16 out of 16 people found this review helpful.
A Perfect Gift for a Sports fan, even if they don't like computers
Date of Review: Jan 30, 2001
The Bottom Line: Millionaire Sports Edition is a simple yet fun sports trivia game that emulates the TV show quite well.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire has shifted to the back burner of our media's consciousness. However, it continues to get high ratings even with it being on 8 nights a week. The reason, I believe, is that the fundamental principle of the game is a fun one; 15 questions away from big money, miss one and you are out. Simple, yet suspenseful. So Disney has attempted to bring this to the home game market with several options: a board game, a video game, and now this, a sports based video game. I bought this game for my father as a Christmas present, but was very wary of it as the original video game and the board game version both were extremely poor. I'll have to say that I was surprised by the entertainment value of this game.
Gameplay
Millionaire Sports Edition runs on the same model as the original, which if you have never have played, is very simple and user friendly. When you start, you just need to enter number of players (1 or 2) and your name(s) and you are ready to go. This was very helpful for someone like my father who is very timid around computers. The graphics are simple, crisp, and do what they intend: give the illusion that you are in the hot seat. It ran okay on a Pentium 166, so anything better than that will run it well. Regis's sound bites are pretty variable and seem to correlate well with what's happening. The only thing I didn't like was an addition of a timer for answering the questions. There isn't one on the TV version, so I didn't understand why there needed to be one here.
Questions
The downfall of the first edition was due to having a specific phone-a-friend response for every phone a friend, there were very few questions and by the third time you played it, you were already getting duplicates. Not a problem on the Sports Edition. I've played it 15 times without seeing many duplicate questions. The phone-a-friends are still entertaining, this time you are calling Regis's bartender friend at the sports bar, etc. but they are universal for all the questions.
However, an important thing to know about the questions is that they are for the true sports fan. The first 4-5 are relatively easy, but they get pretty tough, pretty quick. I have yet to win it all, but I prefer it this way, the challenging aspect of the game definitely adds to its appeal.
Overall
I liked this game. Even more surprisingly, my father, a man who uses a computer only to check his email, liked this game. Its simple, yet suspenseful, just like the TV version.
