How old is everyone?!

[Nil Satis]

Quizmaster. 1984. I'm not getting into this thread. Too many rose tinted spectacles around by far.

You're right. OK, I'll come clean. I've been lying all along about how rubbish the current games are and I am in fact out every night taking £20s out of Hex Appeal, Cops and Robbers, Pub Quiz, Trivia Roulette, Monopoly Deluxe, Crazy Golf 2, Cluedo Revisited, Scratch and Match ... all of them really. That is why virtually every game on every machine is empty - I get there first and clear them all out. They are all actually a piece of piss to win on and I don't understand why you lot struggle with them. I make £1000 a week easily, sometimes without even having to get out of bed.



Pffffffftttttttt!

[QuizMaster]

Name any old game that was better and I'll explain.

[grecian]

Name any old game that was better and I'll explain.

Super Clue. Guinness Book of Records. Beat The Clock. Old Cluedo. Old Monopoly.

[cool]

cool is 44

[ZAX]

[quote="&quot"]I'm just wondering how old people are on here,

Hi Hangmanfan. I'm 38. Most of the people I play the machines with are in their thirties. Jpd PubQuiz twice and WU once and been close on others but thats it. One thing Ive noticed as Ive got older is Im starting to forget the answers to questions Ive already had before. That matey, is something at your age you should not have to worry about!

I dont put it down to old age tho. Just years of boozin..

[Drpepper]

First JP forgot to mention i was about 14, playing guiness book of world records, about the 2nd Q, offers me a bonus, one of the options was JP. Ta very much .

[QuizMaster]

Superclue was a real bundle of fun wasn't it? I remember taking a few £20's out of these, but they never seemed to recover once I had, so you had to play the 50p game instead for a fiver, which also died flat on it's arse once you'd taken that.

When it wasn't interested you'd end up going around the board forever and it would never give you the last letter in the phrase.

I seem to recall Guinness Book of Records did exactly the same thing.

And Old Monopoly

And Old Cluedo.

And Beat the Clock basically told you on the first 50p whether to play or not.

And the only reason any of these games ever recovered once you'd had the money out of them was because they were the only things in the pub that the mugs could play once you'd left, so they had no choice of games, meaning you could go back within a couple of weeks and do it all over again.

My local now has 18 quiz machines. It's called a Paragon. I take £10 out of the Deal or No Deal and no fucker ever plays it once it goes above 60,000. They all start playing the other 17.

The other 'great' thing about old machines was that once you'd won the £20 out of Superclue, if you wanted to play another one you had to get in your car and drive about 40 miles to the next Shithole Arms in Crapston if you wanted to play another one. Now you can cross the road.

Do you know why this is? It's because machines are more popular (and therefore profitable) now than they have ever been. Because choice, for want of a better word, works. Choice is good.

Half the games that you see around today would never have cut it in pubs back then, because they wouldn't have been able to have enough broad appeal to the locals. So yes, this means that you're going to get some dross coming through, but you're also going to get some great games that couldn't have carried a pub on their own, like Word Up, and Pub Series Cricket.

So adapt. Or quit moaning.

[quizard]

Age... mmm that's a personal question especially when you are er.... old

[Matt Vinyl]

Just turned 27...

Jp'd an old £5 crystal maze tonnes of times when I was 17/18/19.

Best win, however, was a £13 spot prize along with a £4 'trail' win on a Hangman 2.

[Mattb]

I'm an over the hill 21. Like MV, potted a crystal maze standalone many years ago. Probably when i was about 14!

There days my best efforts are a £5 bull on bullseye, and a few quid here and there. Shoddy work! :x

[Nil Satis]

Do you know why this is? It's because machines are more popular (and therefore profitable) now than they have ever been. Because choice, for want of a better word, works. Choice is good.

Half the games that you see around today would never have cut it in pubs back then, because they wouldn't have been able to have enough broad appeal to the locals. So yes, this means that you're going to get some dross coming through, but you're also going to get some great games that couldn't have carried a pub on their own, like Word Up, and Pub Series Cricket.

So adapt. Or quit moaning.

As Moaner-in-Chief I realise that we could go round in circles and I realise I come at this from a different direction from you - I have to take you at face value and believe that you play machines either exclusively or mainly for your living, whereas for me they have never replaced a regular job. You therefore have to play whatever is out there, hopefully identifying and winning on the wheat but still having to grind your way through an awful lot of chaff.

From my standpoint all the games you quoted were better to some degree than virtually every game that is out there now, precisely because of the behaviour you describe yourself, namely that they DID pay out a Jackpot on a reasonably regular basis and that it WAS easy to spot on most of them whether to play or not - even on Superclue or Guinness Book of Records I would still win the £5 about 90% of the time if I realised the £20 wasn't available. By contrast I would say that 90% of games at any one time on any machine now will not make even a £5 win available.

