Fruit Machine Chat

word up removed

never mind the buzzcocks added

swathe of new skill based games including the non paying ones

cool wrote:word up removed

Amen..............?

I'll believe it when I see it.

What Quiz games have gone ?

wires74 wrote:What Quiz games have gone ?

Battleships seems to have gone.

Non Question:

That terrible (unless you were the first one to play it) South Park game has gone.

Word Up (don't turn this into a word up thread) has gone.

Happy Days!

BigEd wrote:

wires74 wrote:What Quiz games have gone ?

Battleships seems to have gone.

Non Question:

That terrible (unless you were the first one to play it) South Park game has gone.

Word Up (don't turn this into a word up thread) has gone.

Happy Days!

Is that last one a Fonz-based quiz? Cooool!

100-1 appears to be adapted until it fills up presumably final screen highlights £1 £2 £3 £4 only

ItBox got rid of Word Soup, and look what happened to that. Just saying.

cool wrote:word up removed

never mind the buzzcocks added

swathe of new skill based games including the non paying ones

Are you on about the paragons? Can't see any updates round here sadly.

yes I am seen on a few but only say 1 in 5 round here at the moment

Finally found one of these yesterday, then 2 more in quick succession.

Pub Quiz still on. Nothing else interests me. Word Soup gone, which just amuses me, but only in the microcosm that is fruitchat.

Darts does indeed seem to be 50p a go, but now no way to win £20 with the next game bonus gone.

Obvious changes I've noticed:

By Any Means

This is the same basic game but the Next Game Bonus has gone and the 'collect 6 vehicles' bonus no longer carries over into the next game; instead there's a new set of missing vehicles each time.

1 vs 100

As confirmed by others this now seems to have a £3 JP without having been made any easier to win.

Colour of Money

This was a turd of a game to begin with - on how many other games is it possible to play very well and with sensible tactics and yet still win nothing? - but it has now been made comically difficult with the need to keep answering questions to potentially win nothing in the end game (the same 'Stop' process is in place). Definitely an All Time Worst Game contender now.

New games:

Hexagrams
A 'solve the anagram' game. You get a guaranteed 2 minutes and most people will be able to win £1-£2 for their 50p stake in its initial setup but I presume it gets harder after that. Very slow and ponderous but some may well enjoy.

I-Spy
I think this (or something similar) has already been around a while. GWHL are so confident about its appeal that they are offering punters a free game to see if they like it.

Never Mind the Buzzcocks
I suspect saying this one is 'the least worst Bell-Fruit game for a couple of years' might win me the 2010 Damning With Faintest Praise Award so I'll go for that. Not one that will linger long I would have thought.


Overall it's a poor release but it has to be said that the Paragon is still the best current machine on the market by some degree, albeit against some utterly pitiful opposition. What is disappointing is seeing changes that don't appear to be anything to do with possible legal changes (e.g. the tampering with By Any Means and 1 vs 100, while the former of these still retains the ability to offer, let's say, slightly less than 100% achievable targets for the skill-based bonus games) being made under cover of darkness, so to speak.

P.S. I haven't dared to see yet whether None of the Above has been made any worse, partly because I'm not sure that's humanly possible...

I'm going out on a limb here, but I actually enjoyed a couple of games of None of the Above.

As I don't expect to win it came as quite a nice game.

3 games - £1.50 wasted. 10+ minutes taken.
The high point - xx questions to progress, or the ? box. Took the ? box for 2 easy questions.

The low point, How do you actually win anything?

BigEd wrote:How do you actually win anything?

You don't. That's why it's such a dud.

i found a few of these new releases at last. firstly, the best game has gone but i won't go into that here. suffice it to say: "catastrophic own-goal" but i don't know any politics involved.

of the new/altered games:

hex ripoff seems okay but it is just another speed game; any mug can do it if they are quick enough and can be bothered. imo speed is not a very impressive skill without some cerebral backing.

NOTA. i'd tend to agree. it is good value for your money so enthusiastic folk in the pub might well appreciate their 50pee lasting longer than, erm, anything on open. but the small prizes are about all you can hope for. if this was on the open menu, it would be its best game. but on the paragon it is a disappointing filler.

Q&A revised endgames: we can moan grumble and bitch but it seems a bit early to formulate a considered opinion, bear in mind that these are essentially new games on release mode.

play on words is okay, but for me the weighting is askew. one 10lw should beat 50 3lws. having said that it is more playable than a lot of pseudo-word games which have been released. and there are one or two easter eggy touches like TIME giving you a bonus which i always enjoy. it can't hold a candle to WU/WS.

PLoD must be a busted flush now, i still enjoy it but there is no longer the satisfaction of winning from skill, i'm playing it now to see what the commentator says and leave myself obscure finishes. (although a deliberate bull finish seems to be the way forward with this tweak.)

i really like spot these 20 things games. i've played a very much more sophisticated equivalent on king.com which is far better than the megatouch version (again i won't go into that here but the level of sophistication allows for more than just the visual aspect) now i don't have any special acuity for this sort of thing but it is enjoyable; so in my book, that makes it a good game. but the obvious point is that nobody will play a game without a prize when it costs the same to have a chance of winning on something else.

i spy. well the last incarnation was good because good strategy was an inrtegral part of the skill. now it is weak but might still get played by punters who enjoy something a bit different.

and two terminals i saw had the impossible screen misalignment on PMP and the football hangman game which needs to be addressed if not to alienate locals who enjoy those two.

overall, the release seems to be governed by the stick rather than the carrot (we all understand why).
HMRC has interfered in an area where they only have triumphant ignorance and GWHL et al have had no option but to toe the line. in the long term, i hope HMRC's heavy-handed incompetence hasn't sounded a knell.

all concerned will need the patience and sense to see how this transpires, to my mind, joe public winning £3.50 ten times is more sustainable than joe pro winning £35 once. if this is a deliberate ploy, it is one i welcome although i know it is not a popular standpoint on this forum.