Original Release: Sega, 1995, Game Gear

A variety collection of games from Sega, some involving gambling, some not so much

Gamble Panic (Game Gear, Sega, 1995)

Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!

Review by: C. M0use

Sega has a low-key history of dabbling in gambling titles here and there, one of the cases in point being 1995’s “Gamble Panic” for the Game Gear. This tale of degeneracy never made it out of Japan, but apparently not for lack of effort in presentation; it was one of the last titles Arc System Works did under contract for Sega, before they split off on their own and hit it big with Guilty Gear.

Aside from the gambling theme maybe causing a little hesitancy in porting, an overly linear structure is the main problem here. With a casino title you usually want to be able to browse around and play games freely, this one instead subjects you to a more traditional series of “levels” with each featuring a particular game. First you gotta beat a baby at draw poker (?), then a polar bear forces you to play a memory match game or die, then you’re off to battle some Mega Man robot in a slot tournament, etc. No battery backup either, you gotta write down numeric passwords if you’re not emulating and save stating.

The games aren’t always casino games either, as mentioned you got the Concentration variant, there’s also a virtual “crane machine” level that has you pick up plushies to win, and then the whole shebang concludes with a not-so-great billiards session!

The proceedings are all in Moon Runes and I wouldn’t expect a fan translation (unless AI makes such things trivial), so I don’t know the overall story but it appears you’re directed by the KKK to drum up funds by hustling your way through the off-Strip casino from Vegas Vacation. It’s perfectly playable without speaking Japanese, though there’s an occasional choice that I wasn’t clear on the meaning of.

Anyway, the game lost me at the slot level as it seemed to hinge entirely on getting the right random “super power” at the beginning to win. It’s also very tedious as you take turns alternating spins with the computer, it’s not the standard “slot tournament” style where everyone just spins at the same time and whoever has the most points at the end wins.

Links

Box art

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: IGT, 2022

IGT’s modernized Texas Tea “sequel” keeps a lot of the trappings of the original, but is a substantially different type of slot

Texas Tea: Strike It Rich (IGT, 2022)

Review by: C. M0use

The “revamped” version of Texas Tea (“Strike It Rich”) does something unfortunately common in the slot world – take a vintage property that became popular for one thing, then do the exact opposite when you revive it.

In this case, the original Texas Tea is perhaps the all-time champion of low volatility in slots. The new version ups the minimum bets (perhaps to pay for its fancy new cabinet) and is much more reliant on hitting a bonus game that requires multiple elements to go your way to keep you afloat; compare and contrast that to the “dividend bonus” in the original game where you would just get a respectable lump sum handed to you when you hit it, with no further checks of your luck.

So when you first step up to the game, aside from the fancy tallboy new cabinet style, the playfield looks a great deal like the original game. 5×3, very similar set of symbols, so on. But when you put your money in you’ll notice the minimum bet is a whole lot higher; the original game let you go as low as 9 cents to cover every line, this one is a flat minimum of 50 cents, and I’ve seen machines set higher to $1 minimums! The configuration I saw in a bank when I was testing this was 50c-$1-$2-$5-$10 for bet options. Some videos online indicate there MAY be a 25c-to-$5 configuration but people are terrible about just looking down and filming the wager buttons so I can’t confirm this.

Anyway. In addition to being more expensive to play, line win possibilities seem to have been vastly reduced. The game simply eats your money until you happen to hit one of the two available bonus games (down from three in the original, the “dividend check” feature is gone). The easier to hit of these is the three “strike it rich” scatter symbols, which don’t seem to have to sit on a payline this time out. This grants you 10 free spins, but in a new system that has those “nested” bonus hurdles that I really don’t care for. Each spin is on a 3×3 grid upon which you might land instant win amounts, tokens that go toward one of the progressive jackpots on the big board above, or an extra spin. But then there’s ANOTHER reel that determines whether you collect all of these prizes or not (except for any extra spins, which you always seem to get). And of course, you’ll usually wind up being teased by falling just a token short of earning the bigger jackpot amounts when all is said and done.

