Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, 2nd Edition

"A fun time waster"

About 10 years ago, a little game show called Who Wants To Be A Millionaire premiered, and it was quite popular at the time; being a trivia-based game show with tough questions and a large amount of money on the line. Like any popular game show, there's always going to be a video game based on it, which usually aren't that great. However, is this any good by some chance?

Graphics
It successfully captures the feel of the show quite well with it's diamond text boxes (Which now make me think of Phantasy Star Online), as well as some full motion video of the show's host, Regis Philbin, just for effect. It looks good, but it's also not anything special; it doesn't really push the hardware to the limit or anything.
Graphics: 6 out of 10

Music \ Sound Effects
It captures the feel of the show perfectly; every last song off it's surprisingly epic soundtrack (For a game show, at least) as well as every sound effect is in here, and it sounds great. In fact, I'd be willing to give it a perfect score, but it suffers from one problem; the voice acting. It's great and all, but after a while, you get tired of hearing Regis say the same things over and over, plus there's the fact you can't mute him at all without muting the entire game in the process, which brings down the score considerably. Still, everything else about the audio is great.
Music \ Sound Effects: 8 out of 10

Controls
So simple, and yet it works so well. Everything in this game is setup to the keyboard; with it clearly displaying on screen what key you need to press for a certain option. It's very easy to use; anyone can figure this out quickly when they first play.
Controls: 10 out of 10

Gameplay
It's just your basic trivia challenge; all the drama of the TV series is non-existent here because there's no real money on the line.

The goal of the game is to successfully answer a series of trivia questions; if you miss one, than you have to start over from the first question (Thankfully, the questions are randomized every time you play to keep it from getting too predictable). To help you through, you have 3 Lifelines available; there's 50/50 (Removes 2 of the possible answers to the question; leaving you with a 50/50 chance of getting it right), Ask The Audience (It displays the results of a poll on the answer to the question), and Phone a Friend (Regis calls up one of his friends to ask what the answer might be).

As a tacked-on form of multiplayer, there is a "fastest finger" round; where you and a group of friends gather around the keyboard and basically mash the button for what you think the right answer is; if nobody gets it right (Which is very easy to do because the keyboard can become temporarily unresponsive if too many keys are pressed), the game ends and kicks you back to your desktop. It's not that great of a multiplayer mode; it works better to alternate players, with a coin toss or something similar to decide who goes first.

The game it's self is a fun time-waster; it features a nice variety of questions to keep things from getting dull too quickly, but you will start to see some of the same questions pop up again after a while, which does hurt it's replay value.
Gameplay: 5 out of 10

Overall
Although replay value is rather low, it's still not too bad of a game, and seeing as it can be bought for next to nothing, it's worth checking out if you like trivia games.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/28/09

Game Release: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, 2nd Edition (US, 06/01/00)