Fruit Machine Chat

You wait ages for a new Battleships game, then two come along at once ... well, OK, the first part of that is probably not true for many of us!

The original JPM Battleships game, for those that remember it, was really top notch - the same basic game as the one that still annoyingly lingers on most ItBoxes and GamesNets, but actually programmed to allow you to win more than £1. You could get £10+ unless someone had recently emptied it and you got to play a proper decent quiz game while doing so. Regular readers will no doubt be unsurprised to hear that I don't like either of the new ones anything like as much!

New game no. 1 - GamesNets

This is basically just the ultra 'bells and whistles' version of the current one - doubling your stake is all it realistically offers before the real spoilers kick in. It also has a particularly annoying special effect that will mean I never play it again - every time you get a hit, the whole screen 'vibrates' - not the actual screen obviously but the viewable picture. You really have to witness it to see how annoying it is, and I can imagine that after a few drinks it will be incredibly off-putting.

New game no. 2 - Paragons

I found this in central London, which is surprising as it's pretty rare to find brand new games there before anywhere else. This one is divided into two parts and at first it seems promising. The first part is a single screen, very similar to all of the other Battleships games (albeit with the unnecessary addition of lots of special effects, which now seems compulsory in any new game). Getting through this qualifies you for the money game, where the same screen size now has money amounts (from 10p upwards) and bonuses on each square. All well and good so far but what in fact you get is basically AWP by a different name. In order to win a prize you have to collect the cumulative total before hitting a 'landmine' square. If you hit one of those then you lose all the prizes gathered up to that point! There are apparently 'lifeboat' squares that enable you to save your prize but as both these and the landmines are randomly scattered through the grid, you have no way of exercising skill in terms of when to collect and in terms of improving your prize level with practice over time and that, my friends, is my definition of AWP!

xyz

And now they've even mentioned this thread!

Having not seen the game yet, whats the bonus thingy they're on about?

X 3

There's a new one on Ind:e terminals too.

The JPM game was rubbish - it was the one with the parrot when you got one wrong and it showed the ships before you started playing in a telescope kind of way. You could get the odd £20 on them out of Gameboxes when they they were stuffed.

The original BFG game, which was on the very first Gamesnet I ever saw was the one that is similar to the remaining one today, with the torpedos and sonars etc etc

Not seen these two new ones. Will have a recce later.

xyz

QuizMaster wrote:The JPM game was rubbish - it was the one with the parrot when you got one wrong and it showed the ships before you started playing in a telescope kind of way. You could get the odd £20 on them out of Gameboxes when they they were stuffed.

The original BFG game, which was on the very first Gamesnet I ever saw was the one that is similar to the remaining one today, with the torpedos and sonars etc etc
.

I was wondering which Nil was referring to - I didn't like the parrot one and certainly never got anything like £20 out of one. I much preferred the one with the torpedos and sonars etc.

Sorry - you are both correct. By your descriptions I did mean the BFG one (although wasn't he a Roald Dahl character? ) whereas the JPM one is indeed the one that appeared on GameBoxes around the same time as the original Coronation Street game. There is also the more recent one that is basically a Bullseye rip-off with the 'Sonar Bonus' instead of the 'Bully Bonus' to get you to the end game, which then bears an uncanny resemblance to the Bullseye end game.

As for Barry's question re the Bonuses, I will concede that they have at least tried to do something interesting and innovative there - at the end of a game you get offered one of four or five useful bonuses that only apply to the next game, such as Same Questions (a la Deals On Wheels). It's obviously designed to keep you playing and while I do applaud anything that shows initiative like this, the random nature of the end game is a complete turn-off for me. I know that things like Jiggy Bank and the deplorable Family Guy can be said to have similar elements of randomness but at least there you are able to improve your chances by employing skill, namely by playing on for extra shots. This new Battleships game seems based on the idea that most people will win very little or nothing at all until someone randomly wins big (it promises a £50 JP for a 50p stake), and that is far too reminiscent of fruit machine payout cycles for me. That's just my two penn'orth anyway...

Sounds like more Deal or No Deal/Monopoly style bollocks to me.

Nil Satis wrote:You wait ages for a new Battleships game, then three come along at once...

New game no. 3 - Ind:e

This one is branded MB as with Connect 4 so is presumably the 'official' Battleships game. It looks very much like a board game with pegs marking each square you guess. In fact the look and feel of this one is tremendous - it really is one of the most attractive games I have ever seen.

That is however the good part ... the bad part is yet another awful endgame. Here you have to select prize squares which either hold cash amounts (10p-50p in the main) or 'Collect', which forces you to collect your win at that point. Based on the distribution of these two types of square you will have to be incredibly lucky to win more than a couple of quid, even if (especially if?) the game plays 'fairly'. The questions are graded to get pretty tricky when you are four or five away from the endgame so to battle your way through only to be presented with a total prize of £1.10 or £1.20 (as I did in seven or eight attempts last night) renders the whole thing another waste of time.

Am I invisible?

Who said that?!




P.S. Apologies - I didn't realise you had mentioned the Ind:e game further up the thread.

P.P.S. This is what happens to you when you leave Parliament...