Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? Make the Grade! [DS]

How many vowels are in the word "education?" Is the phrase "spilling the beans" an idiom, a simile or a metaphor? And 25 is a composite number -- true or false? These are just a few of the questions that should make you feel bad if you can't immediately give their answers, because, if you can't, you just might not be smarter than a 5th grader.

Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Make the Grade is the second video game adaptation of the popular primetime quiz show that's been making Americans feel intellectually inferior to their own grade-school children for over a year and a half now. It's a follow-up to last year's rush-it-out-to-market rendition, but while this new sequel has had a further 12 months to have its design refined and some extra polish added, it still just feels like more of the same.

Beginning a round of the game, you'll come face-to-face with a 3D rendered model of the show's comedian host, Jeff Foxworthy. He'll explain the rules in his trademark manner, joking around and poking fun at you as he does -- but it's all very straightforward. You're given a set of 10 questions drawn from a variety of subjects which you can select to answer in any order you choose. For every question you get right, your winnings increase -- up to a potential $500,000. And if you make it all the way to that level, you'll earn the further right to try one final question to walk away with a cool million bucks.

If you get stuck with a tricky question along the way, a set of 5th grade helpers is on hand to assist you. Like calling for a "lifeline" in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, you can peek at their answers, copy their answers straight out, or even be saved from defeat when you offer a wrong response yourself -- and you don't even have to choose to use that last one ahead of time. So all in all, it ends up being pretty easy to make your way to the half-million mark -- you've only got 10 questions to answer to begin with, and the three "cheats" essentially knock that total down to just seven bits of trivia you have to know through your own brainpower.

And that's the game -- this DS version of the game show plays out exactly as the TV program does, with the top screen displaying each question in basic text and multiple choice answers for you to tap on with your stylus showing up on the touch screen below. It's very simple, and without the pizzazz of the actual show, the limited amount of time-filling Jeff Foxworthy tomfoolery and the total lack of commercial breaks, each session of quizzing only takes a handful of minutes.

What's worse, questions will repeat themselves more and more frequently the longer you play. There are 3000 questions total, but with that total further divided across over 23 different subject categories, each subject contains only a little over 100 different questions apiece. In my playtime with the game, I first saw a repeat question in only my third run up through the dollar amounts.

All of that, so far, is all the same as last year's first version of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? on the DS. Luckily, though, there is one all-new addition that actually does add some extended value to Make the Grade -- a multiplayer mode. It's actually pretty inventive, too, in that it gets you and a friend to face off against one another using just one DS.

A question will be displayed as usual on the top screen, but you have to "buzz in" first for the right to answer it -- and that's handled by pressing either the L or R Button. The idea is that one of you holds the left side of the system and is in command of L, while the other holds the right side and takes control of R. It works well, and it's a wiser choice than trying to do a wireless download mode or demand that two players each have their own DS and their own copies of the game. That would have been too rare a situation. As it is, gamers who get this one will probably take advantage of the single-unit multiplayer to challenge their friends, their classmates or their parents in attempts to assert their elementary dominance.

Closing Comments
So Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Make the Grade is almost entirely a rerun of last year’s product, with the same basic presentation, the same 3D Jeff Foxworthy cracking jokes, and the same simple re-creation of the quiz show’s format here on the DS. Its one notable new addition is the multiplayer mode, which is admittedly novel and a good adaptation of the single-player trivia contest into a head-to-head competitive design. That one new mode, and the more budget-friendly starting MSRP of $19.99, makes this package a bit more worthwhile than last year’s first attempt. But it’s still, overall, a fairly mediocre experience and one that most DS owners can comfortably afford to skip.

©2008-12-03, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved