Those of you that follow my saga in these pages will remember that I get deep frowns when it
comes to computer games. (Picture a four eyed fat geek sucking two lemons and a lime, and you
start to get the picture of the kind of frowning I am talking about.) However, my life partner has
distinctly different ideas about this subject, and keeps lobbying for "our second computer" so we
can have game junk on one system, and real stuff on the other one.
Being totally wrapped around her little finger, I have gone out and bought some game software
for the good of the relationship. She is interested mostly in casino stuff, and specifically in slot
machine games. To the point of having a little keychain with a liquid crystal display that does a
simple slot machine shtik.
In the last decade I have been in Reno twice and Las Vegas once, and I can honestly say that I
am yet to drop a dime into any of their perfidious machinery. However first my momma, and
now my beloved, love to pray at the alter of the One Armed Bandits for hours on end. (Both of
them told me seriously of how they never come back from one of these trips in the hole, but the
three times I have accompanied them it seems that the balance of payments is more in Nevada's
direction rather than Washington's.)
It would seem to me that writing a good slot machine game program would not be all that
difficult. After all, most of the slots that you find in Nevada nowadays are computer generated,
and have the lemons, cherries and bananas rolling around on a monitor rather than having a big
metallic box filled with gears and cams and bolts and things doing the job as it was in the old
days. The old days being something like 10 years ago or so.
I have at my hand maybe six such games, ranging in prices from a couple of bucks (shareware,
and if it was any good I would send in the fee) to about $50. Of course, with most of these,
especially on the high end, you get a whole casino full of games, not just slots, but poker, craps,
blackjack, and roulette. Neither of us are very interested in those other things and we did not
spend much time with them.
I have read a little about the psychology of gambling, and on my trips to gambling places, since I
didn't spend any money there but had a lot of time on my hand, have observed the habitues of
these places. And I will say, that I myself have been caught up in this stuff twice in my life when
I was much younger. Once was when I was about 12, and a carnival came to town. I got lifted
out of about a month's (teen age) wages. And a second time, in my early 20's, when I
accompanied both my parents to Tahoe North Shore on a gambler's special bus trip. These
things were a good deal for the right people. You got a bus trip, a night's stay at a hotel, and a
bunch of chips and tokens to play with for about the value of the chips and tokens that you got
(when you rolled into town).
In both these cases, I got caught up in the spirit of the whole thing, much against my extremely
cheapskate grain. You go into one of these places, and you say to yourself, "I will play till this
roll of (dimes, quarters, whatever) are gone, and then I am done." Several rolls of (quarters,
dollars, whatever) later, you are still pulling handles, on your favorite machine, that you just
know is going to spill its gaudy guts with oodles of (nickels, dimes, whatever) and you will get
your stake back and make a profit for the trip. Some do, to hear people talk. Somebody must
not, otherwise these places would not still be around.
So, the idea of having a thirty buck piece of software that will keep momma at home, and not
shoving dinearo into a row of chrome coin gobblers appeals to the practical side of me. Except
that none of the packages that I have found seem to be worth diddly.
A multimedia PC would be a perfect setup for a game like this. What do the casinos offer,
besides a satisfaction of your greed side? An whole environment of sight and sound and
emotion. Why else would people go into zombie mode and plug five dollars, in some cases 25
dollars at a whack for hours at a time into these steel scam artists? First your machine is
designed to keep hold of you. It has lights all over, it makes incredible sounds, things go into a
rythmic thump thump thump as you shove coins down the slot, The dials twirl in a hypnotic
fashion, on most machines you have up to five ways to win depending on how many coins you
spent. And all around you there are a zillion other machines making the same noises, with every
so often a machine actually paying back some of its ill gotten gains, and of course when it does
cough up a few dinero, the coin funnel is designed to make every coin coming down the path
sound like a silver dollar as it hits the end of the chute.
And, I believe, that a software package can reproduce a lot of this environment with the tools that
we have available today. A soundblaster card can do incredible things, in some cases in surround
sound. They could generate the casino surrounding noises, they could generate the specific noise
of your machine, your 20 inch monitor could have all the lights flashing and twinkling, and they
could have more than the most basic of slot machine games (eg cherries, lemons, and bananas on
a center line).
But I have not found a game yet that really does all this. At the most primitive, as seen in the
Expert Casino package, the program can barely do a single thing at once. It might generate some
noise, but when the dials roll, all the noise stops. Real slot machines are designed to make it so
simple to gobble up your money that even a Mac user could play one. You don't need to read
the manual in a casino. But I have programs at hand that you can't even get started playing until
you haul out the user guide and read a few pages.
I have only one DOS game, a shareware game from J&J Gameware, PO Box 327, Hamond In.,
46320, and it is actually pretty good, considering how crappy the commercial versions are. It
only has one game, only one way to win, and its sounds are minimal. But even though there is
an included user manual, you don't need it to crank it up, you don't even need to install it
anywhere since it works just fine from a floppy.
A company named White Wolf has a cdrom of games, one of which is Jackpot Jubilee. Its claim
to fame is it serenades you with music from The Nutcracker while the game runs, but other than
that, there is very little ambiance.
Video Gambling, from Lasersoft, plays jazz music for you instead of classical music. And, they
have a better slot format, with the betting of up to five coins, each one giving you a different way
to play (two diagonal, three horizontal lines). However, their graphics get in front of the dials,
and you can't always tell just what you have done.
Las Vegas Slots comes on a cdrom titled Top 10 Great Casino Games from Global Star, for only
$4.95. Only after you open the package do you find out that you have been suckered into a
shareware distribution system. If you don't send in some extra cash, you get a nag screen and a
flashing banner that tells you that you are a cheapskate and that some of the program's functions
are disabled. However, even with that, it is one of the better programs. At least, it doesn't bore
you with any music. It has a single game, but you can play it up to 10 ways, you click on the
handle to pull it, it has some cheezy sound effects, and you win (coins clanking) or lose (a
buzzer).
Probably the most expensive game cd that I bought ($30) is Casino Deluxe from Sierra. This
company is quite big in the game world it seems, and indeed their cdrom is about the most all
inclusive of the bunch that I have. They do a lot of animation, but the downside of this is it takes
a lot of disk space (75 MB) and it is quite slow to load up, and apparently it must really hog the
cpu, because the mouse seems to be more like an overgrown fat rat than a sprightly mouse. They
have about six slot machine games to choose from, and they do have audio while the game is
running, and surrounding sound between games, but not a mixture of both, which I would think
would be most desirable and should be possible.
Anyway, to get the real casino experience, you are going to have to just go to Jackpot, or Reno,
or Vegas, or one of the local Indian casinos. These games do not quite cut it.
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Afterwords
I get very few fan letters from writing these articles, even though there is an email address
(ddemattia@computorlink.com) located in the title of each published article. Those letters that
do appear go to the magazine, not to me. The editor deletes any letters sent by cranks and critics,
and only forwards a very few on to me when there is something serious about an article that I
have written.
I did get a letter about this article, indicating that there are places where you can do internet gambling for real money. I haven't tried these sites, but the one that was referred to me was www.Intercasino.com.