I’m a sucker for trivia games. I’ve played my share of Trivial Pursuit and have trounced and have been trounced depending on the edition used. So when I saw a trivia game called Smarty Pants for the Wii at Electronic Arts, I was naturally drawn — nay, sucked — towards the title.
Essentially, Smarty Pants is a neat multiplayer game about, well, trivia. Up to four contestants can join and the trivia questions are set up according to a person’s age. For instance, for those that are in their teens, the questions will have to do with current pop culture. If you’ve been around the block a few more times, the questions get progressively harder. Linking questions to the player’s age is a good way of leveling the playing field so (in theory) no one hogs all the answers to the questions.
You wouldn’t think a game about answering questions would be too fun, but as I watched the other players, there was definitely something going on…a killer instinct. Everyone was also having a blast playing and soon, a small crowd gathered around watching us do our best to brain beat each other into submission.
The game is set up with four Miis at the bottom of the screen while a question pops up with four possible answers appearing above. Be the first to raise your hand for a chance at answering the question and you’ll earn some sweet points if you’re correct. In the event of a tie, you’ll have to do a tug of war for the privilege; try to keep from laughing too much during this face-off. If you’re too quick on the trigger, however, and answer a question before it is completely shown — and you answer incorrectly — you’ll be blocked from playing the next round.
You can help determine who will select the next category for a question by spinning a little virtual wheel that looks exactly like the spinner from the board game Life. You do this by holding down the A button and whirling the remote in a circle. Wheee!
There are around 20,000 questions in this game, according to EA, so it’ll keep you interested for a good long time. Of course, the remote’s motion sensing ability is incorporated into the game and competitors can do various gyrations, dances and jump up and down to slow down a countdown timer in order to give their team more time to guess or answer a question.
If the people who were with me playing the game are any indication of how fun Smarty Pants will be, their actions in hogging up all the available spots for play should prove to be a positive for the game’s addicting quality. We’ll find out on November 19.