The “place the derricks” bonus game also returns from the original, this one a little harder to trigger as it keeps to the same rules of having at least four of them land across a payline. While this bonus feature doesn’t put you through additional “luck checks,” it also seems to have much more modest payoffs … lacking the possibility of progressive jackpots, you can expect maybe a win of 20x to 40x your wager (so $20 to $40 off a 50 cent bet) for a typical round here.

The aesthetics are more modernized, up to and including some new and more Smash Bros-ish sounding music, but you’ll pay for the whole shebang in terms of volatility and needing a much bigger budget to expect to make the game work for you. A far cry from the original Texas Tea, which was the king of slot stability and low-roller friendliness.

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: IGT, 2009

A clever multi-hand variant of video poker that offers the possibility of slot-size jackpot wins

Ultimate X Poker (IGT, 2009)

Review by: C. M0use

“Ultimate X” is a familiar sight on casino floors, but it’s not a specific type of video poker … it’s a multi-game machine from IGT, similar in its basic concept to the Game King machines, but with a unique twist. You select from a variety of familiar video poker standards, from Jacks or Better to Double Double Bonus Poker, but each game has you play multiple hands simultaneously (3, 5 or 10) and is outfitted with a unique multiplier gimmick.

So long as you bet at least five coins (which also maxes your pay table on most machines), an assortment of win multipliers will appear and attach themselves to certain hands; this is based on your previous winning hands. The amounts are determined by which hand you had too, ranging from 2x to 12x. Max bet with 10 coins and you’re guaranteed another set of these multipliers on your next play, even if you ratchet your coin total down for that bet.

If you’re sharp about such things you might already be noticing an advantage play possibility shaping up here. And Ultimate X is one of the longest-running advantage plays (possibly THE longest) in continuous existence on casino floors, but it’s the lowest-hanging possible fruit: vulturing. A player may well be sitting there max betting 10 coins, and then get up and leave with a set of juicy multipliers waiting on the denomination they were betting. It only lasts for that one play, but a good enough set of multipliers creates an excellent positive expectation bet for that one play. An even better situation is if multiple people have left multipliers sitting on varying denominations throughout the day, which no one else has come along and claimed yet.

Keep in mind that Ultimate X first came out in the late 00s and is virtually unchanged since then, so this advantage play was sussed out very quickly and has basically been common knowledge to anyone with an interest in these things for well over a decade now. Casinos are likewise very much wise to it and some will kick out or even trespass people they see combing the machines. They obviously don’t find the game enough of a hassle to remove it, it’s been quite popular for a very long time now, but each has their own opaque policies about this that you won’t really be aware of until a yellow security vest is approaching you. Some will proactively kick out people that are obviously combing machines, others seemingly don’t care unless you bother other players or get into a fight with other vultures.

On that last point, the game has spawned a small but enduring cottage industry of Lester Diamonds who try to hustle people into building multipliers for them. They’ll cold approach people who are playing other games, intimate that they have some kind of secret technique for beating Ultimate X, then steer them over to a bank of machines and have them max bet on each denomination until a good set of multipliers is built on each denomination. Then they tell them the machine is “cold” or something and move them to another machine to repeat the process.

If you’ve found your way to this obscure corner of the internet, I’d guess there’s at least a 50/50 shot you’re looking to AP Ultimate X yourself. On that subject, all I’ll say is this. While casinos are on high alert for people combing these machines and tend to view them as ticks to be removed from the property, they have no reason to question someone who just picks a machine casually to play and checks the denominations to see what’s up first … then maybe changes machines once because they don’t like the buttons or the seat or whatever … then maybe takes a break to do something else for awhile and comes back to a third machine to play a little more. If they happened to notice other people playing one of those machines at max bet during that time, well, that’s a coincidence. It’s not something to try and make a full-time income off of, but it’s a possibly lucrative little time-filler activity if you’re waiting between poker games or something and don’t have anything better to do at the moment.

