Video game review number three hundred and sixteen in my 365 Games in 365 Days project is "Who Wants to be a Millionaire".
I've had this game in my queue for a long time on Gamefly, and it's one of the last "Game show games" I still have to play this year. I've got Wheel of Fortune on the way and then the last one is "Deal or No Deal" which should be coming up in a few weeks.
Anyway...much like a few of the other game show games I've played on the Wii, this one features incredibly terrible graphics, and is missing the original host of the game. Honestly, when I added all these games, I was thinking I'd be playing pricing games with Bob Barker, or playing Millionaire against Regis...but when they arrived in the mail, it turned out I was just some generic character playing against some generic announcer. Boo for that.
The game itself is similar to the one on TV, but there have been some changes that were either made just for the game, or might have happened on the show since last I watched. First of all, there's a time limit. I seem to remember Regis giving people as much time as they want (often stretching it out as long as he could) before getting their final answers. Here, you have a 15 second time limit, and then 30 as the questions get harder. That makes it awfully hard to cheat using Bing or Google, and I'm guessing that's why they have the time limit in this game.
The lifelines have also changed. You have "poll the audience" and "phone a friend" (both are really just the computer giving you a big hint), but there's a new one that replaces the 50/50 from the TV show. On the show, they'd always take two wrong answers away, and it often bugged the shit out of me when they did that, because sometimes they'd leave the two choices someone was bouncing between.
In the game, the "2X" lifeline lets you pick two different answers for the same question, doubling your chances at being right. I like this one, and I used it a lot.
Unfortunately, I was not able to win the million dollars. The questions were pretty hard, and worded in such a way that sometimes it was hard to find the answers quickly via a search engine. A couple of the ones I missed out on were easier questions like:
Where is the "T-Zone" located:
A: Face
B: Lower Back
C: Between the Shoulders
D: Foot
I totally had no clue as to what the answer for that one was.
I also missed:
Which of these childhood games uses a spinner:
A: Monopoly
B: Sorry
C: Chutes and Ladders
D: Operation
On that one, I had it narrowed down to two, and guessed wrong. The sad thing is I owned both games as a child.
Overall Score? 5/10. This is an average game, but I think it could have been a lot better. The grahpics suck, the announcer needed to be Regis, and if it were on the Xbox, I can imagine it being really fun in one of those real time "1 vs. 100 Live" sessions they used to do online every week. Still...it was kind of fun, and even though I never won the million, I did play 5 different sessions of it, making it as high as the six figure valued questions before crapping out. One thing this game definitely taught me: I don't think I'd ever want to be on that show, I think I'd embarrass myself and my family by showing the world just how dumb I actually am.
No comments:
Post a Comment