As soon as NBC's game show Deal or No Deal became a huge hit, the videogame version was inevitable. Shows like Deal or No Deal tend to make good videogames, since they're games to begin with; even if they're not so great, they have a ready-made audience in fans of the show.
But you don't really care about that, do you? You want to know about the sausages. We'll come back to that.
Deal or No Deal for the Nintendo DS is structured just like the TV show, minus the caterwauling of the over-excited contestant and the shouts of "No deal!" coming from his greedy family. You begin by choosing from one of 26 cases, each containing a sum of money from one penny all the way up to (apply Dr. Evil pinkie and say it with me) one meeellion dollars.
In the first round you must open six cases, then five in the next, then four, and so on until you're only opening one case at a time. At the end of each round, the Banker will offer to buy your case for a certain amount of money.
The idea is to open cases with low dollar amounts, thus increasing the chances that your case contains one of the big amounts. The longer you can leave the big money in play, the more money the Banker will offer you to stop playing and walk away.
Of course, you don't actually know what's in any of the cases, so picking them "correctly" comes down to little more than blind luck. The actual gameplay is derived from figuring out when to push your luck, and when to cut and run.
Unless you're a fan of the show, you will probably grow weary of the TV Show mode of Deal or No Deal fairly quickly, but the game also comes with a logic puzzle Vault Mode that will give you a healthy mental workout.
You start off with $500,000 and a locked vault, the combination of which is the numbers of three cases. Select three cases and you'll be told if the number on them is too high, too low, or just right. Every time you guess incorrectly, your possible reward drops by $50,000. Figuring out the combination in time to go home with more than cab fare is quite tricky, unless you have particularly good recall or cheat and write it all down.
Now, about those sausages. The graphics in Deal or No Deal are simply deplorable. The ladies who bring out the cases at the beginning of the show are little more than suggestions of human shapes, with flesh-colored blobs hovering over smears of color that are vaguely reminiscent of dresses.
The host, Howie Mandel, sounds great, but his head looks like an egg onto which some merry prankster drew eyes and a soul patch. His hands, which he flings wildly about as he asks you "Deal...or no deal?" don't resemble fingers so much as they do large undercooked sausages. It's really rather unsettling. Fortunately, you can skip his animations by hitting the A button.
If you enjoy Deal or No Deal on TV, you will also enjoy it on the DS. For anyone else, the few minutes of fun you'll get from it aren't worth the images of flailing sausages that will surely haunt your dreams.
