Fruit Machine Chat

here's an epiphany: SWP doesn't exist so we can make a little bit of money; it is just a pub game like whoring, billiards, darts or euchre. the people who (that) matter are the fools who lose. they were not playing TIOLI, that was aimed squarely at you chaps. it didn't hit %age so it was dropped.

if any of us were to take a step back we would clap ourselves on the back for being so brilliant at something (and welcome congratulation from our peers).

SWP is a business like any other, it seems niggardly to begrudge somebody else their living for the sake of solipsistic worship. of course easier games get tightened but the people who make their crust deserve it for keeping us (and 700 clowns) entertained.

gents, if you can carve a living then good luck to you.

heere endeth the gospel according to Istenem

if as contributors have said it double boobys you everytime without a lifeline its theft not entertainment. could have changed the questions completely or brought in more questions in second section.

Cheers for that Istenem. I've been told that TIOLI was actually quite popular with Joe Public, odd as that may seem. I presume it's what distinguished it from, say, Great Pretender, which apparently got very little play from non-mavens. The double booby ruse is pretty low, and Joe Public will soon realise it too. I expect to see TIOLI disappear very sharpish, as I don't believe it's defensible in its current format.

do love your turn of phrase, istenem, its one of the many reasons i continue to visit this site!
i am naturally aware of the business angle. the problem is that TIOLI has become more like a fairground game of "watch the cups" except there is no ball under any of the 3 cups.

A little story.

In February 1989 a marvellous game called "Adders and Ladders" appeared, the premise was simple, get past the last snake and you were guaranteed the pot. The problem was that the "random" dice throw would always send you down the last snake.
This was resolved by players and public complaining to the gaming board or weights and measures or some other body. Pretty soon dice numbers appeared clearly demonstrating what the "random" number would be next up.
Either version was good for the pro but the public had little faith in the first edition. It is more in the interests of the business of the SWP manufacturers, surely, to demonstrate to the player, whatever his standard, that a win is achievable.
If they expect people to part with a pound a game there has to be a bit more transparancy as to what is on offer, its amount and its availability or else I fear for their "business".

Old pike, lurking in his pond!

Good luck to all you survivors out there.

adders + ladders oh happy days both editions were emptiers though
it just took a bit longer on the non dice one. A gust of nostalgia has
just swept me off my feet.

clearly 74 doesn't apply to the year you emerged then wires?? more to the point do you feel my statement is valid in the modern game??

I particularly liked the skillstop that took me past the last snake- got me well excited.

definitely agree with you PIKE about transparency and I definitely wasn't born in the 70's UNFORTUNATELY !

there is a possibility that i was drunk when i started this topic. apologies.

I'm not sure the comparison with Adders and Ladders hold true. When A&L came out, it was the first machine that didn't make it clear what was going on - with Give us a Break, the original Quizmaster points for prizes, 10Quid Grid, etc, it was quite obvious even to a casual punter what you would have to do to win prizes, whereas on A&L it just looked like it had the capacity to screw you indefinitely (it wouldn't, of course ). Nowadays people are I think a lot more aware of the fact that machines will screw you if they want to, and consequently I think the response is often one of resigned acceptance rather than outrage.

A&L was a lovely machine though, even if the question compilation was on occasion quite shocking, and it was ultimately too easy, so every pro and his dog was doing it.

Talking of 10Quid Grid, I know someone who still has a Pavlovian response of "Meat" when asked the national airline of Belgium.

remember a & l stinkers 2nd world war ships tanks & planes?

thanks for this wave of nostalgia guys - the very first machine i could empty - there used to be 3 in strathclyde uni !

Back on topic ever so slightly, a clear distinction must be made between the tweaks that have been carried out on the two games.

The Hells Bells tweak - to make the £20 prize require around 70-80 correct answers (I've seen targets of over 13,000 points) - is both expected and acceptable (as long as the game does not say give a set of deliberately wrong answers after a certain point). This is the behaviour that has been built into every SWP game that has ever been put out onto the market, i.e. providing a game with the ability to become harder and/or less lucrative if too many prizes are won by players.

One side issue worth making is that the tweak hasn't in many cases made the lower prizes proportionately more difficult. On this one I've always treated the £6 prize as the de facto Jackpot anyway, given how much harder it gets after that. Obviously you won't find many ItBoxes left with the early prizes down around 1,000 points but if you were good enough to take the lower prizes before the tweak then that really shouldn't have changed.

What ISN'T acceptable is the Take It Or Leave It tweak of always giving you no lives and then the double Booby Prize. Instead of making the game harder to win on they have in fact made it IMPOSSIBLE to win on. This must surely be illegal, although proving it might be tricky unless you could get a copy of the internal e-mails authorising the change to be made .

The only response is to not waste any more money on the game and hope it disappears in the next release. It's a real shame as this was easily one of the best games of the last 5 years, if a little slow and ponderous.

To show that it's not all doom and gloom, has anyone else detected a tweak towards player-friendliness on the Millionaire game, or have I just been lucky enough to find a few machines in a row where, as Properpro might say, a lot of money has gone in for that particular game and not much has come out? What IS for certain is that it has started popping up on the Gamesnets with a 50p stake, but with the rest of the game seemingly untouched, which does make it a more enticing prospect and also indicates the software company involved have realised the £1 a go version was putting ordinary punters off and have had a rethink.

Much prefer this version of Hell's Bells. Too many people knocking big prizes out before.

Highly reminiscent of the older days - anybody remember Treble Top? 170 questions for £20 with 1 Try Again. Took 55 minutes. Now that WAS a challenge, but was doable with dedication.

didn't have to learn 170 questions on treble top i think you know why QM !!!!. NUFF RESPECT if u r jp'ing hells bells on this setting