 Review By: Jared Black |
Developer: | Zemnott |
| Publisher: | ValuSoft | |
| Genre: | Trivia | |
| ESRB: | Everyone | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Minimum Requirements: P4 1.2 GHz 256 MB RAM 32 MB video card 120 MB HDD space DirectX 9.0 |
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| Buy Now: |   |
Riding on the coattails of the ubiquitous reality genre, and only helped by the recent writer’s guild strike, the TV quiz show genre has made a remarkable comeback over the past few years. One of the most popular of these is FOX’s Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?. Hosted by Jeff Foxworthy, the simple concept and Middle America appeal of its host make it an easy show to watch when “nothing better” is on, and naturally that appeal has led to a video game based on the show.
The concept is simple: the player answers questions from a number of school subjects, such as Art and Math, divided by grade. There are ten questions in all, with two coming from each grade from 1st through 5th. The player is free to select the categories in any order he or she wishes, with the money won increasing with each correct answer. If the player answers all ten questions correctly, he or she is then presented with the golden opportunity to answer a question worth $1 million (or drop out and run away with $500,000).
On the show, what sometimes makes this difficult (and embarrassing to the contestant) is that the questions can be obscure, with answers easily forgotten over the past 20 years or so the contestant has been out of school. So to help the adult dummies, there are five 5th grade children (“classmates”) to assist. Each classmate can help with two questions, with some strategy involved in selecting the children to suit the subjects they’re stronger in. Getting their help comes in three forms, each of which can be used once: Peek, Copy, and Save. Peek lets the player see what their classmate wrote down before answering, Copy lets the player lock into whatever answer the classmate wrote down, and finally Save is automatic if the player answers incorrectly but the classmate doesn’t.
Here though, the classmates are rarely needed. The questions up until the $1 million question are multiple choice, which makes them much easier than they are on TV. Aside from the obscure music and art questions (just not my strong suit, but the more artistic among you should get those easily too), it’s pretty easy to breeze through most of the questions and make it to the $1 million question. When I did need help, my classmate almost always had the correct answer. I guess that’s a good thing though, because there’s no way in the game to know which subjects each classmate is strong in as they have zero personality. A short biography on each would've helped considerably here. The $1 million question itself is fill-in-the-blank, but I never found any questions where it could be one of several answers, so that never became an issue for me.
There are also several curious design decisions. For starters, when you reach the last classmate, you still have to select that classmate even though there are no other options. There’s absolutely no reason why the game shouldn’t auto-select that classmate for the player. More annoyingly, for some reason the camera automatically pans 45 degrees between the front of the stage and the classmates sitting off to the right when the mouse is moved near the edge of the screen. As a result, sometimes the camera will pan when moving the mouse to the “Lock In” button at the bottom right of the screen. Since the classmates obscure the next question on the smaller chalkboard to the right, the player then has to pan the camera back to the right to see all of the next question. Finally, the game plays the “intro” (which is just the theme song playing over the main game screen) every single time a new game is started. While this can be skipped by pressing a button, the player is still forced to sit through introductions of his or her robotic classmates every single time.
The worst sign that this was rushed and developed on a shoestring budget however is found in the graphics and sound. The character models are atrocious. Jeff’s lips don’t move when he talks, and his body loops the same “reading the card” animation every few seconds. He’ll also randomly warp to different parts of the stage between questions for no real reason. The classmates look like they’re straight out of a N64 game, with blocky square hands, hexagon-ish faces with horrible shadowing, and incredibly robotic movements “cheering” the player on. Yes, there’s a reason why this game’s install is a paltry 80.49 MB.
Jeff will frequently spout one-liners taunting the player, but unfortunately he only has a dozen or so to choose from. So get ready to hear him comment about how recess isn’t a subject in twangy Southern drawl over and over again. And of course, the only music here is the show’s minimally catchy theme song, which also wears out its welcome quickly.
Bottom Line:
Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? is a functional trivia game, as it does successfully takes the trivia show and bring it home in video game form. Outside of that basic functionality however, almost everything else is botched with very poor presentation and design choices that only add to a sense of frustration. Given the plethora of trivia games available for free on the web, there’s really no reason for even hardcore fans of the show to buy this for $20 MSRP.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
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| 3.0 |
Posted: 2008-04-01 14:26:57 PST