Smarty Pants (Wii) - Review by Stocka

Introduction

In this, the first trivia game I've seen for the Wii, EA have done a pretty good job at providing a fun title aimed at the casual / family gamer. Use of the Wii controls is generally done well and the game seems to appeal to both older gamers in a party mood, family groups and younger children.

Gameplay

Three modes of play are provided: solo, friends and family. Let's get solo mode out of the way first because it's pretty much a waste of anyone's time. I can't really see why anyone would just want to practice answering questions on their own; and the lack of any performance tracking in this mode (you're not event allowed to use your own Mii in this mode) makes it truly pointless.

Friends mode is the competitive option, which according to the manual is designed for players generally close in age. The reasons for this soon become apparent when you start playing, because although you enter the age of each player to adjust the difficulty level of their questions, there is nothing to stop an overly competitive adult or slightly older sibling 'buzzing in' and stealing their question.

The question category is 'chosen' by using the dreaded 'cranking' gesture to wind up the question wheel before letting it spin. Now I've never particularly liked this appearing in games and it still seems a bit gimmicky, with some people who played the game with me having difficulty with it. I actually quite liked it this time but wouldn't have minded at all had it not been present.

Other players can try to 'nudge' the wheel as it comes to a rest in order to get it onto a favoured position - such as choosing the category yourself, getting special cards or doing the 'double point dance'. This is done be shaking the Wii-Mote and you only have 10 nudges per spin. I found this to be bit hit & miss really, and on occasions no matter what I did the wheel wouldn't budge.

Once the question is chosen it starts to appear letter by letter, typewrite style and you can buzz in at any point by pressing A and raising the WiiMote. Again, this will penalize younger children and slower readers if there is a big imbalance in player age/knowledge as it's often a just a speed reading test to see who can get the gist of the question first.

Questions are spiced up a bit with a variety of special challenge cards. For example, playing the 'I know it' card (by pressing B & flicking the WiiMote towards the screen as if to fling a card onto the table) lets you prevent someone who buzzed in on your question from answering & instead the two players have a tug of war game (with appropriate WiiMote gestures) to determine who gets to answer. The 'Narrow it down' card removes one wrong answer giving you slightly better odds if you're a bit unsure of your answer.

Family mode sees a cooperative setup where all ages can play together and amass points for the team. Each player has their own questions (again customised for age). This mode can be played with a single controller or more and the non-answering players can perform Wii-Mote gestures to slow down the timer which is gradually counting down to zero.

Each mode has a few configuration options such as how long the game will last (from 15 minutes to around an hour). Friends mode has the optional 'wager mode' where a shooting gallery mini-game is played at the start of each round to determine how many points each question is worth.

You can view your statistics to see how many questions in which categories you've attempted and answered correctly. This is a nice idea but it is just show textually in a big scrolling list; it would have been so much nicer to see it as some sort of chart so that you could see at a glance how you were doing in each topic. Comparisons with other players would also have been good - nothing like a bit of sibling rivalry to spice things up!

Controls

I've mentioned most of the control methods already and generally I have to say that they work pretty well. The tug-of-war game is a little odd to say the least as is the 'dance' where you have to get up and jig around to build up a score multiplier or slow down the clock in the cooperative mode. I could never work out exactly what comprised a 'good' dance and the end result seemed pretty random.

Graphics

There's nothing special graphically about Smarty Pants. It's nice that you can use your Miis though the Mii head is actually stuck on top of a more realistic body which actually looks pretty cool. Apart from that everything is a bit bland but quite acceptable.

Sound

Not a lot to say about the music and sounds either - it would have been nice if the questions could have been read out instead of just appearing slowly on the screen, though that would have changed the game mechanic a bit, and who knows - they may have used some really irritating voice actor and it would have made it worse rather than better. Otherwise, the sound package is just about adequate.

Final comments

Smarty Pants only really comes good when you can get 3 or 4 people together, though in Friends mode that will require a lot of WiiMotes! That aside, it's a pretty fair attempt, and as long as you can pick it up at a discounted price it's recommended for trivia game fans.

Pro: Lots of questions, nice use of controls, good for families
Con: You'll need to borrow some more remotes to get the best out of it, a little pricey
Final score: 6.5

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