Original Release: Phoenix Games, 2007, PlayStation 2

A late-life ultra-budget release for the PS2, the van thing seems to be mostly an excuse to cover cheap and sloppy gameplay

White Van Racer (PS2, Phoenix Games, 2007)

Where to Buy: eBay

How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

White Van Racer is as bad as putting together the elements of “work van racing” and “extreme budget title” would lead you to assume.

The racing action is comparable to that zoomed-in perspective you would automatically get when you hopped in a larger vehicle in the older GTA games. Handles like that too, though maybe not quite as good. The premise is a bunch of non-racing-optimized vehicles are racing it out on English countryside tracks, you got your white work vans, food trucks, contractor trucks etc.

I guess you could maybe do something fun with this premise, but this game doesn’t manage it. It’s just too slow and simple, you really have no better moves or strategy than just trying to stay on the pavement to overtake track leaders that basically drive a near-perfect race. There are a bunch of vehicles and tracks to unlock, and the track backgrounds actually look kinda pleasant, if I have to say something nice about it. But it’s about as boring of a racing game as you’re gonna find.

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Original Release: D3 Publisher, 2003, PlayStation 2

A ping pong title that is equal parts ping pong and girlie ogling

Love Ping Pong (PS2, D3 Publisher, 2003)

Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

Also released as “Pink Pong” in Europe, Love Ping Pong does not deliver a particularly good or advanced game of ping pong. It does offer several different shot types, and each character has a special magical “smash” shot, but all of that is pretty much unnecessary as the CPU is basically braindead and the focus is much more on ogling D3’s usual roster of sexy gals.

“Dramatic Mode” is the heat of the meat, a basic story mode in which you pick Outrun-esque courses of girls to go through. You play this mode as typical sleazy hentai game guy who cooked up a scheme to get girls around his school to strip off when he beats them at ping pong, they only get down as far as bikinis but it’s still a pretty good scheme as they’re all terrible at the game. Successfully defeating each one unlocks a new costume for each girl to wear, which they’ll also demonstrate on the spot.

It’s easy to cruise through the story mode and unlock everything as 90+% of the time the girls can’t handle anything more than a line drive sent directly at them (and even that’s a little questionable). This continues even into the later reaches of each course. The girls only score if/when they build up some super shots, but you still get to luckily return those sometimes so it’s trivial to outpace them in points right from the beginning.

So with the story mode being a formality, you’re left with little else to do save maybe 2-player action if you can find someone not embarrassed to play this with you. The 15 or 20 costumes you unlock can be taken into “View Mode” for the usual PS2-era ogling, but beyond that you’re down to just random matches. The gameplay definitely isn’t strong enough to carry that.

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Original Release: Atlus, 2007, PlayStation 2
Other Releases: Wii (2008), Switch/PC (2023)

An Itadaki Street riff that de-emphasizes the investment and adds RPG elements in its place

Dokapon Kingdom (PS2, Atlus, 2008)

Where to Buy: Amazon

How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

Atlus and prolific developer of oddball RPGs in the 00s, St!ng, bring us this iteration on the Itadaki Street board game series. The twist here is adding RPG mechanics, as players pick a character class and battle it out with monsters (and each other) all over the game map.

Reviews from the time indicate this game absolutely needs to be played with other people to be a good time. I don’t have anyone handy to test this with, so all I can tell you is that the single-player experience is definitely brutal boredom. But it seems like one of the key failings is one that would be present in multiplayer too: your characters are pansies that are overmatched by all the random monsters that are within just a few steps of your starting position, and it’s way too easy to get killed at the outset.

You start out each game by picking from one of only three character classes (the first warning sign): warrior, mage or thief. Each has the advantages and disadvantages you would expect. The game world map you’re then placed on is impressively sprawling, but good luck surviving to explore any of it. Each dice roll forces you to move exactly that amount of spaces, but it seems no space is safe from random monster attacks, and if the first one doesn’t get you they’ll weaken you enough so that the second finishes you off.

If you could survive to get to them, the game world apparently gives you a lot of options. You can drop in on kingdoms to get quests for money, items and glory (well maybe levels). The Itadaki Street element comes as you can take over towns and invest in them for passive cash flow (though it doesn’t seem to be nearly as necessary here as it is there). Apparently you can upgrade your character class eventually, but don’t ask me the details, I couldn’t even sniff such advanced levels while getting insta-raped by Imps and Lovecraftian monstrosities with lightning bolt spells immediately upon starting out.

