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Faster than you can say "cha-ching," Disney has released Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire: a terrific realization of the wildly
successful television game show. Boasting voice work by Regis
Philbin himself and a game engine by the makers of the
well-respected You Don't Know Jack series, this is the perfect
family title.
We originally reviewed the title for about an hour and a half
before surmising its rating. By all means a good title, there's
one big problem that arises only after repeated hours of play:
the questions repeat, and repeat ... and repeat. Frankly, the
resurfacing of questions--there are only about 200 total--was the
only way we made it to a million dollars, but we can see that not
everyone sees this as an enjoyable "asset." The justification
from the manufacturer is that the package is at a low price and
was never meant for hard-core gamers (or people who install the
game on multiple machines). But even for just twenty dollars,
you'll wind up being really sure how many stock make up the Dow
500 after five to ten hours of game play, and may walk away
annoyed. People looking to purchase this game for multiplayer
action also won't be pleased, since players who have spent time
with the game will be at an advantage to climb to higher dollar
as.
The best elements of the real-life game show through: in
particular, Regis and his friendly-yet-sarcastic commentary. The
software even mimics the pauses Regis takes, building tension as
the (virtual) dollars up. "You think it's D?" he asks. With
more inflection, and as if you're nuts, he adds: "That's your
answer?" Then he bellows: "You are correct!" With touches like
these, players really do feel like they're in the hot seat.
(Regis even makes fun of you when you flunk out, exhorting you
not to spend your zero-dollar check in one place.)
The game begins with the same painfully simple
hundred-dollar-increment questions, revolving around pop-culture
topics like Pac Man, the Jeffersons, and "Who's known as the
'Chairman of the Board'?" Just like the show, the easy questions
soon dissipate into the more challenging, with topics revolving
around things like the United Nations Security Council. The same
lifelines are also in place, but instead of calling on your own
support person--who's most likely standing behind your shoulder,
ready to play the next round--you're saddled with Regis's own
friends. (He seems to travel in a pretty uneducated crowd, since
they provided wrong answers much of the time, tripping us up.)
Another warning: this isn't really a multiplayer game in the
true sense of the word. All the parties try to buzz in on one
question, ranking certain choices, for example, in numeric order.
Whoever is quickest with the right answer wins the chance to see
the questions through to the full million. That translates to a
lot of time spent watching someone else play, but with this game,
it's somehow excusable.
With great, simple graphics influenced by the show and the same
violin-and-heartbeat soundtrack, Millionaire deserves to be a
runaway success. The creators worked quickly but well, creating a
game that everyone can enjoy, provided you can accept its
considerable glitches. For fans of the TV game, time spent with
this game will have you smiling as broadly as
million-dollar-winner John Carpenter--without all the tax
headaches in the morning. --Jennifer Buckendorff
From the Manufacturer
---------------------
TV's hit quiz show comes to the PC. Now you're in the hot seat
with host Regis Philbin. You're just 15 correct answers away from
becoming a virtual millionaire. The pressure is on. Win a
million--or lose it all. Just try not to sweat when Regis asks,
"Is that your final answer?"
Review
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Most hard-core gamers probably gnash their teeth at the thought
of Regis Philbin and his simple-minded trivia game outselling
every other supposedly respectable game on the market. The TV
game show that has every executive from other networks feverishly
reshuffling his prime-time grid is also burning up the computer
entertainment charts. With more than a million copies sold and no
end in , Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is the people's
choice, whether fraggers like it or not. Much like the TV show,
and perhaps like Regis Philbin himself, Millionaire the computer
game appreciates its own mediocrity, but it executes its
blandness extremely well. First of all, the price is low enough
($19.95) to make it an ideal impulse buy. Second, it's got Regis
himself, who's key to the game show's success. After all,
Millionaire is about achieving unearned success by showing
mastery of trivial knowledge that otherwise gets people nowhere
in life. Who better to usher these average Americans into the Hot
Seat and give them a at accidental wealth than a common-man
celebrity like Regis? While the game doesn't reproduce the social
drama that makes the TV show so popular, it makes do with the
bare-s gameplay and adds some of the design qualities of the
developer's signature product, the much better You Don't Know
Jack. Each aspect of the show is re-created in the computer game
in some fashion. In single-player mode, you go right into the Hot
Seat, where you must ascend a ladder of 15 multiple-choice trivia
questions to win. Reaching the one thousand and thirty-two
thousand dollar milestones guarantees you will win at least that
much if you lose later, though it hardly matters. All you'll get
is an onscreen check with Regis' signature. When you feel
stumped, you have three "lifelines" to use throughout the climb.
The 50/50 option removes two of the three wrong answers to a
question. You can ask to poll the audience, which gives you the
actual results taken from a sample group for each question. The
most impressive re-creation is the phone-a-friend lifeline, in
which Regis calls one of his friends, who then struggles to offer
a suggestion that may or may not be right. Jellyvision and Disney
evidently invested the necessary resources to give the game as
much of the TV feel as possible. While Regis doesn't actually
read off all of the questions, he does offer the color commentary
about where you are on the ladder and banters with the
phone-a-friend character. Even after many hours of play, there
still wasn't any tedious redundancy in his comments, and the
question database seemed sufficiently deep to avoid frequent
repeats. With years of You Don't Know Jack experience under their
belts, the Jellyvision designers know how important a smooth
audio-visual experience is to keeping a simple game interesting.
In addition to the melodramatic music, the questions - which pop
in and out, causing the screen to rearrange itself - are animated
well. Regis comments on the game without any telltale sound
splices or lag times for disk access. However, the questions are
noticeably more media and pop-culture-related than those in the
TV version, suggesting that Jellyvision may have been dipping
into the You Don't Know Jack database. Unfortunately, the Fastest
Finger multiplayer qualifying round is the weakest part of the
game. On TV, more than a dozen contestants must arrange four
items (like movies or historical events) into the correct order,
usually chronological. Getting the fastest correct answer sends
you to the Hot Seat. The computer variant struggles to re-create
this by letting any number of people choose a letter as their own
on the PC keyboard. The computer then shuffles the four items
into different orders. The first person to press a key when the
right order comes up wins, and then the standard single-player
mode starts. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire could have been a
better game in other ways as well. It's hard to say whether a
network-play variant could have worked better than the Fastest
Finger option, which just doesn't make Millionaire into the party
game that You Don't Know Jack is. A head-to-head or multiplayer
contest in which players simply respond to the same
multiple-choice questions simultaneously until one player remains
would have probably worked better. And since the central drama of
Millionaire has to do with the money at stake, it would have been
interesting to link the home and on-air versions somehow. For
instance, home players who consistently reach the top of the
money ladder could automatically apply to be TV contestants. But
for $19.95, one probably shouldn't complain that Jellyvision
didn't explore any extensions to the basic gameplay. As it
stands, Who Wants to be a Millionaire is both a faithful and
entertaining simulation of the TV show. You Don't Know Jack is
far and away the better trivia game, as it's both more
entertaining and more appropriate for party play. But it's
definitely the game for those who want to see how well they would
do in the infamous Hot Seat. It may also be the best way to
permanently shut up that irritating, know-it-all family member
who barks out the answers to all of the questions whenever the
show is on TV. --Steve Smith
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without
express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot
Review
