A trivia game that adjusts its questions to anyone, of any age, anywhere in the world? No way! This I had to see.
In Smarty Pants, you begin by picking your Mii and your age group, so that the game can adjust the difficulty level of the questions for each player. This ensures that no matter the age of the player, the level of knowledge will be appropriate. Furthermore, it even takes in consideration where in the world you are to customize the questions for you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t consider everywhere in the world, so only North America, UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy are available.
According to your performance throughout the questions, the difficulty also adjusts itself. Answer a lot of questions right, and they will become harder; answer incorrectly and the questions will “dumb down” a bit.
Basically, this is like playing Trivial Pursuit, but without the board, the cards and with some funny activities in between questions. Smarty Pants has three modes of gameplay, Solo, Friends and Family. Solo play is pretty much you answering as many questions as possible within a time limit. The questions are selected from eight categories: Games, Places & People, Science, Sports, Books, Fashion, Entertainment and Art. There is no way to track your personal scores while playing alone, since you can only use a guest profile.
Friends mode is the competitive multiplayer, and you will need at least two Wii-motes to play it. Players customize their own preferences and then take turns spinning the wheel by making circular movements with the Wii-mote and releasing A. Once the wheel stops, you can still nudge it either way, but there’s a limited amount of nudges, so use it when you know it will be beneficial to you. Some of the spaces also have special cards that you can throw into play, literally, by doing a throwing gesture with the Wii-mote. The cards can help you narrow the answers, change categories or pause the timer.
Once you have your category and the score the question will be worth. How do you do this? By shooting at the amounts that pass on the screen. You want to shoot the positive numbers, of course, so as you can imagine, it’s not just about answering the most correct questions, but getting the most points as well. And buzzing in before anyone else does.
Family mode offers the same basic multiplayer as Friends, but in co-op fashion, so the mini-games are used as a group effort instead.
Smarty Pants is a pretty smart trivia game, for the most part. It makes it possible for everyone of all ages to play on an equal level of opportunity by adjusting the difficulty to each player, ensuring everyone has fun. But at the same time, it assumes everyone who is 30 must know a whole lot about sports and all kinds of books…
It’s no Scene It, so after a while you will start noticing the questions repeating themselves, but Smarty Pants is still an entertaining game for the whole family. Just make sure you have some extra Wii-motes handy for everyone, since the game box forgets to mention that.
Special thanks to Dan Mazei and Nintendo for providing a copy of this title.