Smarty Pants (Wii) Review

The game is a simple one. Pick up a Wii-mote, shove the disk in the hole in the Wii and answer some questions. You can do it by yourself or with three other people. Everyone has their own Wii-mote which acts as your buzzer. If you know the answer, you buzz in by pressing A and waving your arm around in the air. Heck, even if you don’t know and you want to piss everyone else off you still buzz in. Hilarious.

There’s a whole shed-load of questions from categories such as Science and Nature, Literature, the World, Food, Sport and a whole lot more. What’s super-duper cool is that each version is localised for its specific market (so the UK version that we’re reviewing contains a ‘UK’ category of questions, ditto for the other versions in Europe and the US of A). The questions range in difficulty from the simple to the obscure. They’re pitched at different levels depending on how old you are (you tell the game your age and assign your details to your Mii character before you start playing), so if you’re only ten the game won't start asking you about amino acids or Moll Flanders. Get a question wrong and you’ll be docked points and placed in jail, meaning you can’t buzz in again until you get ‘out of jail’. If you’re playing with four people you can also play in teams, which is great fun.

The game is split up into a solo mode (which is a bit dull) a friends mode (which is a bit competitive) and a family mode (which is a bit warm and cuddly). In solo mode you have to answer as many questions as you can before the timer runs out, in friends mode you have the chance to compete head to head to find out who is the Smarty Pants and in family mode you all work together and have lots of jolly good fun. Jolly! We do have a minor complaint though: in friends mode, if you’re ahead on points (not in timer mode), you can basically sabotage the game. We would explain, but then that would tell you how to ‘cheat’ the game.

We’d much prefer it if EA had kept this game to being quizzical and nothing else. It has all these stupid little mini-game elements, which to be blunt, are bloody stupid. Especially the one that requires you to dance around like a fool for nearly a minute. Pointless, unnecessary and just plain odd. It just doesn’t fit into the whole feel of the game. There are also random and often confusing ‘bonus cards’ that allow you more time to answer questions, make questions harder and the like. Why they exist we’ll never know. They have bizarre rules, knowing when to use them is confusing and it just detracts from the fun of getting quizzical.

There are 20,000 questions in total and it’ll take you a fair bit of quizzing before they start cropping up again. You can also select how long a game lasts, so if you want a quick round of quizzing you can select short or if you want a longer experience you can go for a full on hardcore quiz. Just how good this game is depends on how much you like being clever, or being found out as dumb. If going to pub quizzes, playing Trivial Pursuit or even playing along when you watch The Weakest Link or something of that ilk is your thing then you’ll probably enjoy Smarty Pants. If getting a little tipsy over Chrimbo or New Years and and trying to be clever whilst playing Wii with your mates and or family is your thing, then you’ll probably enjoy Smarty Pants.

So, what wont you enjoy about Smarty Pants? Well, it has a very annoying ‘host’ who shouts enthusiastically at you the whole time and makes you want to hurt people (our top tip: turn him off) and it looks a bit naff (our tip: don’t buy this game looking for amazing graphics, its a ruddy quiz game) and it buggers about with a normal quiz format in favour of stupid and 'crazy Wii stuff.'