Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? 2nd Edition (Game Boy Advance) Review

For anyone that has ever sat down and watched an episode of the almighty Chris Tarrent and his tension mounting techniques, you will be aware of how things work. A quick fire qualification round followed by a set of 15 questions, each of which is worth a certain amount of money to the contestant. As the money builds up, so does the difficulty of the questions, players may drop out at any time and take all the money they have earned thus far with them. There are also three life lines and set safe point questions which help make things easier, but basically that is the idea of the program. Now although this basic premise does remain the same the game doesn't really do anything else, and it is this lack of variety that is the games first main downfall.

Once you boot the game up, and have whizzed through the various company's logos and intro screens, you land head first in the game with your first question. No choosing of modes, no changing of settings whatsoever, just straight in there. Now some might consider this a good thing, games that mess about with unnecessary menus and what have you are often more trouble then there worth, but on this occasion that is not the case. One of the first things that will strike you is the lack of any people, no audience members, no 'you' and no Chris Tarrent either. Despite the fact you get a panoramic view of the set before you star answering questions, there's nothing there; the seats are all empty. Although this is hardly a big problem it certainly doesn't give good first impressions either.

Once you get into the answering of questions, you are presented with the three life-lines familiar to anyone who has seen the show. They are pulled off in quite a satisfactory manor with 50:50 doing the obvious, phone a friend consisting of a ringing noise (one of the few sounds in the game) and a brief reply in the form of "I'm 'some amount of certainty' that the answer is 'A/B/C/D'. Answers from the mystery person on the phone are randomly generated, and it is up to the player whether or not they follow the advice given. Last but not least, ask the audience who if you remember aren't actually in the game, despite this they retain the ability to clap and give answer recommendations, we suppose it's something to do with the magic powers ITV gave to the developers.

So far, so average then, as you work your way through the questions you might begin to notice something. The formula of higher number questions being more difficult to answer is no where to be seen. They all seem to be picked entirely at random from the (admittedly quite large) selection of over one thousand different questions. With this comes two problems, one it is down to luck whether or not you get questions you know or not, and two despite the large number of questions available you will see repetitions after only a few games, not impressive. If you do manage to work your way up to the million pound mark or indeed any safe-point for that matter and then quit a measly little screen displaying how much you won appears and that's it. You've finished the game, you either play through again, and again, and again, or that's your fill. At which point if you have any sense you take the game back to wherever you were foolish enough to buy it from in the first place.

Fair enough it must be quite hard to add any sort of graphical achievement into a game that is in essence made up questions on the screen. However this does not explain why there are no people included, with so little going on at any one time the GBA surely has the processing power to allow for such a feat. If it wasn't for this then game would be quite atmospheric and a decent representation of the TV shows. All the classic sounds and tunes are in place; the theme tune, the atmospheric music, the clapping from the audience and even the ringing of the phone are all immaculately emulated. What the game needs is that bustling atmosphere that is provided by the audience, the atmosphere they provide when they all peer down at you in complete silence and of course the witty comments from ring-master Chris Tarrent. The console versions managed so much more, and you only have to look at other great GBA titles to see that this could and should have done so as well.