The only remaining question is, is Ultimate X worth playing for its own sake? It certainly seems to have casual player appeal, as it’s held a place on casino floors for coming up on 20 years now despite drawing a disreputable element. I’d chalk that up to the random assortment of multipliers with each new play adding a new layer of engagement to the process. It makes it seem on the surface like you have a better shot at a big win than with regular Game King type video poker, but keep in mind that the pay tables tend to be worse to make up for the multiplier gimmick, like bottom of the legally allowed barrel in that jurisdiction. The other thing is the volatility. You’re playing at least three hands at once, if not as many as 10, and betting to cover each of those at what are usually fairly substantial minimum bets. So “big wins” still come back to your “main” hand coming in good on the initial draw and allowing you to hold those cards into the other hands, making it a much more high-variance game than usually sedated and grindy standard video poker. That provides more of a rush when you win, and can create some massive jackpots the likes of which you don’t see at standard video poker, but it can also drain off your money to no avail at speeds that would make some slot machines blush!

Links

Bob Dancer’s analysis

Wizard of Odds analysis

Casino Player Magazine article on perfect strategy

Videos

Basic video tutorial for beginners

Original Release: Activision, 2009, PlayStation 2
Other Releases: Nintendo DS (2009)

A simple racer that follows the general theme of the TV series with equally simple elements of upgrading beater cars and winning street races

MTV’s Pimp My Ride: Street Racing (PS2, Activision, 2009)

Where to Buy: Amazon

How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

Unless you’re a big fan of the mid-2000s Xzibit show, you’d likely not know that there were actually two Pimp My Ride games. The first was an oddball GTA derivative that had you drive around fulfilling customer car orders by ramming other random cars to make their coins fly out in Mario style, for whatever reason … “Street Racing” is the second game, which basically recycles the first game’s driving engine but retools it into a straight-up racing game with no “open world” elements to it.

The other oddity about this one is that it was released in 2009 for the PS2 and DS, a full two years after the show was canceled (and well into the PS3/Xbox 360 era). That means no Xzibit, in fact almost no real connection to the show save for using its logo and a modified version of its theme song.

All of that, plus it being a $20 budget title, seems like it would add up to almost guaranteed catastrophe … but surprisingly, it’s actually a solid little racing title. It’s definitely on the simple and limited side of town, and definitely a little out of date for 2009, but it kinda shoots for a “Gran Turismo lite” style with its heavy-and-realistic-ish handling, focus on everyday street racing and need to tinker with beaters to advance in the main career mode.

That said, don’t expect anything approaching Gran Turismo’s car count, level of detail or general depth. This is a $20 budget game, so it has no licensed cars whatsoever – just a collection of about a couple dozen kinda odd-looking knockoffs for you to gradually unlock and then customize. Aside from pretty decent overall handling, the big strength is a collection of pretty well-designed tracks; again only about a dozen though, with championship cups padded out by having “reverse” versions of each in the mix.

The “pimping” process also eventually opens up a decent range of visual options for the car, but is extremely straightforward. You earn “scrilla” from your racing ostensibly to buy stuff, but the championship races (the only place to earn it) also gradually unlock everything you need when you place 2nd and 1st in each race. So actually buying anything really feels like a waste of money until you get near the end of the game. Upgrading car performance parts is also a simple and straightforward process that is the same for every car. There’s a little more action in crafting the visual design of your car, at least after you’ve unlocked a bunch of parts and such through championship race wins, but one thing you can do from the beginning is create custom drawings for vinyl wraps and your own custom license plate. Unlike Gran Turismo, you’re also able to paint each of your cars whatever color you like at any time for free.