The games seem like they take an excessively long time to resolve (typical of the Itadaki mold) even if you know what you’re doing, but getting killed constantly drags it out to insane degrees as you have to wait three whole turns to revive PLUS your corpse gets looted. Some of the enemies steal a big chunk of money and run away too, and you can’t really defend against that since you can’t afford to leave yourself open to actual attacks at the beginning. It’s a real F’d up situation.

There is a Story Mode meant to cater to solo players and provide a more gentle introduction, by having a starter sub-map you can grind for a while where there’s tons of low-level treasure and the enemies are extremely weak and die in one hit even if successfully defending. But you run into another balance problem here. The computer AI opponent basically cheats. It always gets highly favorable rolls and items. I tried this out three times and it always similarly sprinted ahead of me and just had the best of luck. A little reading online this is actually the way the game is programmed and is a well-documented “feature” of it.

All I can say about this game is, absolutely put it out of your mind if you only want to play by yourself. It is complete trash for that purpose. Interbutts scuttlebutts indicate maybe it’s worth a try if you have a friend group who is into the concept, but I’d make sure it’s in a format you can return it and get your money back if you paid for it.

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Original Release: 505 Game Street, PlayStation 2, 2004

A “Simple Series” simple knockoff of the Technos dodgeball games, but with at least a couple interesting qualities (and that coincidentally came out the same year as the Dodgeball movie)

The Dodgeball (PS2, 505 Game Street, 2004)

Where to Buy: eBay

How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

D3 Publisher ranged far and wide with their genres and knockoffs for the Simple games series … in this outing they cloned the Technos dodgeball games, though not to great effect. The game isn’t without its qualities, but it’s definitely slower and clunkier and lacking the charm of something like Super Dodgeball.

The best bit is that each of the national teams is composed of random historical figures, like Japan has Nobunaga and a bunch of warlords, Germany is headed up by Bach and a bunch of composers like Wagner are in the trenches for him. They also have appropriate super moves, with Bach conducting a magical note around that pounds the enemies and Wyatt Earp (for the USA of course) throwing a bottle before doing a quick draw throw.

That, and the range of options for game rules (which are so extensive they’re almost annoying) are the high points. The downside is that it’s basically Super Dodgeball, but a little slower and clumsier. I was never clear on how you’re supposed to catch the ball, I take it there’s an assigned button but I could never figure out which one (no documentation online either). One button does make you do a little shadow-step dodge but I could never get that to actually work either. The CPU also seems to catch an inordinate amount of your throws, even the heavy and special ones, making games a slog.

In the end it just made me want to play one of the Technos dodgeball games.

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Original Release: Bally, 2009

A dark and volatile slot with unique and nice art

Hand of the Devil (Bally, 2009)

Review by: C. M0use

Hand of the Devil attracts immediately with a very cool look, but underneath the hood is a pretty volatile game that centers on hitting its bonus feature to get any money out of it.

Get ready for a lot of dead spins and fractional or 1x wins, your money WILL ebb away consistently until you hit the main bonus feature. There’s a secondary bonus that seems to pop up totally at random, in which you try to pick the right card out of four for an instant jackpot win), but it’s also highly unreliable and likely to leave you with nothing.

So the main bonus feature is a set of free spins that have sticky wilds that eventually form a hand of cards. If you get five-of-a-kind stickys, that guarantees you a win with every remaining free spin. The bonus feature is fairly generous to make up for all your crappy spins getting there, at minimum it’ll likely return 100x your wager and could range up significantly farther than that if you’re lucky.

I feel like this is another one of those games kind of aimed specifically at addicts as it doesn’t offer any kind of really big win possibility from line wins, it’s virtually guaranteeing you have to stick around for a while and lose some money getting to the bonus spins (but they do reliably at least get you a chunk of your money back when you get there). If you prefer something with a little more “peak and valley” than “grinder” gameplay, it’s an interesting one just for its unique look if nothing else.

