Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
Gets an F
Tags: Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Jake McNeill on Oct 9th, 2007
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Other | No | ||
Ever since Regis Philbin helped turn “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” into a national phenomenon, it seems as though every now and then, a new game show becomes a big ratings-grabber for a little while, only to be forgotten within a year or two in favor of some new fad. We had “The Weakest Link” and “Deal or No Deal” among others, and apparently, the latest of these games to make the rounds is “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.”
A name like that is obviously intended to elicit guffaws and laughter at the expense of its contestants. You graduated high school, right? Maybe you even have a college-level education… and you can’t answer 5th grade-level questions? Haw haw haw. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that many of these questions were minor footnotes in the textbooks that teachers generally don’t seem to go over, and even then, I have to wonder if they’re stretching things a bit. Algebra? Really? In fifth grade, algebra? And astronomy? And apparently we learned about Picasso in first grade. Hmm… either they’re reaching just a bit, or the public school system in California is horribly deficient.
However, as much as the show itself may be cheating, the videogame version takes the formula and drains out anything worthwhile that may have been there to begin with. You name an area where the game could falter, outside of glitching up and setting your computer on fire, and it does it.
Jeff Foxworthy reprises his role as the show’s host, but his voiceover here is flat and wooden to the point where he actually fooled me into thinking the game’s producers went the cheap route and hired a voice-alike, and a poor one at that. What’s more, he may pack in the comedy clubs, but here his witty repartee is so completely lacking in personality that the ensuing level of hilarity is somewhere between a Family Circus strip and a comedy traffic class. Yeah, it’s that painful.
However, this is if you can even get beyond the game’s horrendous graphics. The character models for Foxworthy and the five students (the same five every time, natch) are possibly the worst I’ve seen in a videogame in years. Not only are they blocky and robotic-looking, with jerky, broken-looking animation, but they all bear hideously empty faces with mouths and eyes that don’t move. If you can tear your eyes away from the freakish character models for a minute, you’ll see a room styled after a classroom suffering all sorts of graphical problems, including extremely jagged-looking desks, extremely blurry textures (made all the more noticeable because they’re right next to somewhat cleaner ones), and furniture that was obviously hand-drawn in along the walls. Even the “blackboard”, where questions appear, often features blurry writing.
However, even if the presentation has all the charm of a rotting corpse, as a trivia game, this is all about gameplay, which should hopefully leave those problems behind, right? Ha. Things go bad there right from the get-go, with pacing that’s sure to infuriate players. The game starts by making players sit through the show’s terrible intro theme (there’s a button to skip it, but no way to shut it off by default), followed by Jeff Foxworthy introducing the schoolkids. Every. Single. Game.
Now, as I’ve said, the character models are so atrocious you don’t want to look at them, but even beyond that is the plain fact that it’s the same five damn kids. What’s worse, unlike the intro song, you can’t skip this part. Oh, you can turn off Foxworthy’s voice and opt to display text instead, but even if you do, you have to wait for the inaudible sound file to play its course. This is something you have to put up with through the entire game, before, after, and sometimes even during trivia questions.
Oh, but that’s not the end of it, either. The questions aren’t read aloud, and answers to questions often aren’t even shown if you get them wrong. Yet, one question I encountered, “How many times does the letter A appear in this sentence?”, requires sound to hear the sentence in question, yet doesn’t let the player know this if they’ve turned off the annoying audio, making them think that “How many times does the letter A appear in this sentence?” is the sentence the question is referring to. There are even a few misspellings here and there – most notably, I suspect many players won’t guess the correct answer to one particular question because there is no such place as the “Eire Canal”.
What’s more, one almost has to wonder if the game’s designers even expected players to bother playing it more than once. The fact that I started seeing questions being repeated around my fifth or sixth game would seem to suggest the answer is “no”. This also explains a flaw that probably makes this a poor choice for home play to begin with – the fact that players can choose the more difficult questions first to get them out of the way means many will undoubtedly just play the game, lose within one or two questions, and restart until they get past the tough stuff, only to sail through the rest.
Quite frankly, this game isn’t worth the cost of the CD it’s stored on. It’s a shoddy mess that’s such an obviously rushed and half-hearted effort that everyone from the voice talent to the graphic designers to the programmers and question writers must have felt they had more important things to do with their time. Trust me when I say that you have better things to do with your time, too.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
| + Well, it’s based on a TV game show some of you might like. | 2.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Conceptually a bit shaky - if these really are fifth grade-level questions, the California public school system is even more corroded than I thought - Foxworthy’s voiceover is flat and humorless - The graphics are outright repulsive - The pacing is mangled by numerous design issues - The game’s writers couldn’t even be bothered to spell-check questions and answers |
|
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| This game is a joke. Not a funny joke about how children are smarter than adults, but a sad, pathetic joke about how a shoddy piece of work like this could actually make it into stores (and probably sell pretty well, at that). Even a fifth grade student could tell that this game is a waste of money. | |
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Tags: Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
Posted by Jake McNeill on Oct 9th, 2007 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
