Deal or No Deal – NDS – Review

A while back when Deal or no Deal
(DonD) was a new TV show, many critics remarked that it was too simple to be a
hit. To much based on luck rather then knowledge and a concept so trite the
average audience member will bore of it quickly. No kidding, the critics beat
this show up. Then the ratings came out and it was a bonafide smash hit. Howie
Mandel, a former stand up comedian and sometime movie star had instant appeal
with the contestants and the people at home. He was funny, his improvisation
is second to none and more importantly, he made even mediocre guests look
great. But when a show that still manages to pull in decent ratings decides to
venture out and become a video game, well that may just have been the last
deal made by the licensing dept at NBC, cause this game is a real stinker.

"Here we see Howie playing the
genie from Aladdin’s magic lamp."

The game is really that bad, you
say? It really is a stinker? Yes and uh, yes. First off the game has quite
possibly the worst example of bit mapping a celebrity’s likeness on to a game.
Howie looks simply awful standing in front of his giant numbers board. He
literally looks like the devil, his evil little goatee and beady eyes. If I
was Howie I would be really mad. The grainy, pixilated graphics do nothing to
make him look like a human, and don’t even get me started about the ladies.
You know the 26 beautiful women all holding a case. Well, when he introduces
them a bunch of weirdo mannequins come walking down the steps. Not a single
recognizable one in the lot. And let me tell you, several of them have become
quite the little personalities on the show, so for Gravity-i (the publisher)
to completely ignore them is to completely ignore a large portion of what
makes the game entertaining. The mysterious banker, the host, the ladies, the
game board, it all looks like a GBA game, seriously. Somebody dropped the ball
here.

Now the game does have Howie’s
voice over, but again, instead of collecting say, 15 of Howie’s comedic quotes
from the show, they play the game straight. Howie says about seven canned
phrases, including some over and over and over and over (infinity) it really
makes you upset. If you shelled out the $29.99 for this game expecting some
funny stuff going on, then you would be pretty mad.

"Look at them ladies, not a single one
with a nose or an eyeball."

So I got a bit ahead of myself. In
case you were wondering, DonD is a pretty simple game. Contestants select a
single briefcase from a possible 26. Each case contains a random amount of
money ranging from one cent to a million dollars. As each round is played, the
contestant picks X amount of cases and one by one they are opened revealing
their cash content. As each case is revealed the dollar figure is removed from
the game board. After each round, the unknown banker makes a cash offer to the
player in the hopes that he can drive the contestant away for less money than
he believes is in the player’s case. Since there are several huge amounts of
money on the board, the offers are usually in the tens of thousands in the
first couple of rounds. But if a player picks too many of the large amount
cases and not enough small ones, then the offer will go down. It’s a simple
premise that really addicted a nation for a while there and had the David
household watching.

In this DS version, you use the
stylus to pick your initial case and then to pick the cases you want to
eliminate as the rounds go by. Here is the big problem, the game is broken
from the get go. It appears the developers made a mistake and didn’t seem to
make enough variable games. In fact, every time you boot up, and pick a
specific case in the first game, it always contains the one million dollar
case. We discovered this quite quickly as it just happens to be my wife’s
"number" the same one she had playing sports in high school and college. This
is poor designing here as the game can be broken very easily. In fact,
subsequent games after the initial game also seem to fall into one of "X"
amounts of patterns. Not allowing the game to truly randomize the cases is a
real downer if you are a DonD fan, or a game fan for that matter.

Oddly enough the game manages to
tack on a multiplayer made where you can compete against a friend to see if
who can get the better deal. Or in another game, one player plays as the
banker and tries to under cut the value of your case. Wow, this is a really
pathetic attempt to jazz up a game. None of the multiplayer games are worth
the time it takes to play them, what’s worse you need two copies of the game
to do so.

Gameplay: 2.0
You use the stylus to press the
case you want.

Graphics: 2.1
Howie Mandel is probably yelling
at his publicist right now for having agreed to have his likeness (ahem)
mapped on to the mutant child of Satan and Phyllis Diller.

Sound: 1.9
Howie’s voice is there – but that’s about the best you can say about
it.

Difficulty: Easy
If only breaking the game in real
life was this simple.

Concept: 4.0
It was a no brainer to make the TV
show into a game, then things went bad – horribly, horribly bad.

Multiplayer: 0.8
Why bother?.

Overall: 1.8
This is officially the lowest scored game in my entire career of
reviewing games; the good news is that no matter what I review next, it can’t
be any worse.