Review: More millions, little Regis, and NO Kathie Lee!
Ever since Who Wants to be a Millionaire aired, ABC has had a hit game show on their hands. With an immense amount of money at stake destined for one winner, people tune in and the suspense keeps them switching the channel. Now, THQ and Eurocom bring you an addictive Game Boy Color title that may make your portable system feel like a Million Bucks.
The game follows the show in a very simple manner, and gets the job done quiet nicely. When seeing Regis once during the title screen, you may have felt cheated, but trust me, it’s better in the long run. The game is run through a bunch of easy to navigate menus, asking questions and awarding cash to the best of your knowledge. There are a total of 15 questions, and as you advance up the ladder of money, the questions become more difficult. If you are stumped, those helpful lifelines can bail you out. As seen on T.V., the 50/50, phone a friend, and poll the audience options can be used for those gamers not worthy enough to answer the question with pure brainpower…like me.
Are you fast enough to beat out your friends to earn a position in the hot seat, for a chance at a Million? In the fastest fingers mode, you go up against opponents in a turn based multiplayer game answering the questions as fast as possible. The winner receives the distinguished honor of sitting across from Regis and going through the 15-question trial.
The audio in the game mimics the television show as well. The digitalized voice of Regis plays each time during the intro of a game where he asks, “Who Want to be a Millionaire,” with his rather annoying voice that Darrell Hammond imitates on a couple skits of Saturday Night Live. Sound Effects play just about each time you move about the menu system of the game, and choose different answers and options. Both background music and little sound clips from the show have also been implanted to give off both a game show mood and the suspense of having money on the line. The greatest part of the audio in Millionaire must be the fact that it doesn’t get old or isn’t annoying from the start, unlike many other Game Boy titles I have heard from in the past.
In every trivia title, there comes the big question…about the questions. Do they repeat? Every game will repeat a question more than once, and because you are playing a GBC title, you have a better chance of seeing questions repeating to the end of the time. But does that apply to Millionaire? Seeing how there are 600 questions, the repetition shouldn’t be much of a problem for a while…unfortunately, that’s just not so. After about four or five trial runs into the game, you begin to start finding a couple questions here and there that you have already answered. A fast 600, wouldn’t you say? It may seem like a blessing to have already known the answer to many of the questions, but in the end, it turns out to be more of a nuisance in the replay department.
The recurring questions could have been avoided with the inclusion of such features as save game files, something on the terms of what Tetris DX incorporated. This way, players could cycle through the trivia with no repeats involved and it could start over after 600 in a random order. Another useful area of a save option would have been to keep the top scores and prove that Regis himself wrote out A Million-Dollar check that you “lose” every time you turned off the game. Maybe then, the bank tellers wouldn’t look at me so cock-eyed when I tell them this. In the distant future, hopefully the final solution of being able to download new trivia questions will be in use. Then, replay value wouldn’t be much of an issue to start with. Hopefully changes come about in these types of games when GBC and GBA get hooked up to mobile phones for net access. To me, that would be worth a million bucks…maybe.
