play, which doesn?t seem to exist on the Wii.