Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition (Xbox 360)
Adapting the trivia game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? into a Kinect game feels like it should have been an easy and successful process. Using the Kinect’s microphone, you can simply speak your answers out loud to participate, the game getting you a bit closer to feeling like you’re competing on the actual game show. However, there were two other elements at play that make Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition and adaptation that isn’t likely to fulfill even its most basic role of bringing the game home. The game was released two years into a format change for the game show that didn’t last, meaning many iconic elements are absent, but more importantly, barely any effort was put into the presentation or structure of this video game.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition uses the ruleset change that had happened to the game show starting in 2010 and lasting until 2015. While the goal is still to answer a sequence of multiple choice questions to try and earn one million dollars, the path there has taken on a curious form. For the first 10 questions, all the cash values have been shuffled around and randomly assigned, questions ranging in value from $100 to $10,000. You’ll only know a question’s value after you’ve answered it, which ties to the single lifeline you get for these first ten rounds. If you wish to skip a question, you can use one of your two Jump the Question lifelines to move on, giving up whatever money it might have been worth but able to stay in the game since a single wrong answer will lead to you losing. On the show there might be some weight to this choice, you only get to go up and compete once and you’re missing out on real money. In Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition though, the money is fairly pointless. There are achievements tied to getting a certain amount over time, although you can’t check how much you’ve earned in the past or even how well you’ve done in previous games despite the game being very picky about you having to set up a user profile and stick to it. There are no actual rewards for earning money in any form though, meaning the cash amounts are fairly meaningless and there’s no real sting to a loss besides having to try again with new questions.
After the first ten rounds though, you transition to the more serious high value questions. Four more tests of your trivia knowledge await, and while the money values are much higher, again, walking away to bank the money is essentially a pointless choice. For these last few steps towards earning the million, you also only have a single lifeline now, the Ask the Audience lifeline giving you a hypothetical poll of what other people could think the correct answer is. The game is willing to let the audience be incorrect, sometimes to a substantial degree, so it’s not a guaranteed correct answer, but they’re also not too poor at picking the right choice, so you do at least have to weigh up the feedback you get from this lifeline some before you lock in your answer.
While the absence of stakes really harms this format, what really makes playing a round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition feel hollow is the barebones presentation. Not only does the game not feature any recognizable host who ever worked on the real game show, there isn’t even a new stand-in. A disembodied voice with no personality will read you the questions aloud, the voice acting at least thorough despite sounding very generic. Their lack of excitement and inability to build tension is made even worse by what the actual show looks like. Your Xbox avatar will stand at a podium in the middle of the floor, there being no host or other contestants. An audience of nondescript Xbox avatars sit in the shadows, and that’s about it when it comes to presentation. No recognizable music from the show, barely any attempts to make the high value questions feel more important, and there are even minor nuisances like the rules for the two different round types being read out every time regardless of how many times you’ve played with that profile it insists you make. Even winning a million dollars feels a bit underwhelming, comprising of mostly just a confetti shower before things wrap up and the game asks you to play again.
The questions end up being where Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition can at least at times be said to be doing a decent job. General knowledge and pop trivia are present in fairly equal measure, there being no options to cater the questions to any subject, but you won’t likely see the same question twice and their range in subjects is pretty broad so most people will experience both easy wins and hard stumpers. At the same time, being released in 2011 meant recent events and media were of unclear importance, meaning the game does make some failed gambles on including questions tied to what was then relevant and newsworthy. Faulting the game for not anticipating the lasting effect of a documentary or which T.V. shows might be well remembered doesn’t feel too fair, but Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition does have an unusual preoccupation with celebrity literature and families. Asking very specific questions about the autobiography of a starlet, expecting you to be able to put the Jonas Brothers in age order, or asking what Tim McGraw’s father did for a living when the question mentions even he was surprised to learn what it was all feel like questions that will arrest most people’s progress because of the unimportant details they focus in on. If you do manage to clear all 14 questions to get the million it is fairly likely you will only see one of these at least, but it can feel odd to have questions about Alexander the Great and proven Broadway classics interrupted by the player needing to know American politician Newt Gingrich married his high school geometry teacher.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition ends up feeling like a pretty straightforward trivia game at times, little done to dress it up or make it exciting, and the Kinect isn’t contributing much. You actually have to speak the answers out loud rather than simply saying the letter they’re assigned to, but at least the Final Answer option gives you a chance to undo any occasional misreads the game could make. Usually it picks up voices fairly well and often its questions with deliberately tricky choices that sound similar that might trip up detection, but you can also just use your hand for the motion sensing camera to pick up instead for an easier time with selecting exactly what you like. Questions don’t have time limits which means you won’t be done in if your Kinect does fail you, which is good in the game’s two player mode where you are both on camera and even competing to try and answer questions first. A Fastest Bonus goes to whoever selected the correct answer first and whoever has the most money after the first ten questions gets to tackle the final four alone. Tracking two bodies that might be overlapping isn’t the Kinect’s forte, but like many other things in this game, it’s straightforward and you can at least sometimes squeeze out a bit of enjoyment by essentially playing a simultaneous trivia game with someone close to you.
THE VERDICT: A hollow representation of a game show that was in an awkward period, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition adapts the heavy focus on the way you earn cash from the show’s format at the time without any way for that money to mean anything. The presentation is barren beyond the very basics of the studio, and the voice that reads out questions barely counts as a host. You get the simple thrills of a trivia game show at times, there always a bit of satisfaction when you know the right answer or luck into a good guess, but even setting aside the Kinect gimmickry, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition feels like it almost did less than the bare minimum, leading to a video game adaptation of the game show you’ll likely never want to touch compared to other versions that exist before or after it.
And so, I give Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition for Xbox 360…
A BAD rating. While two player can potentially have issues, the Kinect really isn’t what causes this trivia game to fail to live up to most people’s standards. Even if they couldn’t get a recognizable host, they could at least put the speaker in the studio with you so it doesn’t feel so lifeless and empty. The money should definitely have held some weight or at least you should have been able to view your profile so you know your lifetime earnings, but even the game doesn’t care much about the cash so it’s hard to yourself, especially since achievement chasers will get more than enough money for grand totals on their path to clearing other achievements like getting the million dollar question right five separate times. It really can feel like you’re just getting asked 14 multiple choice questions in a row rather than playing much of a game, the lifelines not that exciting and even the final questions can be unusually tame since it doesn’t feel like they’re weighted any differently despite their importance. If you know precise information about 2000s celebrities, politicians, and even websites that no longer exist you might find an unusual way to put that knowledge into practice here, but it also leads to an uneven question list where knowing the names of Paris Hilton’s brothers can be unusually important. The questionable questions though could be forgiven if it felt like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition cared much at all about anything, it feeling like an enterprising fan could throw together something with more care and pizazz than this very basic execution of the show.
The shuffle format adapted from the game show’s then very recent shift in design will likely throw many players for a loop and even seemed to do so at the time, but while the design did have some room for an interesting quiz game format, it ends up feeling like one of the many things that’s off in this game’s hollow presentation. The game is barely treated with any gravitas because the money is truly meaningless, the “host” couldn’t even bother to show up in the studio, and all there really is to do is go through the game over and over, waving your hands and talking to your Kinect without much satisfaction save perhaps the first time you hit that million, only to see how it underwhelms like pretty much everything else in this weak adaptation of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.