All your concepts of choice and profitability are indeed good but to me they are good for the machine companies and pubs and NOT for people like you or me. I understand and accept your argument that standalones were better for good players because ordinary punters had no choice but to play them but I can't understand how you can then think that having 18 games on a machine is better when they are virtually all dross. As for having to travel distances to get to the next machine in 'the good old days', that might have been true in country areas, as it is still true now, but any decent-sized town has had a proliferation of machines from at least the late 80s - I had 30 or so machines available to play when I lived in York for a year in 1990/1.

I have long had to accept the disappearance of standalones but to my mind we have come to the end of the second and (to my mind) final 'golden period', namely when the multigame machines had a good selection of profitable games - it's only about 3 years ago when an ItBox had Millionaire, Hangman, Pepsi, Top of the Pops 2 and two or three more decent games, and the Gamesnets have had a decent selection more recently than that.

It is interesting that the two games you pick as examples of the riches that are out there now are non-Q&A games where the enjoyment comes mainly from the game play and not from consistent winning. I am personally a fan of Word Up as an intellectual challenge, although not to the extent of some of those on here(!), but you surely can't claim that this one is a consistent payer other than for two or three specialists, who don't as I understand it play or win much on the other games.

So by all means kid yourself that things are great nowadays but just try to remember who they are great for!

[QuizMaster]

Telephones were better when they had dials as well, weren't they?

And I preferred green monitors for my PC, and floppy disks rather than these new fangled flat screen ones, with this Interweb thingy.

Times change.

[Nil Satis]

Times do change but not all progress is good. Would you take 'I Just Called to Say I Love You' over 'Superstition' or 'We All Stand Together' over 'Eleanor Rigby'?

Unless you can justify WHY things are better now (or even the same, in terms of winning money), I'm happy to stay Moaner-in-Chief...

[grecian]

Some interesting points here. Whilst I think his "all nostalgia is pointless" line is a bit unconstructive, I can see the logic of much of what QM says, although as always NS speaks a lot of sense also.

Maybe it is rosy-tinted spectacles, but my personal preference remains for the occasional thrill of a large JP from a game even if that game is patently not paying for much of the rest of the time. I do take QM's point, though, that a benefit of multi-games is that there's nearly always a few things paying out, and one can normally win between £5 and £10 from, say, £3 investment by dint of winning dribs and drabs from individual games. It's not desperately exciting, for sure, but perhaps it is easier to remain on a financially even keel on machines nowadays than it was, say, in 1996. I remember as a poor student losing, say, £7-£8 in a day when I couldn't find any Maygays that were paying - that wouldn't happen now. But equally, nor would the thrill of that big £40 JP on Beat The Clock.

I'd dispute that more pubs have machines now than in the past, incidentally - in my experience I'd agree with NS - similar numbers of pubs have machines as was the case when I started machining in 1996, but because of multigame terminals, the number of individual games is obviously much higher.

I'd also say that very often on the old Maygay terminals they wouldn't be paying either the £5 or £20 jackpots (that was certainly the case in Oxford at the time); hence one could easily invest, say, £2 with absolutely no joy no matter how good one was at the game. NS, were you really able to win the £5 "90% of the time"? May I ask how? I remember games of, say, Guinness Book, lasting 10-15 minutes with absolutely no joy in getting any prize offered.

[Istenem]

good post NS.
somebody once used the analogy that a multigame terminal is like a pub with 18 (or however many) standalones, it is a good analogy to explain the myth of a centralised pot but it is flawed. 18 standalones could be played by 18 monkeys at once whereas now, for obvious reasons, each game only gets 5.5% of money through it while all the other games are idle.

my arithmetic is not the best but i have calculated that collecting £1 on any given game means that statistically the terminal would need to register 17 unwon games before the same game would be ready to give another £1 prize (this might well be wrong). essentially the questions are smoke and mirrors, if a machine doesn't want you to win, it has the power. we all know this anyway.

for my two pence worth, as long as there are some games which provide a testing degree of mental gymnastics, i will still play them while i enjoy a pint. it is a hobby.i don't treat machnes as cashpoints, these days i am happy to lose a fiver if i get a satisfactory experience, although as a benchmark i aim for the swp to pay for my drinks. i'm not in it for the money, frankly i am just not good enough to expect to win big consistently, except on word games.

but i'd disagree with both of you (NS & QM) about the halcyon days; to my mind there is proportionately a higher %age of pubgoers who play swps now, which must make the munificence to better players greater. overall the standalones were, essentially, very simple quizzes which were (relatively) easily learned. now drinkers are more familiar with swps, each of us will nick a few quid from japseye because it is fundamentally easy to do so.

while i think programmers do a good job overall i would echo others' comments about them not having the guts to introduce more realistic JPable Q&A games, but i can't see how they could do it without upping the payout %ages.