The racing kinda resembles Gran Turismo in general “realistic everyday car” handling and emphasis on braking properly around sharp corners, but it definitely differs in a number of ways. It’s much more gentle, for starters, with no need to come to grips with corner technique for the first few championship cups. There’s also only one AI racer who kinda rubberbands around you to maintain general challenge, the rest of the pack are losers who are easily dusted. There are also more arcadey elements, like speed boost pickups, off-track shortcuts and Dukes of Hazzard jumps. And since this is “illegal street racing” you have to deal with NPC traffic on nearly every track, but collisions are handled very gently; you can usually truck the Sunday drivers with little penalty, and a bad enough wipeout only costs you two or three seconds of drive time before you’re gently placed back on the track in Lakitu style. And while your car will show visible damage over a race you can’t actually hurt its performance or permanently wear or damage it.

So it’s kinda a good choice if you dig the general Gran Turismo style but wish the game would take it easy and relax more, you know, make an effort to be more arcadey and invitingly fun. The developers definitely seemed to be racing fans and put more effort into the core driving action and track design than was probably necessary for a late-PS2-life budget title.

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: IGT, 2008 (?)

The sequel to one of IGT’s biggest slots looks very similar at a brief glance, but actually is a substantially different and more risky game

Cleopatra II (IGT, 2008?)

Review by: C. M0use

The sequel to IGT’s hit Cleopatra is decidedly more volatile, trading the frequent line wins of the first game for a more exciting (and potentially lucrative) bonus feature.

As with the previous game, the structure is kept very simple. You’re playing primarily to hit the bonus feature, which requires only landing three scatter symbols anywhere on the playfield (that your bet has covered). When that happens you get the standard 8 to 15 free spins, but with some unusual perks. First of all, the free spins can re-trigger if you land another three scatter symbols. And that seems to happen very often, as in my one run on the bonus spins I had it re-trigger five times for a grand total of over 60 free spins!

That’s not bad by itself, but the real heat of the meat is the fact that your win multiplier increases by 1x for each new spin. And I’m not sure what the cap is, if any, but on my 60+ spins it was up to 60-whatever by the time everything was said and done. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that you’re still playing for the usual rare/crummy line wins during your free spin sequence, but once the multiplier gets into the double digits even the crummy wins can start getting substantial. Playing 20 cents per spin during my test run, the minimum to cover all lines, I ended up with a total of over $220 off my free spin sequence (most of that coming from a $100+ win late in the sequence). 100x your wager is about the best you can ask of a bonus feature that has a reasonable chance of popping each time you sit down!

That said, you’ll probably eat a lot of dead spins and crummy fractional wins in getting there. I got lucky and got to it within only about $10 of spins, but for that initial $10 it was starting to feel like the game was a big dud compared to its prequel. Aside from the crumbum and rare line wins, the only other thing to look for on the playfield is the Cleo II symbol. This acts as a wild, but also doubles the value of any payline it lands in. A screen packed with these might land you something like the potential 10,000x win you could get from the original Cleo with every spin, though I didn’t see a listed maximum for these.

So this isn’t a “grinder” like the original Cleo, something you could sit at for a long while with a small budget … if you don’t luck into a good bonus spin sequence you could see your money draining away pretty fast. However, it is another “true penny” (at least in its original cabinet) as you have the option of betting as little as 1 cent for just the center line or a nickel to cover 5 of the 20. So if you just wanna sit and chill for a while and maybe scoop a drink from the cocktail girl, it’s a choice. The other use case is the one I stumbled upon – deploying a small amount of free play that you don’t really care about losing for a shot at a very decent return if you luck out.

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: Action Gaming, 2004, Web browser
Other Releases: Android/iOS (2018)

Run by Action Gaming, the kings of video poker in brick-and-mortar casinos for over two decades, the Videopoker.com website and apps allow for free play of their various games with a rewards system and contests for cash prizes

Videopoker.com (Web browser, Action Games, 2004)

Where to Buy: Free-to-play in a web browser

Review by: C. M0use

I’m filing Videopoker.com under “social casinos” but it kinda pre-dates the concept. I first started playing around with it in 2013, but it actually launched nearly 10 years before that (and hasn’t changed a whole lot in 20 years from a web design standpoint, as you might notice). It does have an actual social aspect in terms of a chat area and being able to post public messages to people (as well as adding an optional photo to your profile), and it has always had a “reward points” system for earning real prizes but one that doesn’t actually use or prompt you to buy virtual chips.

