Deal Or No Deal Family Challenge

Deal Or No Deal is one of the few new TV game-show success stories of the last five years and it's therefore no surprise that this second Interactive DVD version arrives coincidentally with few shopping days left until Christmas. The premise is simple; a lone player must pick one of 22 suitcases which they believe to hold £250,000. The rest of the cases are then randomly selected and, at unspecified intervals, an anonymous banker makes an offer for the contestant’s suitcase dependent on how high-rolling the game board remains. If the contestant accepts one of these offers the player walks away with the specified amount (and the game is played out to see how the result would have been affected). If all deals are refused the player receives the value of their case.

The pointlessness of a DVD game based on this concept is that, since no skill is involved (and no gain is made by the player at the end of it), the whittling down of the cases is a rudimentary exercise that limps towards a tawdry conclusion and the thrill of the TV show is absent since all of the 22 players are repetitious in their responses (not to mention homophobic - see Bunney player 18!). It may differ on more high-end machines, but on a typical player the pauses between some sections are quite interminable. The quest continues for a good use of the DVD format to couple to a games concept.

Released on 19th November 2007 by Channel 4 DVD.

Written by Simon Cole.