New Paragon Game - High Stakes
Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2012 12:54 pm
I first saw this one at the weekend and was stunned by how poor it seemed to be on that first impression - too complicated and ridiculously difficult to win on.
Now I've seen a few more examples in the wild it might not be *quite* as bad as my first impression supposed but it still bears all the hallmarks of another 24 carat dud.
The basic gameplay is a variant of Every Loser Wins, with two levels of questions on each round - the first being a set of numeric questions where you have to pick wrong answers and then the main questions where again you have to pick wrong answers. There are six rounds and you have to get through an increasing number (1 up to 6) of steps per round. The prize ranges I've seen were usually something like 0, 0, 0, £1, £2, £10. You get one Extra Life; there is some sort of Extra Life bonus available but I saw no instances of it in the various games I played.
This all sounds fairly fine and dandy so far but all the examples I have seen this week had clearly been installed in hard or ultra-hard mode - it's too new a game and the other games on each cabinet showed no signs of being significantly burned for anything else to be the case. However the difficulty is this - the second parts of each step almost always require more than one question, often four questions, and on the first example I saw it was always four questions per step. In other words you'd have needed to answer 105 questions to win the JP (5 + 10 + 15 + 20 + 25 + 30). Picking the wrong answer from four options does of course reduce the odds but the game rapidly moves onto only giving you three or two options.
It's impossible to see who this game is aimed at - punters will find it far too fiddly and complicated and have no chance of ever picking up a prize and hence it will only ever stay in hard installation mode. GWHL have now released several real duds in a row on the Q&A front, and tellingly I am seeing almost zero punter play on any of them on my travels. They certainly aren't going to change that situation with games like High Stakes.
Now I've seen a few more examples in the wild it might not be *quite* as bad as my first impression supposed but it still bears all the hallmarks of another 24 carat dud.
The basic gameplay is a variant of Every Loser Wins, with two levels of questions on each round - the first being a set of numeric questions where you have to pick wrong answers and then the main questions where again you have to pick wrong answers. There are six rounds and you have to get through an increasing number (1 up to 6) of steps per round. The prize ranges I've seen were usually something like 0, 0, 0, £1, £2, £10. You get one Extra Life; there is some sort of Extra Life bonus available but I saw no instances of it in the various games I played.
This all sounds fairly fine and dandy so far but all the examples I have seen this week had clearly been installed in hard or ultra-hard mode - it's too new a game and the other games on each cabinet showed no signs of being significantly burned for anything else to be the case. However the difficulty is this - the second parts of each step almost always require more than one question, often four questions, and on the first example I saw it was always four questions per step. In other words you'd have needed to answer 105 questions to win the JP (5 + 10 + 15 + 20 + 25 + 30). Picking the wrong answer from four options does of course reduce the odds but the game rapidly moves onto only giving you three or two options.
It's impossible to see who this game is aimed at - punters will find it far too fiddly and complicated and have no chance of ever picking up a prize and hence it will only ever stay in hard installation mode. GWHL have now released several real duds in a row on the Q&A front, and tellingly I am seeing almost zero punter play on any of them on my travels. They certainly aren't going to change that situation with games like High Stakes.