Apps to Avoid: Clueless

Clueless 
(Developed by Paramount Digital Entertainment)
Available for: iOS
Price: 99 cents
Originally published: June 14

Movie tie-in applications are hit or miss--mostly miss. Some are totally inexplicable, like Clueless, a mobile game based on the 1995 teen comedy starring Alicia Silverstone. That's right, 1995--a moment in time more than a decade before the iPhone or the App Store, when mobile phones were the size of Nerf footballs, and America spent its days transfixed by Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise," NYPD Blue and the O.J. Simpson trial. Not one of those pop culture touchstones has resurfaced as a mobile game, so why Clueless? Are teen girls clamoring for mobile apps based on movies released before they were born? Was there an Alicia Silverstone renaissance and no one thought to tell me? Or is Hollywood simply so utterly bereft of compelling ideas that it has no choice but to resurrect blockbuster concepts from a generation earlier? (It's a rhetorical question.)

None of it would matter if Clueless delivered a worthwhile gaming experience, but it's a regrettable waste of time, not to mention enormously condescending towards its target teen audience. "Avoid making your friends cry 'as if!' by matching them up with all the oh-so-fabulous items they crave to land a hall pass to the next level," reads its App Store description page. "In between some major virtual retail therapy and debating whether or not those shoes were so last year, players will strive to maintain their social status by helping over a hundred friends find happiness with romance, fashion and all the must-have items that make a girl's life complete."

While Clueless the movie cleverly and thoughtfully addressed the anxieties that percolate below the surface of teen life, Clueless the mobile game simply exploits those anxieties, championing the shallow, soulless youth culture the movie satirized. Say this much for Clueless, though: It definitely lives up to its title.