GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 11/16/2007
- Released on: 11/13/2007
- Originally published on GameSpot: Smarty Pants (Wii) Review
The Wii's success with people who don't typically play games has resulted in the console being home to an inordinate amount of minigame collections. Finally, someone figured out that these casual players are interested in more than flailing their arms around to win five-second-long challenges. Smarty Pants is a trivia game with 20,000 questions geared toward both kids and adults. It's bare-bones as far as console-based trivia games go, and at $50 it's a good $30 too expensive, but it's still a fun game to break out with groups of friends.
There are three different ways to play Smarty Pants: You can play alone; against up to three friends; and with your friends in a race against the clock in family mode. Given that most people play trivia games to be competitive, you'll probably spend most of your time in friends mode. Here you select your Mii, which lets the game track your stats, and then input your age to ensure that the game will ask you age-appropriate questions. Although an adult will probably be able to answer more questions than a child no matter what questions you ask, there are some pretty kid-specific questions included, so even the younger crowd should have fun and feel competitive. You can also choose the game length and what scoring type you'd like. "Countdown" decreases the amount of points a question is worth as time ticks away, and "wager" lets you determine a question's value by playing a not-so-fun shooting-range minigame before a round.
Once you've got that all squared away, it's off to spin the wheel, which looks and sounds a lot like the wheel from Wheel of Fortune. This is done by performing a spinning motion with the Wii Remote. The wheel is divided into categories such as arts, entertainment, sports, video games, books, and fashion. You'll be asked questions on whichever category the wheels stops on, unless you nudge the wheel over by pressing a button and waving the remote left or right. Depending on the space where you land, you might receive a card that can be thrown into play during a round by pressing B and making a throwing gesture. These cards will let you pause the timer, change categories, or even narrow down the available answers.
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