Smarty Pants Hands On Preview

By Joe Haygood | October 23, 2007

EA games is really making a push into family entertainment on the Wii this holiday season. To put an emphasis on this, they spent their entire E3 press conference about family entertainment and family play titles like The Playground, Boogie and Smarty Pants, which was playable at E for All in anticipation of its November 19th release date. Smarty Pants is a trivia game that adds mini games to the standard question-answer format.

For anyone that has played You Don’t Know Jack or more recently, DVD games like Scene It, Smarty Pants takes that vibe and puts it on the Wii, but it is wrapped in a family friendly look. You use avatars that look awfully similar to the Mii’s that you create on the Wii. The game supports up to four players locally, but I have heard nothing about an online multiplayer feature as of yet.

The game will start with a character spinning a wheel that can land on a category or a player choice space. If you get a player choice spot on the wheel, you can also get a card, that will allow you to do special things. One example in the movie is using the I Know It card which gives you a chance to answer the question even if someone else tries to answer it. But this comes with a hitch - mini games.

Yes, as in the tradition of using the Screw in You Don’t Know Jack, you can use your player cards to open up opportunities in the game. In our example, someone used their I Know It card, which allowed them to enter a mini game to get the option to answer the question. There are a number of little mini games in Smarty Pants that really add to the experience. We got to do the Tug of War mini game, which required us to move the Wiimote like we were playing Tug of War.

The game is a ton of fun, and is another party game that can be enjoyed by anyone of any age. The only real issue that could be a problem is what plagues all trivia games and that is the finite amount of questions available. EA will have to either provide new questions via download or expansion pack if they really want this game to take off. We will have ot wait until after the game is out before we get some feel of what the future plans hold for this game.

One Response to “Smarty Pants Hands On Preview”

1. used cisco on October 24th, 2007 at 1:26 am Says:
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   I don’t think the number of questions will be a problem. I think I read there will be more than 20,000 questions and that an average trivia game like trivial pursuit has like 2000 questions. I’m a big trivial pursuit fan and we play our TP games anywhere from 10-15 times before repeated questions start being noticeable. If smarty pants is smart enough not to repeat a question until every question in that category has been used, then it could last a VERY long time.