E for All 2007: Smarty Pants Impressions

There's always been a problem with trivia games released from major television networks or larger-scale operations: the whole family can't play a game when there's only one or two people who know the answers to the questions. Cue in Smarty Pants, a wonderful trivia game designed to bring the whole family together.

The demonstration of Smarty Pants asks the player's name and the player's age. While age is usually a useless number, the game adjusts all of its questions according to your age bracket. Cultural questions, sports questions, and many other genres are set to accommodate even younger players. Instead of asking who won the World Olympics track record 20 years ago, younger-aged gamers are asked who the managers are of present-day baseball teams. It alleviates the age-old question in trivia games: how in the hell am I supposed to know THAT?

There are two modes of multiplayer in Smarty Pants.  The first is Friends Mode, pitting players of similar age levels against one another.  At least, that's the plan.  Players need to be of the same age range to fully enjoy this competitive mode.  If players of varying ages of 10 and 78 compete in a game, the game will attempt to divide the questions in half for each.

That's where Family Mode comes in.  Family Mode allows an entire family to cooperate with one another and answer questions from each age range.  For younger children, the time can be slowed down, and sped up for adults.

What surprised me the most was the inclusion of Capcom and Square-Enix questions in the game. If either company had anything to do with the game, I could see that as shameless self promotion. But EA confirmed that they want gamers to express their knowledge from all platforms back to the Atari.  This might prove to be a game where gamers can answer trivia with their cross-platform knowledge. Playing a game about answering trivia about other games, who would have thought?