The Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? TV game show has always been popular with kids, and so have the CD-ROM interactive game versions. However, kids didn't have as fair a chance at winning the virtual million-dollar prize as adults did with the previous editions in the series. All that has changed with this new edition designed especially for kids.
The game plays just like previous editions with some key kid-friendly differences. Most importantly, the questions are youth-oriented. Though they are challenging at times, they are vastly more manageable for the target audience. Besides that, they are really fun, with pop culture questions (including ones about Harry Potter and Pokemon, for example) mixed in with math, history, and geography questions.
Kids are faced with a series of timed multiple-choice trivia questions--15 of them if all goes well. As they advance, correct answers earn players more and more dollar points. However, if they miss a single question, they're "toast", as Regis reminds players. The game ends, and players are bumped down to zero dollars or the last "safe haven" amount. As players work their way up the ladder towards the million, they can use 3 "lifelines". The 50/50 option is straightforward enough--if selected, the four possible answers are narrowed down after two incorrect answers are eliminated. Ask the Audience pulls up a poll, originally taken on the Internet before the game was released, of children's answers. Players use these statistics to help make their decision. Phone-A-Friend involves listening to pre-recorded conversations between Regis and one of a group of "whiz kids" (or otherwise). The "walk away" option is available, though most kids will be more willing to take risks and go for the big money simply because real money is not at stake.
Game-play is rather true to the TV trivia show, and is complete with the original dramatic music and pregnant pauses. While kids won't face down the host, they'll get plenty of feedback from him through his voiceovers. Regis' wisecracks and commentary are deliberately more "youthful"--he reminds kids that the $200 mark is "bound to be more than your allowance", ribs players with "even a grown-up could have gotten that!", and tells players they are "wicked right" after they have selected a correct answer.
The questions are just plain fun--we haven't seen a kids' trivia game with as entertaining questions as these. The topics are an eclectic mix of pop culture, history, sports, literature, and more. An example $100 (starting) question is "What is a young sheep called?" A $500 question reads "In the Pokemon cartoons and games, what items are used to capture Pokemon?" The questions grow more challenging as kids advance, when players may be faced with the challenge of identifying which of a set of four words is NOT an adverb, recognizing a line in a Shel Silverstein poem, determining which of four given body parts is NOT primarily made up of muscle, and more.
Of course, playing the game affords kids some liberties--testers quickly realized, for example, that they could use the "pause" feature to buy more time when answering a question, or to do an Internet search in order to come up with a winning answer.
It's no secret that kids love cheat codes and this title actually rewards kids who have reached a million by offering them a "secret" code that affects game-play in interesting ways. More codes are available at www.millionairekidsgame.com, and these can make the game easier by offering things like unlimited lifelines. On the other end of the scale, codes that give no lifelines whatsoever are available for kids who prefer a more challenging game!
One or two players can enjoy the game, though the multiplayer option is not a true head-to-head competition because kids don't directly vie against each other. Instead, they engage in a Fastest Finger round in which four items need to be rearranged into the correct order (such as arranging sets of coins from lowest to highest values). Whoever wins this round goes on to the virtual "hotseat".
