Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
Posted 02/06/2009 at 2:00am
| by Jan Hughes

This App Store game is a replica of TV’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,
sans Regis Philbin and his monotonal suits. Meredith Vieirais the host
of this version, welcomes you to the game (over, and over, and over
again) in which you must answer 15 increasingly difficult questions. If
you get in a jam, you can opt for the help of one of four lifelines
(“Ask the Audience,” “Phone a Friend,” and the newly added “Double Dip”
and “Ask the Expert”).
In this version, you are shown the category prior to the question and
can bank the time saved in answering to use on the million-dollar question. The
makers of this games have added a handy 2.5-second delay before the
question appears to give you time to read it before
the clock starts ticking. After that, you get 15 seconds for the
questions up to $1000, 30 seconds for the questions up to $25,000, and
45 seconds after that. You can only enlist the help of the
“experts” after you reach the $1000 benchmark, which we routinely did
when asked a question in the sports category. Some of the experts live
up to their moniker and others are total crap. One actually gave us a
“100 percent positive” incorrect answer. So, trust them at your own
peril.
Just like the television version, you have to keep answering the questions correctly to get to the $1000 and $25,000 benchmarks on your way to the million. Oddly, if you let the clock run out, you get the amount of money you have up until that point. So if you did want, say, $100,000, you can just let the clock run out on that question. Not that anyone is counting or really paying up...
Playing the game is very easy and fairly addictive; you just keep
touching the screen with the correct answer from the $100 dollar
question all the way up to the million-dollar doozy. We were eventually
able to make it to a million because we had banked enough time to
research the million-dollar question online. On our own, we were only able
to get to $500,000 once (many times our guesses sent us back to $1000 or
zero--hint: use your lifelines), although the game has 900 questions, so
it should keep us testing our trivia mettle for a while yet.
It took a few sittings to become a millionaire, and we had to use our own personal lifeline, the Internet, with our banked 5:43 minutes. Fortunately there are hundreds more questions to sort through, to see if we can win the million on our own brain power.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
COMPANY: Capcom Interactive
CONTACT: www.capcom.com
PRICE: $4.99
REQUIREMENTS: iPhone or iPod touch with 2.2 software update

Fun and very addictive for trivia fans. Don’t have to win a “Fastest Finger First” to play. As in life, your "experts" can let you down, lending the game just the right touch of reality.

Meredith greeting us with every new game is repetitive and annoying.