Time to name and shame

[q-time]

Played on a Games Warehouse machine tonight. The one with TP2, Hex Appeal, Pimp my Ride and other such bollocks.

Outrageous - I won 40p on DOND but it didn't actually add that to my bank. My suspicion: it only actually gives you any money if you win 50p or more. But surely that's a bug and a pretty serious one too since it breaks the law.

I was caught by the DOND spoilers today. It was obsessed with asking me questions about American short story writers. I got about four of them and ended up losing my tries-again because they were stoppers, not fair game literature questions.

My fiercest rage is reserved for the aberration that is POT THE LOT. I needed 50 points to pick up a quid. Fine. But don't start asking me those maths questions when I've only got about 13 points on the board. You know the ones - "What is (345986 x 191929) - 134567?" I used to amaze onlookers by getting those really quickly (by selecting the one with the correct final digit) but Pot the Lot has cottoned onto this and offers answers each with the same final digit, making it a pure 33 percenter unless you're that autistic homosexual maths genius called Daniel something.

Great pleasure was had on "Buckeroo" - a game whose gimmickry overshadows its essential greatness.

QT

[grecian]

You're definitely right about the sub-50p bug on GWHL DOND.

I'm also told that Fatbox Tetris will not register the existence of a second life if it gives you one. It's pretty poor that games are ported with these programming errors which are not then ironed out.

Pot The Lot's always been an absolute wretch of a game. Christ alone knows how it's lasted so long.

[quizard]

I thought the sketch with DOND on the Paragon was it saved the fractions of a go and displayed this onscreen in the left-hand corner until it made a quid and then credited it. So it is hardly a bug since it is intentional.

[grecian]

I thought the sketch with DOND on the Paragon was it saved the fractions of a go and displayed this onscreen in the left-hand corner until it made a quid and then credited it. So it is hardly a bug since it is intentional.

Really? I must check. Can you bring e.g. the 40p up to a quid by putting cash in or do you have to win further fractions? If the former, fine, as essentially that's no different from DOND elsewhere. The real answer, of course, is to abandon fractional prizes.

[q-time]

I am aware that on fruit machines any fractional win is bulked out with a 'bonus' - which prevents mechanics from having to install payout equipment which deals in anything less than a pound. On the rare occasions when I have played on a such a machine I have often locked in profit and walked away having accounted for the said bonus.

When I say profit I am of course talking about pence. Hardly a bonanza.

Played on a Shitbox this weekend in S. Cumbria. Returns were miserable. A couple of quid on Bully. DOND up at 65000. 1 vs 100 has got a lot more frigid in recent weeks IMHO.

QT

[theoak]

I dont play qiuz machines. Ever really. But i did this weekend. The requirement was 39k, is this good? I got 45k and duly played the end game, it offered me £4.50 with a lot of boxes left including all the top three. I took it. Was this a good thing to do or is it entirely random?

[Nil Satis]

That was Deal or No Deal in 'average' mode - neither dying to pay out nor being very hard to win. As for whether £4.50 was a decent win, the nice feature of this game is that any prize apart from the £20 is equally likely if you can get to the end game - the £20 being 'protected' to stop you getting it apart from very rare occasions, as opposed to the 1 in 16 chance it ought to be. Hence you might have been given the £7 or £10 but equally might have been given whatever low prizes were left, so it'd really be up to you as to whether you thought £4.50 was worth taking.

I can confirm the bug of not being credited with prizes under 50p on the Paragon Pro version of the game - at first I thought it was just my imagination (running away with me...).

[grecian]

That was Deal or No Deal in 'average' mode - neither dying to pay out nor being very hard to win. As for whether £4.50 was a decent win, the nice feature of this game is that any prize apart from the £20 is equally likely if you can get to the end game - the £20 being 'protected' to stop you getting it apart from very rare occasions, as opposed to the 1 in 16 chance it ought to be.

I'd query the assertion that every prize bar £20 on DOND is equally achievable once you make endgame, at least nowadays. I'm making the endgame more and more rarely nowadays, and when I do I seem to be getting the lower prizes more often than the higher prizes, and more often than I used to.

I suspect the smart money on DOND is to have a set tactic of dealing any offer above £X, but human nature means it's pretty difficult to resist the lure of going for the big £7 and £10 prizes. Based on my recent playing of this I think £4.50 is a very generous offer and an above-average prize if you persist to the end. I hope I'd have taken it but I might have ploughed on.

[Northern Monkey]

That was Deal or No Deal in 'average' mode - neither dying to pay out nor being very hard to win. As for whether £4.50 was a decent win, the nice feature of this game is that any prize apart from the £20 is equally likely if you can get to the end game - the £20 being 'protected' to stop you getting it apart from very rare occasions, as opposed to the 1 in 16 chance it ought to be.

I'd query the assertion that every prize bar £20 on DOND is equally achievable once you make endgame, at least nowadays. I'm making the endgame more and more rarely nowadays, and when I do I seem to be getting the lower prizes more often than the higher prizes, and more often than I used to.

I suspect the smart money on DOND is to have a set tactic of dealing any offer above £X, but human nature means it's pretty difficult to resist the lure of going for the big £7 and £10 prizes. Based on my recent playing of this I think £4.50 is a very generous offer and an above-average prize if you persist to the end. I hope I'd have taken it but I might have ploughed on.

Agree with all of Grecian's comments and whilst I play this less and less the £10 wins which used to seem fairly common seem to have almost disappeared. Similarly it seems rarer that you can just waltz into the endgame first or second cred despite knowing a lot more of the answers compared with when it first came out.

[theoak]

That was Deal or No Deal in 'average' mode - neither dying to pay out nor being very hard to win. As for whether £4.50 was a decent win, the nice feature of this game is that any prize apart from the £20 is equally likely if you can get to the end game - the £20 being 'protected' to stop you getting it apart from very rare occasions, as opposed to the 1 in 16 chance it ought to be.

I'd query the assertion that every prize bar £20 on DOND is equally achievable once you make endgame, at least nowadays. I'm making the endgame more and more rarely nowadays, and when I do I seem to be getting the lower prizes more often than the higher prizes, and more often than I used to.

I suspect the smart money on DOND is to have a set tactic of dealing any offer above £X, but human nature means it's pretty difficult to resist the lure of going for the big £7 and £10 prizes. Based on my recent playing of this I think £4.50 is a very generous offer and an above-average prize if you persist to the end. I hope I'd have taken it but I might have ploughed on.

Its the most id ever been offered on a quiz mahine (outside of STD) so I snapped it up.

[Nil Satis]

It's all a matter of opinion and (crucially) depends on the state of the games on the machines you generally play but all I can say is that when I do get a chance to play a few machines nowadays Deal or No Deal is often the ONLY popular game that I find is worth playing, by which I mean it offers a reasonable chance at a £10 prize on a regular basis.

I often have trouble finding anything else worth having a go at - for example, nothing I have seen recently on X Factor has changed my mind on that little "gem" - and Deal or No Deal commonly bails me out in terms of being the one thing that provides any profit at all. I won the £10 prize four times yesterday on circa 6 machines (all ItBoxes) but can't think of a single other decent prize I won, other than being randomly given a £5 cashpot on the new Monopoly game.