Millionaire 0.61 Arrives, Still No Regis

by Eric March on March 30, 2008 at 11:35 pm

If you haven’t heard of this one before, you probably aren’t Italian, because iSpazio has finally released version 0.61 of Millionaire, the first version to add English support. I probably don’t need to explain what this one is about, but for the three of you who aren’t savvy, Millionaire is a version of the well-known game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Unfortunately, Regis Philbin doesn’t appear in this version, but I’m sure he’s a busy man, so I’ll forgive him. (We won’t speak of Meredith Baxter.)

The iPhone and Touch version simplifies things, as you would expect from a mobile version of the game. All of the lifelines are there: 50/50, Phone a Friend, Ask the Audience, and Swap Question. The Phone a Friend lifeline only works on the iPhone, because it actually dumps you into your contact list to phone a real friend. Somehow I don’t see that one as going down quite as well with your buddies — unless you do a really good Regis Philbin impression. “Hey, dude. Listen, I’m playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and — no, no, on my iPhone, and — no, yeah, I mean, it’s a game on my iPhone, and I’m stumped on a question, so — what? No, I’m serious, just — well screw you, too!”

The Ask the Audience lifeline just randomly generates virtual audience responses, and you usually get a pretty good indication of which answer to go with. The rest works pretty much as you’d expect. You are randomly asked, “Is that your final answer?” during the game. The preferences are pretty simple; you can turn sound on and off, and you have the option of enabling the old money levels, which were part of the original game series, and ended up being eliminated in later seasons. (Much like the “fastest finger question.”)

There doesn’t seem to be a huge database of questions; I frequently got asked the same questions from game to game, and the some of the questions themselves don’t appear ot be really thought out or worded. (But as it’s translated from Italian by someone for whom English is a second language, I can overlook that.) Overall it’s a fun time waster. A much larger database of questions (or support for downloadable databases), and maybe better questions, would be pretty cool for future versions. I’m going to warn you right now, though. The ending is fairly anticlimactic. Especially without Regis handing you a giant cheque.

Millionaire is available on the iSpazio repository. (http://www.spaziocellulare.com/ispazio.xml)

Screenshots (click to enlarge)

(Source: Apple iPhone School)

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