Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Mobile, 2007; v1.0.3, 316KB
What is it?

Smarter than Average Joe is a quiz game that pushes you down a list of questions in a handful of categories and moves you along a rating scale that corresponds to a traditional schooling system as you progress. It is styled to mimic the staggeringly popular “brain training” games that have made Nintendo improbable amounts of money with very little programming effort. However, unlike these brain games, this is a trivia quiz that’s based on actual specific knowledge rather than conceptual skill.

You can practice the quiz or do what’s called a “daily” test, but the name is misleading on the latter, as you are not limited to playing the test once per day, and in fact you could play it endlessly if you were so inclined.

How does it play?

At last, a mobile phone game that’s in the right style for a keypad. Sadly, the game is so visually inconsistent that part of the time you’ll be trying to figure out what the keys will do, which will harm your performance in the quiz as you’re scored based on speed. Additionally, while these questions are meant to be on actual knowledge, a number of the questions are either completely wrong or worded in such a way as to be unanswerable. Over time you will learn what the answer it wants is though, because when you don’t see the same exact question appear more than once, you’ll see a variation on it until you figure out what it’s looking for.

Just to be clear here, do dogs see in black and white? No, while they don’t see a full visible spectrum, it is not believed that they do. But in this game, yes, they do. When installing an air conditioner in a window, where do you put it? At the bottom, so it can be braced on the windowsill. But in this game, no, the correct place is either at the top of the window, or about a foot alongside it, embedded in the wall… I’m not clear on what the diagram is saying.

You’ll find the questions do not change in difficulty throughout the game, and you’ll see the same questions throughout. You’re effectively being scored based on your percentage correct from a random batch of questions. This was confusing to me because I expected the questions to become more challenging, and most of my progress was in turn a result of memorization rather than knowledge.

How does it look and sound?

The menus are colorful and readable, and it’s easy to navigate. Presentation during the quiz is poor. Simplistic design is great for this style of game, but the seemingly random use of color and layout, along with the baffling diagrams, makes for a great challenge on even very easy questions. The game’s feedback to your answers is not consistent from question to question, so at times it can be hard to tell whether you got a question right or not. I’ve played some flash-based quiz games in the past and other quiz video games, and the successful ones always use the same style and feedback throughout in an attempt to stay out of the way so you can do your thing. I found myself spending several seconds on many questions just trying to figure out what I was looking at. Some of the analytical questions would have benefited from an explanation after the fact.

How is the replay value?

I don’t see any replay value in this game. Once you’ve depleted the questions, you’ll just see the same ones again and again as you try to improve your percentage… but this will begin to happen before you finish a single play through of the game. There don’t seem to be any additional modes to unlock, so the package is very bare bones.

Is it worth it?

I’m going to have to say no. Fans of the genre are going to be disappointed, and those who aren’t are going to wonder why these games do so well. If you have a DS, stick with Brain Age and Train Your Brain, they’re a much more solid offering than this. In fact, Gameloft has some other brain games available which I haven’t played, and perhaps they’re better executed than this.

Smarter than Average Joe for mobile phones gets one point out of five.

Check out Smarter than Average Joe and Gameloft’s other mobile games at the official site.