Celeb-a-like
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| Celeb-a-like

Who would want to be famous in this day and age, when holding on to your time in the spotlight has nothing to do with talent, but rather selling coverage rights for your wedding to tacky magazines or taking a trip to the Australian jungle to eat animal genitals. No amount of cheques or guest appearances on Loose Women is worth that ordeal.

Thankfully, there's now a way (albeit, a fairly lighthearted one) of finding out just what kind of star you'd be if you ever made the headlines, with AMA offering up a quiz that uses your personality traits to fathom just what celeb you're most like.

Make out you're a caring, sensitive guy who loves his family, for instance, and Celeb-a-like will paint you with Will Smith's brush, who - in AMA's book, at least - is partial to fun excursions out with his kids or romantic meals in front of the fire with his wife.

The two main modes follow roughly the same format, asking you fifteen questions about you and your lifestyle, or fifteen questions about you and your other half, focusing on how you interact with each other both publicly and privately.

Presented with four hypothetical situations, you choose the option that best describes you before Celeb-a-like determines who your match is. That's after it's thrown in a random mini-game for good measure, however.

In standard Celeb Like Who mode, this involves rearranging a 'celebrity picture' split into squares so that it forms the original image. In 'Celebrity Couple', it means pairing up a star with their real life partner.

Neither of these little excursions is especially fun or has anything to do with the end result, serving no purpose other than being needless filler to bulk up the package as a whole. Without them, Celeb-a-like would literally be over in seconds.

That aside, the questions in the main modes themselves are far from perfect. Some seem to refer to lifestyle decisions you make in your day to day life, while others seem to be after how you'd react as a celebrity.

The problem is, the distinction between the two is far from clear, and the answers on offer often ridiculous.

It almost feels like the heart of Celeb-a-like has been lost in translation, the questions and answers so awkward, so seemingly random, that trying to search out a response feels like a waste of time.

That is, essentially, what Celeb-a-like represents. It's a very basic idea, the kind of quiz you see on Facebook or in magazines all the time, needlessly fleshed out to try and make it worth spending money on.

Fancy playing celeb charades with your friends? Well, Celeb-a-like comes complete with a mode that suggests film roles and characters for you. If that isn't pointless enough, there's also the 'Gallery' mode, which lets you read about the careers of all of the stars featured.

To be frank, there's nothing in the game's filler that can't be found online for free, and the main game modes are confused, cheap and ultimately futile.

What makes it all the more painful is that applications such as these should inject welcome diversity into the portals. Celeb-a-like and its kin have the potential to go beyond your standard online quizzes and serve up something really special.

This, however, is far too shallow, far too cynical and, overall, far too silly to be worth spending your hard-earned cash on.

Celeb-a-like

Pointless to the point of being offensive, Celeb-a-like is an example of an app that tries to make money from the kind of activities you can find online for free, mixing in a series of misguided quizzes with some fruitless filler
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Keith Andrew
Keith Andrew
With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font. He's also Pocket Gamer's resident football gaming expert and, thanks to his work on PG.biz, monitors the market share of all mobile OSes on a daily basis.