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Original Release: SciPlay, 2015, Android/iOS

A mobile app collection of just-for-fun versions of a whole bunch of real casino slots, including some that are hard to find in real life now, from a small grouping of major publishers such as Bally and Shuffle Master

Quick Hit Slots (Android, SciPlay, 2015)

Where to Buy: Free to play (download from official app stores)

How to Emulate: Android Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

While subsidiary SciPlay is the publisher, Quick Hit Slots is sort of an unofficial collection of parent company Light & Wonder’s slots found on casino floors. Over the years the company has acquired some big names including Bally, Williams/WMS, NYX and Shuffle Master, so it’s a pretty huge lineup of titles to draw from.

SciPlay makes some of these popular series available in smaller apps with more focused collections (like the various Monopoly or 88 Fortunes games), but if you want all of ’em crammed into one big app, or you just want Bally’s Quick Hit games, this is the place to go. There are at least a hundred titles unlocked to start, and as you level up you’ll gradually unlock at least a hundred more.

The main reason I downloaded this one is due to dabbling with Quick Hit Platinum during a recent casino trip and finding it quite generous, so I wanted to see how the other Quick Hit games compared. Testing out Platinum very shortly after playing a lot of it on a live casino floor, I found this version actually lacked some of the bells and whistles and seemed to be nerfed a bit; bonus games hit less often, and line wins seemed nerfed (ex: two Quick Hit scatter symbols gets you a little something in the live game, nothing here). Seemingly a rare example of the free app game being less generous than the live real-money game … maybe because you’re awash in renewing free chips, and this game is among the first ones available to you?

Whatever the case, the Quick Hit app proceeds like the standard social casino with the various gimmicks for free chips each day and gradually gaining EXP from your spins to level up. There are absolutely no real prizes to be had though, not even raffles or drawings. The upshot is it doesn’t plague you with ads nudging you to buy chips, you just get one when you first launch the app.

It’s also pretty remarkable on the performance end, especially on older devices. Playing primarily on a tablet that’s a few years old now, pretty much every Android casino app I’ve tried other than Pop Slots is plagued with enough freezing and issues that it eventually gets unplayable (and even Pop Slots has its random crashes once in a while). Absolutely no issues with Quick Hit though. Seems like a really nice piece of programming.

The one big point of criticism I have is the UI. While everything is zippy, it basically has no organization whatsoever. You just have to scroll horizontally through the whole random list of slots, being careful not to errantly tap on one that you don’t want to install. No list or sorting options, no way to “favorite” the ones you usually play that I could find. On the installation front, the game takes up about 200 MB to start but note that the only pre-installed titles are the Quick Hits and a handful of other Bally games. You’ll have to manually install each game you want to play, which can quickly bloat things up. I’d expect the game to stretch into at least several gigabytes of storage if you want to install absolutely everything as the slots seem to run about 20 MB each.

While you can’t win any real prizes, Quick Hit does offer a convenient central way to try out a whole bunch of slots you’ll find in live casinos to get a feel for them before you put real money in. You can even try out recent stuff like the Rich Little Piggies / Hens games, to see why they aren’t actually all that great of a play :(.

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Original Release: Phoenix Games, PlayStation 2, 2005

A budget title from a longtime shovelware publisher that is as good as those things would lead you to believe

Doomsday Racers (PS2, Phoenix Games, 2005)

Where to Buy: eBay

How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

When you’re picking through budget discs on the PS2, here and there you do find a surprising treat. Doomsday Racers is not one of those happy occasions. It is instead a very low-effort racer that looks like a project from a kid in game design school, inexplicably shoveled out as a commercial title (and even at $5 or $10 it isn’t even worth the money).

The game’s sparse menu screens funnel you right into the Doomsday Racing, which gives you only the option of a “quick race” or the game’s “tournament” mode. As it turns out, the game only consists of two huge tracks, but each level is somehow a portion of one of these tracks. What that means is technically 10 “tracks” to play, but they share one of two of the same sets of background graphics.

One of the game’s biggest offenses is teasing you with weaponry that you can’t seem to use. The promo art and loading screens show roof-mounted cannons firing lightning or something, and those cannons are included on the game models … but there seems to be no way to use them! In fact, the only buttons you seem to have are “accelerate” and “brake.”

And that “brake” button is basically useless. Even worse than teasing you with false advertising of weapons, the core gameplay is just not at all good. The brake doesn’t enable handbrake turns, so really you just ease on and off the accelerator as needed. Which is not sufficient given how easy it is to spin out inadvertently and wind up in an unrecoverable position. First of all, the tracks have a weird “half-pipe” style, the intent of which I guess was to give you a risky means to pass other racers. But riding on the half-pipe is much more likely to randomly spin you out and leave you facing in the wrong direction with the slightest of jostles. Sometimes you won’t get a choice, as the enemies can “pit maneuver” you into these things from behind – but you can’t do it to them!

