Pretty Sassy

The TV Show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Graderis hosted by Jeff Foxworthy and pegs a normal adult against some really, scary smart kids.  Like the kids on the show obviously aren’t the paste eaters or the day dreamers.  I’m pretty sure they are the kids with attache cases who say things like “I think Alan Greenspan really needs to do a better job of adjusting for inflation” and actually understand what they are saying.

The video game runs $19.99 and is published by THQ.  The last gameshow-type video game I owned was the cellphone version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.  It was super low-tech, but I enjoyed playing it whenever I had a few spare moments.

My bar for this video games that are based off of TV Shows and movies have historically have a tendency to be made on a very tight budget with really tight time schedules(like this ET Game on a 5 week Schedule that now has it’s very own landfill).  You need to get it out before the craze dies.

So as with any game there are pluses and minus:

Positives: Great voices.  Jeff Foxworthy’s quotes are hillbilly awesomeness(even if there are far too few of them).  The little shout outs from the kids are pretty darn funny too.   The questions come from a massive bank of 3000 questions and we’re really fun.  The graphics of the classroom was pretty realistic and had a very fun style.  You can also pan your camera(the game word for “view”) from the front of the classroom to the back of the classroom where the kids are and there are a fair number of this to look at.  I also never ran into any major gameplay bugs or hiccups.

 Minuses: Look at those kids!  just a wee bit freakish.  The character modeling lacks some realism.  Also there are no two player modes which would have made it much easier for my husband to eat my lunch.

Who is this for: I think older kids would get a kick out of it as would die-hard watchers.  The Jeff Foxworthy quotes we’re really enjoyable and the questions we’re excellent.  The only real downfall is that I get the feeling that the character modelers were really short on time to make their delivery dates.