Previously, the big limitation was that the prizes were limited to branded swag and free premium subscriptions (aside from the ultimate prize, requiring an insane amount of points, being a free three-night trip to Vegas). After happening to check back in on it on a whim, I found they’ve since added substantial layers to it – the biggest being regular daily, weekly and monthly contests for cash prizes!

The site now distributes a total of at least $5000 per month between all these assorted free contests. It’s also not only expanded its video poker variants to around 100, it’s also added 12 types of keno … so I guess you can actually have the World Series of Keno here! (or at least a reasonable facsimile).

The whole thing is funded by Action Gaming, a longtime casino game designer that partnered up with IGT on their Game King series specializing in video poker and keno-focused terminals that allow you to select from a wide variety of simple games. If you’ve ever been in a live casino in the last 20 years or so, you’ve no doubt seen them; it’s often the only option on the floor for single-hand video poker. Videopoker.com is packed with the sorts of games you see on those machines, plus some titles that IGT/Action usually ship on their own separate cabinets like Ultimate X and Triple Play Draw Poker.

So the core feature of the site is simply playing all these video poker and keno games to your heart’s content, and earning one “reward point” for each hand you play. You don’t have to worry about managing a stack of virtual chips or buying new ones, but the site is monetized by showing a video ad of a few seconds whenever you switch to a new game type. That by itself doesn’t seem like a whole lot of a reason to play, save for trying out game types in advance of a casino trip or something; and back when I used to play this 10 years ago it really wasn’t, I mean there was the rewards factor but to give you an idea the cost of the free trip to Vegas is 3,000,000 points. So that’s why I wandered away from it initially.

But these new developments add a little more purpose. Item #1 obviously being the cash contests, though enough people are still playing this that you’ll basically need to land a royal (or similar super rare high-value hands) to stand a chance at winning even a daily for $25 or so. Each contest gives you a limited amount of daily tries, ranging from 5 to 10 usually.

The other thing is training, though you’ll need to pay for a Gold subscription (also purchaseable with reward points) to make use of that. I’ve long lamented the lack of good video poker trainers, with the ancient (but very good) Frugal Video Poker still kinda the top option in this area, and this one seems to have some good features (and they have a mobile app now so between that or just running in a web browser it would be simple to play on your phone). The premium subscription also eliminates the video ads, and promises to allow you to “play games before they hit casino floors”, though I couldn’t dig up any more detail on that … could actually be of value to advantage players if you can spot a weakness in a game they’re testing out before anyone else does, these games are not immune as several different Ultimate X vulnerabilities over the years have shown.

Original Release: Namco, 1995, PlayStation

The first original Ridge Racer game for consoles, Revolution didn’t do much to evolve and completely copied some tracks from previous games (along with recycling Ridge Racer 2’s soundtrack)

Ridge Racer Revolution (PS1, Namco, 1995)

Where to Buy: Amazon

How to Emulate: coming soon!

Review by: C. M0use

Ridge Racer is one of those series that went off the rails with its sequel naming right away. They did put out a Ridge Racer 2 in the arcades, but that was really just a tweaked version of the original game with a few added features. It just went bananas from there, if I’ve got it right the next game was “Rave Racer” in the arcades in summer of 1995, followed in a few months by Ridge Racer Revolution. So I guess this is the fourth game in the series, though actually the second for the PS1 as a port of the original arcade game had come out a few months prior as a launch title.