Add in the droning annoying techno accompanying the action and this is just a total waste of time at any price, this is an amateur effort that should not have been released.

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Original Release: Bally, 2012

A member of Bally’s Alpha 2 Pro series of slots (the first to introduce the large curved screen design), Golden Banjo may have remained one of the more obscure entries due to its kinda odd theme or due to being a little too friendly to players

The Golden Banjo (Bally, 2012)

Review by: C. M0use

I gave this one a spin just based on how weird it looked, but it turned out to be a kinda volatile but generous slot that has a bonus round that usually gives you pretty big hits.

Though released just a few years ago, the graphics look like something you’d see in a 90s CD-ROM game, with the green-screened actors clumsily inserted on static backgrounds that have no animation at all. The narration is kinda mumbly but seems to spin the tale of Moonshine Jeb who finds the Golden Banjy and takes it on a quest for riches.

It’s kinda weirdly charming in its janky presentation, and helped along by the bonus round popping reasonably often and doing a lot to make up for the game’s volatility. Maybe it was a little too generous, as I’ve never actually seen this in a live casino, and had to look up videos to verify it was ever on casino floors!

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Original Release: WMS, 2010

The second Press Your Luck licensed slot (and first from WMS), this five-reel attracted attention with a giant bonus board but could have done more with the theme

Press Your Luck (WMS, 2010)

Review by: C. M0use

Fans of the show will likely be looking for its mid-80s charm and cheesy animation, but there’s none of that to be found here. Instead this slot is a “modernized” (and generally low effort) take on the classic TV property, with animation that looks like it was done cheaply in Flash.

With the unimpressive aesthetics and a playfield full of generic symbols (gems and numbers), everything centers on the bonus game. This is entered by popping three scatter symbols, and is meant to resemble the “no Whammies” big board from the original show. Of course, this being a slot machine, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually stop when you tell it to; the landing spot seemed to jump randomly on me several times during my test run.

The other issue is that a lot of the fun of the game show was the Whammy animations coming across the screen to steal someone’s win totals, obviously something that isn’t going to happen here either (you do get them on occasion but they’re more of a positive than negative in this edition). With seemingly only a halfhearted attempt at capturing the show’s style, and a volatile game that relies on a bonus round that isn’t particularly good, there’s not much to recommend this one.

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Original Release: WMS, release date ?

A wild slot with multiple types of bonus features that appear randomly, the Flintstones pairs the possibility of wild large wins on every spin with nice animation and faithful attention to the details of the show

The Flintstones Summer BBQ (WMS, release date ?)

Review by: C. M0use

After some poking around online I’m not sure if this “Summer BBQ” variant of the Flintstones slot is exclusively a “fun money” version available for assorted apps and on Facebook – places like Quick Hit, Jackpot Party and Gold Fish are the only ones I see advertising it. But if the “live casino” versions of the Flintstones are anything like it, they’re definitely worth checking out.

The game is centered on three bonus features that can potentially spring up with every spin – no need for scatter symbols or whatever, they might just kick off as soon as you press the spin button. Each are accompanied by animation clips from the cartoon: one simply scatters at least a few wilds onto the playfield, another is the “Yabba Dabba Doo” mode which is a random string of these clips that can add a ton of wilds plus multipliers and also split or stretch the screen, and then there’s a bonus wheel spin that can pop a few different things (the most valuable seeming to be Dino licking you some random amount of times for potentially big money).

The game thus feels more wild and anarchic than slots usually do, as you can potentially launch right into a wild sequence of wins with any given press of the button. You might see the playfield split into two or three separate reels, then stretch vertically multiple times, and have a long sequence of wilds and multipliers being thrown in to boot. This seeming generosity may be a function of it being only a “for fun” game on mobile apps and Facebook; I haven’t played any real money Flintstones games and would have to compare them. But the big win sequences are also counterbalanced by seemingly a lot of dead spins and tiny line wins, so it’s a fairly volatile game at the very least.

Setting aside its potential for wins, the effort on the art, animation and sound is top tier for a slot title. Between that and the possibility of any spin turning into a long wild run of bonuses, fans of the show should get a kick out of it.