Is that your final version? (Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (DC))

Member Name: D1A1

Product:	Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (DC)
Date:	31/12/00 (178 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Are there any? Seriously, Id be hard pushed to find one, but I guess it entertains the grandparents!

Disadvantages: There are far too many of these to explain here. You'll just have to read the opinion!

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Whenever this question is raised everyone in the room would be likely to see 'me! Me!' simply because the vast majority of the population are not millionaires - being one is highly desirable to most people. Ok we all know this, and I'm sure you've watched, or at least heard of the game quiz show hosted by Chris Tarrant on ITV - right?

The basic concept is that the show enables genuine members of the public to phone in and hope to be chosen to appear on the show. Once selected (and this is a very small number of people compared with the numbers who phone in! That's where they get lots of money...) 10 players have to sit in the studio chairs and respond as quickly as possible to a simple question read out by Christ Tarrant. The players then have a choice of four possible answers 'A', 'B', 'C' and 'D' and the idea is that they have to be put in a correct order according to the question set - these questions are usually like 'who appeared first' or 'put these names in alphabetical order'. You'd be surprised (or not) by how many people don't get the question right!

So, the person who gets the correct order quickest faces the dreaded 15 questions that could very easily turn their life around. The questions start off easy, (but only if you know the answer!) with the following monetary values:
Q1: £100
2: £200
3: £300
4: £500
5: £1000 - at this stage the player is guaranteed £1000 even if they get the next question wrong.
6: £2000
7: £4000
8: £8000
9: £16000
10: £32000 - at this stage the player is now guaranteed the welcome amount of £32000!
11: £64000
12: £125000
13: £250000
14: £500000
15: £1000000

The questions get a lot harder as the player progresses, and it is incredibly rare for someone to win the full £1,000,000 although one Lady has done this. There a
re 3 lifelines available throughout:

Phone a Friend (put your trust in a friend that is likely to know the answer)

Ask the audience (do you have faith in a group of 100 randomly selected people? Are they actually randomly selected?)

50:50 (this is the most useless lifeline if you don't have a clue of the answer)

You can only use each lifeline once!

Chris Tarrant will do his best to confuse you and make you feel somewhat unsure about the answer, even if you know you're right! He is an excellent host for the show, but shows genuine happiness for the people who win the money. He must get paid quite a lot per show I am sure.

The game show is all about making decisions and contains general knowledge questions, but they do get incredibly difficult. I think WWTBAM? has won many awards as a TV show, and is certainly one of the programmes on television with the highest ratings.

Now that's just the TV show! What about the game? Well it is true to the TV show in part, but is such a flawed game that it really is laughable. The Dreamcast version is identical to all other formats and bears no better features or improved game play. In a way its ironic that such a poor game, that has been highly slated and deeply criticised could be the best selling game of the year, claiming the Christmas number 1 in the games charts.

Firstly, what is the point in playing the game, yet alone buying it? Ok, we all know that you cannot actually win a million pounds, simply be proud of making it to the virtual equivalent. But is anyone proud of winning the virtual million? Has anyone actually bothered? I was 'foolish' to get this game, but at only £20 it didn't leave such a dent in the pocket as some games do (Samba De Amigo anyone?) and so I'm not too disappointed that I bought the game. I am however, disappointed with the game, and I can honestly say that it is the worst on Drea
mcast even though a great deal of people owns it.

I thought it'd be fun, and for the first few games it wasn't bad, and I reached a respectable £16,000. But right from the start I knew that WWTBM? was going to last for as long as a pint of milk. One of the most annoying facts is that many reviewers have said the game brings the show to life and is almost identical to it 'recreating the TV show brilliantly'. It doesn't. There are no actual audience in the game, so the atmosphere becomes a joke, with empty seats around you! So the ask the audience poll percentages are derived from survey results. So Hot House and Celdor have actually put some effort into this game, even if all it entailed was to ask 100 randomly selected people a series of questions.

The game play is the major let down though. You can play the fastest finger first, a head to head game, or in teams, so up to four players can compete for the chance not to win any real money. There is also a single player mode. I do not recommend playing with more than two people, as the game will take so long to get through, with all the cameras moving about and a 30 second load up time fro all the questions. You will, quite literally be put falling asleep when playing this.

The presentation isn’t good either, no real graphical effects, the Virtual Studio looks bare and empty. There is no advantage of buying the Dreamcast version over any of the others they’re all just as bad. The fact that only 1000 questions have been used means that the game repeats itself all too often, like a one-line parrot. Therefore it is possible to complete the game, without knowing the answers -just by remembering what you saw in the last game is enough! There is no Chris Tarrant, only his voice. Is this a bad thing? Well in my view the game loses the atmosphere because of it. The phrases get on my nerves also – especially ‘the bigger-err, jumps.’ That the q
uizmaster so often talks about when you reach £8,000 or thereabouts - this also makes Chris Tarrant have a lisp. Hmm.

The Box and leaflet presentation are the best aspect of the game, and they are still pretty awful. To add insult to injury, the front cover is home to an orange sticker claiming that you can win a million pounds when you buy this game, but not by playing it. Therefore the only reason to buy the game is to hope that, if you send off the competition leaflet, you will win. You won’t though. The back cover is full of lies. Apparently there is the ‘Entire Music score’, which recreates the atmosphere of the game. Well, the music might be there, but nothing else is so that isn’t enough. Then it says ‘Highest Score Table’, which supposedly allows you to see whose best! Isn’t that great! Well no, because the high score table doesn’t actually save your name there as there is no save feature in the game, so if you want your name to be at the top, then you’ll have to leave your console on forever.

The cameras are also very strange. There is a 20 second interval between most questions, and the camera decides to dart about during this time, and then focus on to the empty audience, the empty contestant chair, and the empty chair of Mr Tarrant. So, why?

The game may well provide some entertainment, and my older family members did appreciate the game, but then they haven’t played anything else before. You might like it, and I’m glad if you do, but I cannot see the point, so I do not play the game.

Who wants to be a Millionaire? Could well have been so much better had the developers chosen to finish the game off, actually make it playable and added an element of fun. An Online mode could have been included whereby you could upload your high scores, a save facility really should have been included so that you’d be able to upload your scores. An a
udience wouldn’t have cost anything to remember, and can’t Chris Tarrant be recreated in virtual form?

To say that the game is poor is an understatement. It is complete drivel, but has sold incredibly well thanks to the popularity of the actually rather good TV show. It’s a shame that Eidos associate themselves with such below par games (Anyone remember Daikatana?) but they saw a window of opportunity with a large cash flow sign on it, and I have no doubt that it was a great deal more than £1million.

A lot of people have this, but the game doesn’t deserve to succeed.

I don’t recommend the game to anyone, but there will be those who like it.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this opinion proved to be of use to you.
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Small update:

I've just had a Playstation arrive in the post, and I've tested out the PS version of WWTBAM? and the graphics were worse, although this isn't important. The sound quality wasn't on a par with the DC game, but the questions I recognised, and that infamous saying 'err-bigger jumps (lisp, lisp, lisp)' was said by Mr Tarrant on the £8000 question. I made it to £16,000 and then lost all of it but a £1000 after the audience were all wrong - 70% got the question wrong (It was C not A!!) and so I switched the machine off.

Cheers
D1A1

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