Fruit Machine Chat

I doubt it. Loads of pubs today seemed to have gone in:die or whatever it is. That's if they haven't closed down or scrapped quizzers altogether! I reckon Itbox 74 would be an outside bet at how far it would get.

The ItBoxes had a really fallow period about three or so years ago - something like issues 45-50? - when Deal or No Deal was often the only reason to play them. Now they are in another fallow period and each issue seems slightly worse than the last. It's a real shame, but like you I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them gradually disappear. The same applies to the Gamesenets, which have a very similar games selection.

Both Gamesnets and Itboxes are owned by Gamestec and the games are supplied by them so no wonder they have the same games on them. As for the lack of decent content i am hoping this changes soon as when the new guidelines come through for developers to follow so they know where they stand and what they can develope. So there maybe a little more life in them yet.

Itboxes finally beginning to vamoose from some of the JDW's.

Nil Satis wrote:The ItBoxes had a really fallow period about three or so years ago - something like issues 45-50? - when Deal or No Deal was often the only reason to play them. Now they are in another fallow period and each issue seems slightly worse than the last. It's a real shame, but like you I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them gradually disappear. The same applies to the Gamesenets, which have a very similar games selection.

Isn't the problem with Gamesnets and I.T. Boxes that they don't have the memory for the better games to run properly. Anyone who's tried to play BAM on an I.T. Box will know what I'm getting at.

Can't share your view about it being a shame. My heart sinks when I walk into a pub and see either of those anachronisms sat there. (Usually untouched)

tonkarentino wrote:Can't share your view about it being a shame. My heart sinks when I walk into a pub and see either of those anachronisms sat there. (Usually untouched)

That's exactly why it's a shame. They still have a major chunk of the market and to have so much of the market all but worthless to serious players is a sad state of affairs. Wetherspoon's pubs, for example, were almost exclusively ItBox pubs until fairly recently and they always give you an easy pub or two to find in any major town, ones that always open earlier and very often later than any other mainstream chain. It is surely symptomatic of the desperately poor fare on show from the Gamestec machines that possibly the biggest chain around has now, as QM notes, started to look elsewhere for their SWPs.

A few years ago, I found ItBoxes a joy to play, but recently, they are literally unplayable. There are 4/5 'spoons that I frequent around this way, at last check:

1. Replaced by a Paragon

2. Every touch took 'at least' 50 seconds to respond (yes, I did count!), so I wavered my 50p without even bothering to play anything!

3. The screen constantly 'wibble-wobbled' about 10 degrees either way, making playing not only very difficult, but not too good on the old eyes either...

4. Off

5. Playable, (if slow) but the screen was so dark and dirty (OK, not purely the machines fault, but...)

I wish they would abandon all the shitty trivia games (2 versions of Battleships?? WHY?) and just bring back some old skill games.

No good for the pros (who cares) but imagine an itbox with word up, boggle, word wall, word blocks, brainteaser, puzzler, countdown, double vision, TV TIMES!! etc.. I'm sure that would get far more play from mr. punter than the dross on them at the moment. Most of these general knowledge games make you feel like you are sitting a levels rather than having any sort of amusement.

danzo wrote:I wish they would abandon all the shitty trivia games (2 versions of Battleships?? WHY?) and just bring back some old skill games.

No good for the pros (who cares) but imagine an itbox with word up, boggle, word wall, word blocks, brainteaser, puzzler, countdown, double vision, TV TIMES!! etc.. I'm sure that would get far more play from mr. punter than the dross on them at the moment. Most of these general knowledge games make you feel like you are sitting a levels rather than having any sort of amusement.

I'm sure Bob Isty and Fotherz would hate to see a machine like that. In fact I think Bob would give up his job (again)

Doing a bit of resaearch generally into puzzle / casual games (for a recreational project of mine) and have found that word-games struggle to thrive in this day and age. There is of course, the elite group (90% of whom are probably members here!) but in 'sales' terms they simply fall down when compared to things like Bejewelled / other match-3-esque puzzle / skill games.

I guess this is similar when it comes to SWP content - there's very rarily more than 2 or 3 'real' word games (Isty will expand on that ).

Having said that, are any of the companies still producing content? It's all gone very, very quiet...

danzo wrote:I wish they would abandon all the shitty trivia games (2 versions of Battleships?? WHY?) and just bring back some old skill games.

No good for the pros (who cares) but imagine an itbox with word up, boggle, word wall, word blocks, brainteaser, puzzler, countdown, double vision, TV TIMES!! etc.. I'm sure that would get far more play from mr. punter than the dross on them at the moment. Most of these general knowledge games make you feel like you are sitting a levels rather than having any sort of amusement.

I can't imagine anything worse.

Matt Vinyl wrote:Doing a bit of resaearch generally into puzzle / casual games (for a recreational project of mine) and have found that word-games struggle to thrive in this day and age. There is of course, the elite group (90% of whom are probably members here!) but in 'sales' terms they simply fall down when compared to things like Bejewelled / other match-3-esque puzzle / skill games.

I am sure you're correct, given how quickly word games appear and then vanish. I am not averse to skill games - some of the games I listed aren't out-and-out word games. But there must be something more attractive to the average punter than answering screeds of tedious questons, most of the answers to which have been memorised by guys in their 40s anyway :-)

Completely agree with you on the out of date nature of trivia games in today's society but think that this applies to word games, brainteasers etc. Given the state of intelligence in today's younger culture, games such as Bejeweled are far more likely to be in sync with 'yoof' simply because to play them requires so little intelligence/thought.

It's no surprise that of all the games on machines, the one which has survived longer than any of the others (including Millionaire etc) is Spot the Difference, or 'Monkey See, Monkey Do' to give it its more familiar title.

The problem with these games is that they invariably cheat players more overtly than Q&A games, since it's relatively easy to develop your skills to an excellent degree to play them, thus the protection becomes overt and clunky.


I don't think I've ever met anybody on my travels who is a pro Bejeweled player, or Spot the Difference player.

The counter argument to all this of course, is that everywhere I go, people who do play machines seem to play Pub Quiz and not much else. Which is one of the reasons I chose it.

Whatever happened to skillball bingo on SWPs? Anyone in the know?

playwithrob wrote:Whatever happened to skillball bingo on SWPs? Anyone in the know?

Isn't that a bit like asking whatever happened to rickets?