Original Release: Virgin Games, 1996, PC
Other Releases: PlayStation (1997)
Golden Nugget is a rare game to use actual footage from a Vegas casino floor (starring Adam West to boot), but the action is as generic as it gets.
Golden Nugget (PS1, Virgin, 1997)
Where to Buy: Amazon , Play-Asia
How to Emulate: Coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Golden Nugget is for the most part fairly typical of casino games of the early CD-ROM era; just a bunch of the standard real world casino floor games tied together with a bad interface. In fact, it’s virtually identical to the Caesars game for the PS1 except for one factor that sets it apart: the madmen filmed a short “spy thriller” movie that ties into the game via a story mode that plays out through a sequence of video clips as you reach certain gambling goals.
You don’t have to do the spy movie mode if you don’t want to, you can instead choose a “free roam” mode that just deposits you in the virtual Golden Nugget with $10,000 to play with. Let’s say you choose that option. You’ll find a full complement of the standard game types, including keno, Big Six and several kinds of poker. Everything is executed OK, but the graphics are none too impressive; a set of static screens that are a somewhat blurry representation of the Golden Nugget casino floor circa the mid-late 1990s (with a repetitive background noise loop for ambiance), and the games are very basic and rather dingy-looking once you get into them. Poker is simple, you don’t even see visual representations of the other players so it’s pure number-crunching. There are only six basic reel slots, and one type of old-school Jacks or Better video poker. None offer any particular edge or unusual rules.
The spy movie is the only real reason to stick around. The setup is that you play as Poker McStud, and your sexy scientist ex-girlfriend creates a computer chip that can somehow map and predict chaos theory or something (the intro is lifted almost verbatim from Jurassic Park). Naturally, since seedy figures in the casino underworld want it she decides to stay at the fabulous Golden Nugget and leave it sitting around on a desk while using the hotel phone to call people and talk about it. When some B-movie Bond villain steals it, she calls you because if you enter this poker tournament that the Bond villain is in somehow that might lead to getting it back or something … I kinda lost the thread by the end of the intro video.
The important bit is that you start with 10k in cash, and you need to turn that into 20k to enter the poker tournament. Since you can save and reload fairly freely, your first thought might be to save-scum big bets in the high limit area. Nope, you need 50k to access that. So you’re limited to relatively small maximum bets at the pleb tables, meaning the only sane path forward is to save-scum poker. You’re free to do this after every hand, but without an emulator and save states it’s a tedious process. You have to leave the table after each hand, navigate back to the lobby then go back to the table.
Hang in there to make it into the poker tournament, however, and you get a pleasant surprise – TV’s Adam West! Since your character never speaks or is seen on screen, West serves as a sort of Mathis / Felix Leiter figure to explain what’s going on and advance the story. Which isn’t even remotely a good story, by the way, but everyone involved seemed to fully understand and embrace that this was a low-budget B movie type production and they have some silly fun with it. Not enough to put yourself through actually playing the game, but it might be worth skimming on YouTube for fans of the old Batman show as there’s heavy implication that West is the retired crime fighter and this is just what he does for fun these days.
I’ll give the game some amount of kudos in that it’s a rare one to actually make use of the property it’s promoting. The movie clips were filmed in the actual casino in downtown Vegas, and the game takes up two discs as they’re actually fairly high-res and full-screen (by general 1990s FMV standards). The games (and story) certainly won’t inspire you to get on the next flight to Vegas, though.
Videos