Smarty Pants is a simple trivia game which include some fun Wii interaction along the way. Smarty pants has a variety of game mode, focusing on multiplayer cooperation or competition. Questions come in a range of categories, and for cooperative play, your age is taken into account when looking at the difficulty and target group of your question.

Smarty Pants did seem to have an impressive amount of questions, none of us saw a repeat despite quite a lot of play. But. the interaction and game dynamics are pretty boring. Trivia games have grown in recent years, evolving and changing. Smarty Pants seems to be of an older generation, along the outdated lines of Jepordy and Trivial Persuit rather than the newer social games around like Cranium or Outburst and the like. This older game dynamic isn’t as much fun as it could be, and makes me feel like it could be so much more.

Supposedly Smarty Pants was changing the difficulty and content to match you age, but I didn’t see much of that. Furthermore, many times in the game you can use a bonus to get an easier question or give an opponent a harder one, but often times these categories of easier and harder seemed very off, so I wonder how much testing they really did to come up with these supposed distinctions.

Furthermore, there wasn’t really a way to tailor what categories we get. For example, one of the categories was of course sports, but all four of us never knew any of the answers, and it would have been nice to remove the category for play completely. But this didn’t seem to be an option.

All in all, I feel like I need more in a trivia game if it is really going to keep me hooked. I give smarty pants a 5 out of 10. Especially at the $50 price they are asking.

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Yep, Microsoft has been working on it since August. A Wiimote, no pretending other wise. You know, I don’t have a problem with the fact that Microsoft is including motion sensitivity. That makes sense, everyone has been waiting for them to do it and it is the next logical step if they want to compete with the PS3 and the Wii. But I find it appalling that they don’t even pretend to come up with something that isn’t a blatant ripoff of the Wiimote. Lets have a look at the design that has been leaked to the right.

OK, it has an LED light with four colors on top. All right, that might be original, if it is suppose to be used for games. Probably it is just so that you know which controller you are. OK, that is cool, not exactly innovative though. It has a speaker, which is a straigh unapologetic ripoff. Hopefully it’ll be better quality than the Wiimote speaker at least. It has an analog stick. Wow, innovation at it’s best, an analog stick instead of a direction pad. First, that may make it difficult to use the Xmote to navigate menus (meaning that they will have to do everything point-and-click), and second, an analog stick instead of a D-pad is not innovative.

It has four buttons instead of two, and unless I’m mistaken, it is going to be a little on the difficult side to hit those buttone while you’re moving. Granted, the Wiimote makes it hard to hit the buttons as well, but at least with the Wiimote you have the option of holding it sideways. No such luck here.

And lastly, a microphone. Well that is interesting. What are they going to do with that? They can’t use it for multiplayer communication, because a mircophone that far away from you would pick up the sound of the whole house (and the other players right next to you). Maybe they’ll do something interesting, but I’m just not seeing it.

All in all, this is a total ripoff. So far this is just rumor, but I can’t imagine how Microsoft could hold their heads up if they released something so unoriginal. There are lots of ideas out there Microsoft, surely you can find something unique?

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