Whew! So anyway, Revolution kinda sucks. This was still in the period in which Namco was just iterating on the original game, which was always more of a graphical spectacle (by mid-90s “first wave of polygons” standards) than a quality or even “solid” racer. Same story here, it’s very colorful and really still looks pretty nice for a first-year PS1 release, but the gameplay remains plagued with herky-jerky movement, giant car hitboxes and the maddeningly random “drift” mechanic that is somehow even more annoying than in the first game.

It’s also very much still in an “arcade” mentality, with only three tracks available for the entirety of the game, and only four cars until you kill all 40 enemies on the little Galaga loading screen when the game starts (and then you get most of the rest of them). Same structure to the races as the first game – you start at the very back of the pack, the first five guys teleport ahead such that it’ll usually take to the final lap to catch up to them, the last five guys just sit neatly in their assigned position in life and try to put their ass in your way.

It’s annoying getting around the other cars as hitboxes are blocky and slightly larger than each of the vehicles, also there’s no going off-track at all (even into seemingly benign grass patches) or it counts as a collision and slows you down. But the worst offender is the random drift mechanic. In theory, it’s supposed to kick in when you tap the brake or ease off the gas then re-apply. In practice it just kinda kicks in whenever it feels like it, which probably won’t be on the corners you need it but will be on some straightaway where you let off the gas a little to try to weave around a fat-assed car. And surprisingly the cockpit view somehow gives you much more precision in this one, usually the opposite in racing games, the “chase car” view here seems to just expand all the hitboxes even more.

The only thing that held up is the colorful and detailed tracks with their fun background animations, otherwise the game is just primitive and even stuff like Driver and the first Gran Turismo make it look like a joke. Add in the taunting commentator with the annoying voice and it gets old fast. No real reason to go back to any of this crop of the early Ridge Racer games really.

Links

Original soundtrack

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: PlayStudios, 2014, Android/iOS/Amazon

A basic blackjack game that ties into the MyVegas / MyVIP “real world rewards” system

MyVegas Blackjack (Mobile, PlayStudios, 2014)

Where to Buy: Freemium via Android/iOS app stores or Amazon

How to Emulate: Android Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

MyVegas Blackjack is a smooth and pleasant basic blackjack app with some added benefits, chiefly the MyVIP / MyVegas rewards for playing, but also some major limitations in options.

If you’re not familiar with the MyVIP rewards world, it’s a family of about 10 mobile and Facebook “social casino” apps now that provide you with reward points for playing that can then be cashed in for an assortment of actual prizes. The program is tied in with MGM so a lot of those rewards are at their various casinos, but they’ve expanded over the years to a number of other partners like cruise lines and TopGolf and even some of that random Shaq branded merchandise.

You pay two prices for getting these reward points for free: advertising, and limited options. None of the MyVIP apps actually force any sort of third-party advertising, but they do frequently nag you to buy chips. Blackjack is actually one of the most restrained of the bunch, it just has a pop-up when you start it up and then it pretty much leaves you alone. It is one of the few that does allow you to voluntarily watch third-party ads for more chips, however.

As far as limited options, one is simply the amount of free chips doled out. You start with 25k and get about 5k per day just for showing up, and if you’re playing bets of 25 or 100 at single-deck with good conservative strategy that’ll hold you for a very long time. But initially you ONLY have access to a basic single-deck game and have to gradually unlock all the other game’s features by earning EXP from your bets: playing multiple hands, new rooms with new rules, side bets and so on.

Aside from earning rewards, the app does a few things to spice up the usual blackjack grind. Each new table you unlock has a set of 10 bonus cards to collect, which appear randomly with card draws. You have to win the present hand to keep them. Collecting the complete set gives you a huge EXP and money boost. At level 10 you also unlock the Strip quest; this isn’t like the My Strip you build in Facebook MyVegas if you’re familiar with that, it’s just a long chain of bonus objectives for more EXP and free chips (like winning a certain total of chips at a particular table).

