Preview Before You Play

  Early each winter, after the manufacturers unveil their new machines for the coming year at the Las Vegas gaming convention, these innovative slots start finding their way into our favorite casinos. They all beckon to us with lights, and music, and promises of fun and fortune to be won. Don’t you wish you had enough entertainment money in your budget to play them all? 

  Better still, don’t you wish there was a way to view them all in action, to learn how they work and what they pay, to find your favorites - all without having to spend ANY money to do so? Well, there is.

  Most of the casinos I visit have around 2000 machines for me to choose from. Maybe two hundred or so of them each season are new games I have never played before. In the past I have spent far too much money trying out these unfamiliar games just to see how they work.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stayed too long with a tight, uncooperative, losing game just because I wanted to see what happens in the bonus feature.  With minor variations, the base games on a machine are all somewhat the same. We really play the base games so we can win a chance to play the bonus ones. (That’s not entirely true. We also play to win some money!) The bonus games are where you find the fun features, however - the clever gimmicks and surprises, the opportunities to win the big jackpots. It’s where you get your entertainment. 

  “How can you learn how a particular game works without spending money to play it?” you ask.  There are two ways you can do this. One way is to play vicariously by watching other people at the casino spinning the reels hoping to win. They probably won’t appreciate your watching over their shoulders, however, and will likely move to another game before very long.

     If voyeurism makes you uncomfortable, a better way to learn what these games have in store is by watching the films posted on YouTube by other players.  I have frequently seen the new releases on these blogs before I have seen the actual games in my Southern California tribal casinos. You can learn a lot from these films. Players like Casinomannj or DProxima have posted hundreds of winning games on their web sites. Sometimes they film their entire game to show how long it took to get the bonus. Sometimes they only film the bonus itself. Sometimes they edit their films to show only the winning bonus spins. You can sometimes tell they are hiding from casino security guards so they won’t be caught filming the games. Usually they are playing max bets so their jackpots will be as large as possible and exciting enough to attract many viewers. Besides seeing how large the wins can be, you can also see on their sites how many spins it takes to bring up the bonus, and how often or how infrequently those bonus spins hit. These players do a good job narrating and editing their films, and I would recommend their sites to anyone wanting to view what the casinos have to offer. You can search YouTube by the player’s name or by the name of the game you want to see. If you subscribe to your favorite player’s site, you can post a comment or ask a question as well.

     Here's a sample of Casinomannj:

  You might not want to spend a lot of time doing this. You’ll be anxious to play and try to duplicate their success yourself. After all, there’s no money to be won watching a game on YouTube.  Viewing these videos can be informative, however,  and you can get some idea of what to expect if you decide to play the game yourself. What you see watching someone else’s game will be more realistic than what you see playing free casino-type games on the internet sites or on computer casino software. Those games are set to pay off large amounts of pretend credits to encourage you to try them for real money. 

  The slot manufacturer WMS has a section on its web site with statistics on Today’s Active Gambler.  Watching it I learned that there are over 5,000 channels of slot films on YouTube that together total nearly 300,000 film clips. Some have a few thousand hits: some have over a hundred thousand. You won’t be alone in learning to play your favorite game by watching it on YouTube. Hopefully the experience will help you choose wisely and pick a game that is fun, and it may let you take home a little more money when you play for real.

Slots for a New Generation

    My husband and I love to play the slots.The simpler the game, the cuter the icons, the better. We belong to the over 60 crowd, the geriatric gamers that seek familiarity and predictability in their gambling experience. We don’t like surprises. We don’t like games that require us to skillfully maneuver past obstacles, or to shoot aliens or monsters before they can destroy us, or to ward off myriad other threats. We especially don’t like games that require speedy decisions and award us credits based on how quickly we can execute the bonus rounds. In other words, we are the demographic that most slot manufacturers design their games for - baby boomers and beyond.

    Our gen-x and millennial children, on the other hand, have no use for the games we play.  They frequently lecture us on the insanity of sitting and mindlessly pushing buttons hoping for a jackpot to materialize. They point out to us the futility of expecting a big win from a game that requires no skill, but only lucky timing to pay off. They talk about odds and random number generators and hit frequency and percentages of payout as if we could be educated to give up our penny slots for a more sensible pastime like blackjack. If only we would listen to what they say. We smile tolerantly and then go back to looking for the double-triple diamonds to appear.

    It’s not that our children don’t love Las Vegas. They do. Just not the slots. They love the clubs, and the shows, the buffets and the trendy restaurants, the sports betting and the table games, the weirdos you see on the Strip and on Fremont Street. But they grew up with arcade games and pastimes like Facebook and free-to-play home video games. If these young adults are going to play games, they are going to do it on their mobile devices, not on a slot machine.
 
    The average age of visitors to Vegas has been dropping since 2009, from 50 to 45. But the share of visitors who gambled during their stay has also dropped, falling from 83% to 71% during that same period. Young people still flock to Vegas to play in record numbers, but it is not slot machines they are playing. And this has the casinos worried because slots often return a 60 percent profit margin compared with the single digit margins of table games according to a San Diego Tribune article this month taken from the Washington Post.

    Partly this is the slot manufacturers’ fault. They have not put much effort into designing and producing games that appeal to the skills or interests of younger players. IGT claims that the industry has been slow in developing skill-based video-game-like devices because of state regulations requiring slots to offer random outcomes.

    There are a few companies that have been trying recently to come up with a gaming concept that blends both skill and manual dexterity with luck. One idea has been to combine arcade action in the basic game with bonus rounds that pay based on the random number generators, thus creating a hybrid machine that is both a game of skill and also a game of chance. Gamblit is working with casinos and regulators on concepts meshing the play of mobile games with the random chance of slots, switching from playing with virtual credits to playing with real money when connected to WiFi in an area where gambling is legal.  Which brings us back to my previous post about internet gambling.

    Press releases claim one current innovation for IGT’s Reel Edge series is based on arcade games. Titles include Race Ace and Centipede and the games are played on a console with an optional joystick play mechanism.



    Another company, Aruze Gaming, in an attempt to appeal to younger players, has developed Dark Samurai, a game that features a fighting bonus resembling the type of action seen on most martial arts video games.

    Global leader Konami Gaming has adapted its Playstation 2 game Neo Contra to the slots, marking the first ever release of video game intellectual property to the casino gaming industry.  Mighty Warrior and Supreme Samurai are designed and will be especially marketed toward video game players.  Konami has a forty-two year history of world wide video gaming and, with its extensive catalogue and cutting edge technology, is uniquely positioned to be a leader in the marketing for the coming generation of gamers.

    Counter to this trend, Bally Technologies, the nation’s oldest slot-machine maker, has announced it would pay up to $100 million to buy Dragonplay, an Israel-based developer of games playable on Facebook and cellphones.

    One fear some have in switching to these new-generation skill based slots is that a player could become so good at playing these games that the casino would end up losing money.  I don’t think they will let that happen. The card counters didn’t put the blackjack tables out of business, did they? It’ll be interesting to see what changes the next few years bring.