The Weakest Link

Over the past year it’s created a national catchphrase and become the BBC’sanswer to “..Millionaire”,in terms of being a massively successful quiz show, but for me is one thathas not yet outlived its welcome – unlike it’s ITV counterpart – and isstill just as entertaining for the viewer as the contestant, primarilybecause a lot more questions can be asked within an episode of this showthan in the Tarrant game.

All the rounds of the game and 1000 questions are here with the voice of Anne Robinson (norelation) inserting insults into the proceedings when questions are answeredincorrectly. It begins with all eight contestants being tested one afteranother and then back to the first one again, with each one having the optionof banking the money built up so far by the others, which makes you look goodto the others – especially if you were to get your own question wrong and thushave saved yourself from losing a fortune – and although you’re meant to workas a team, some have their own agenda and will plot against the moreintelligent ones so as to get their hands on the loot. The aim is to win amaximum of £20,000.

As the game progresses, each subseqent new round will have ten seconds taken offthe clock and the first person to answer questions will be the strongest linkfrom the last round. The weakest link is the person who was voted off at theend of the previous round by the most number of people, not necessarily theperson who was statistically the weakest by answering questions wrong, eventhough that person will occasionally be pointed out by Anne.

In the final head-to-head round, the last two contestants will be asked upto five questions each. The one with the most correct answers takes the pot.

It could be argued, like “..Millionaire”, that there’s no money to bewon so there’s no point, but there’s more to this game because there’s manymore questions to be answered, you can vote people off and the prize winningsaren’t targeted as the main point of the show, hence any home version willstill retain that “fun” aspect of the game.

Also, you’ll find more questions will get answered in this electronic versionover the TV original because for the virtual players the questions don’t needto be read out. This would only happen when playing against real people.

If I had any complaints, it would be that many of the other contestants’voices sound the same, Anne Robinson repeats the same acidic comments ratheroften and she also sounds like one of those automated answerphones, eg.“Player… 6… you voted for number… 5”, etc.

Couldn’t she have recorded complete sentences for all options so it didn’tsound so stilted?

Faults aside, to this reviewer it’s still hugely entertaining and a must-buy.You’ll no doubt shout back at the angry red-head when she criticises youand if playing alone I’d suggest being about three people in case one of yougets voted off.

However, when I first played it as ‘player one’ only, the paranoid in me feltthat all the virtual players would vote me off after the first round and thenenjoy running the batteries down while they played out the rest of the game…but no, the game actually stops once no humans are left in the game. 🙂

OVERALL