Also on the theme of being overly basic, don’t expect any tutorials or play optimization tips here. You actually get sort of the opposite with a “charged bets” feature that offers some bonus chips if you keep making statistically not good plays during a hand. I guess it clues you in to what’s risky, but there’s nothing here to tell you what you could be doing better. There’s not much else to do aside from two slots you can unlock, both copped from MyVegas (Betrock Nights and Frontier Fortune).

Blackjack generally is not comped well in real casinos, and it’s definitely nerfed in the other MyVegas games that offer it … and that theme continues here as it’s one of the tightest of the app family about doling out the reward points. You’re capped to 4k per 24 hours and that’s strictly for about an hour of time-in-app (so you can sit there doing nothing if you want, so long as the screen stays active).
Still, it’s simple and straightforward, and it doesn’t have the problems with crashing and freezing on older devices that others (like MyKonami and the bingo game) now seem to be plagued with.

Videos

PlayStudios behind-the-scenes video

Gameplay Video

Original Release: Konami, 2020

A progressive slot that keeps some of Konami’s vintage elements but also introduces some modern features (and volatility). Available in both online and offline forms that are very similar.

All Aboard Dynamite Dash (Konami, 2020)

Review by: C. M0use

All Aboard Dynamite Dash is a slot released a few years ago that retains Konami’s classic 3×5 style, complete with its familiar symbols and a lot of the same sound effects, but expands the action to the then-brand-new “tall cabinet” Dimension 49J line that allows for an added bonus feature and linked progressive jackpot status screen on top.

One thing that’s different here is the volatility. Konami first made a name for itself on low volatility, graphically simple slots suited well to sitting and grinding with smaller bets for a long period (whether for loyalty points, free drinks or just something to do). Stuff like Lotus Land, Panda Express, Red Hot Chili Chochachos and etc. This one is quite the opposite; it sports very infrequent line wins, and you’re really hanging in for the bonus feature to choo-choo on in and catch you up. It’s also not the cheapest of the available slot options, at an absolute minimum bet of 50 cents per spin (1 cent to cover 50 lines).

At least on that front it does consistently deliver, when it finally does hit. To trigger the bonus you simply have to land at least six of the “gold train” scatter symbols in any position. This takes you to the usual series of three free spins that will fully re-trigger if you land another gold train symbol as they go. Manage to fill out the playfield with all 15, and you win the linked progressive jackpot. But even if you fall short of that lofty goal you’re still looking at a guarantee of a pretty big win. Unlike most of this particular style of bonus feature, whenever a new train symbol lands during the free spins, you get every credit on the playfield awarded to you again!

But, unless you get super lucky right when you step up to the machine, you’ll absolutely need that bonus feature win to offset the fact that you almost never get line wins and there’s really not much else helping you out here. Solid choice if you wanna go for the gusto with some free play you don’t mind potentially throwing away, though. My own experiment saw me going down the equivalent of $300 (at $1.20 per spin) before getting lucky with the bonus feature and recovering to a total profit of $600 after just hitting it once.

Links

Konami’s page

Videos

Gameplay Video

Original Release: Sony, 2001, PlayStation 2

The first Gran Turismo release for the PS2 stepped up the presentation as expected, but also improved the player experience a bit while reducing the overall car count. The gratuitous “A-Spec” subtitle is the base game, not a special version.

Gran Turismo 3 (PS2, Sony, 2001)

Where to Buy: Amazon

How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide

Review by: C. M0use

Though I appreciated many of the qualities of the initial PS1 entries, and had some fun with some of the races and aspects, I left that console era with the feeling that “The Real Driving Simulator” wasn’t quite for me. It was mostly due to the constant feeling of having a little Japanese man behind you whacking you with a stick and yelling “NO THAT WRONG!!!” at every little deviation from “proper” racing technique, yet not providing you nearly enough in-game instruction as to exactly how that technique is supposed to work.

Gran Turismo 3, the entry that jumped to the PS2, still has some of that. But for me it was markedly more enjoyable and where things started to “click,” thanks to a fair amount of loosening of the “training gates” locking off the game’s content.

You do still have to pass the obnoxious license tests to access the majority of the Simulation Mode’s content. However, there is one important change: that doesn’t carry over to the Arcade Mode, it’s now wide open with nearly all of the game’s tracks and a broad selection of good cars right from the beginning. Not only can completing race sets in this mode furnish you with good cars to give you a boost in Simulation Mode, it also provides a more fun and free way to sort of teach yourself the finer points of the game. It certainly helped me a lot; I couldn’t even finish the bronze B licenses in the PS1 entries, but after a few hours futzing around in Arcade Mode here just having fun and picking things up on my own I pretty much breezed through all those trials (save a couple that took a few retries as I was falling like less than a second short of the required time).

Gran Turismo’s challenge really just boils down to two things: handling sharp corners with “proper” and realistic technique, and buying and tuning cars such that they out-muscle the competition on straightaways. That first component is by far the toughest part of the equation. If you don’t come in supplying your own race car driver knowledge, you aren’t getting it from the game, you’re just going to have to trial-and-error other than some occasional vague mumbled advice in a track description and a vague blue line overlay on the track that actually often isn’t the most helpful approach. I still wouldn’t call GT3 anything close to “arcadey,” but it does seem a little easier and less demanding on the handling than its predecessors. I can’t really come up with a concrete explanation for this but I think it may just be the generally improved physics in jumping to the PS2 hardware, combined with a controller that has a little more sensitivity to input.

The game’s one “arcadey” conceit is retained, and it continues to help in some races … your car is essentially invincible and free to ram other cars with impunity. That can be played to some strategic advantage, especially when using other cars as momentum sinks to carom off of while working your way up the pack and taking sharp corners. It’s less helpful when trying to maintain a lead, but on some tracks you can take advantage of the other cars driving “realistically” and attempting to avoid collisions by doing something they would never do like plowing across a patch of grass or two with enough speed to make a shortcut out of it.

Other than still having something of a demanding learning curve, complaints are minimal. The biggest one for series fans will probably be the drop in car count despite the move to DVD; GT3 has just 180 cars, only about 40 more than the original game and almost 500 fewer than its prequel! I don’t see much of a good explanation for this, other than maybe Sony trying to get it out close to the PS2 launch (it still ended up coming out a little over a year later). But it was an anomaly for the series, which would climb back up to 700+ cars with GT4 and then into the thousands with the following games. The other thing I didn’t care for was the soundtrack, which continues the theme of trying to license hot n’ popular tracks of the time. These things are always a product of their times and the early 00s was not a great time for pop music … you’ve got some Matrix kungfu techno, a cheesy promotional rap from Snoop Dogg, MOD SKILLZ, Lenny Kravitz stuff that’s beyond played at this point, Powerman 5000, Raekwon, a HUGE dose of Feeder for some reason … about the only thing I enjoyed was 80s classic “She Sells Sanctuary” tbh. The Japanese release continued with supplying its own original instrumental rock that’s pretty good, I think a few tracks made it into this version but with the DVD storage it would have been nice if you could switch to that as an option.

If you’re looking for an early entry point for the series, I think this is the place to start. Arcade Mode gives you a ton of stuff to do upon bootup with no gating, it looks nicer, it’s a little easier to come to grips with, about the only downgrade is the car count and soundtrack. It could stand to do a little more in teaching you what it expects given how it demands perfect execution in some aspects, but it also gives you much more room than the prior games to play around and figure it out for yourself in your own way. Also surprisingly still dirt cheap on Amazon and such, it looks like GT4 draws a lot more attention of the two PS2 entries.

Links

Basic ROM (ISO) editor for license test time settings, track data, CPU opponent stats, car prices and more

Retexture Mod

Concept Mod – Adds cars and courses from Gran Turismo: Concept

FAQs

Videos

Gameplay Video

Japanese TV ads