Fruit Machine Chat

the new paragon menu is a thing of beauty but the two new games are awful. both are called 'here is a good way to lose 50p in the blink of an eye' and neither has any discernable skill.

roulette is well-designed but imo it has no place on a SWP terminal. and the six shooter thing is a pseudo reel-skill AWP feature. nobody in their right mind would play an AWP at 30%.

they have borrowed some games from other terminals so it is not all bad news but the headliners are poor.

have the rules changed to allow the S of SWP to be disregarded?

Sounds poor. Might I ask what games have been borrowed from other terminals?

ported games (this might not be the whole truth or nothing but the truth but from my recce) were:

caesar's palace
pub quiz
the other trivial pursuit
tetris
zeleb WWTBAM
frogger
±

Sounds quite promising. I will keep an eye out.

Paragon Games Pack v3.2 March 2008

New Games Added:

Casino Royale
Skill Six Shooter
Celebrity Millionaire
Caesar's Palace
Frogger
Haunted House 2
Pub Quiz
Shoot for the Starts 2
Tetris Star Prize
Trivial Pursuit 2

Previous games removed are:

I Spy
Hangman 3
DOND No Questions
Shoot for the Stars
Ultimate Move Quiz
Choc a Block
Fruit Frenzy
Message in a Bottle
Trivial Pursuit

The menu displays 29 games which is more than previously. I wonder if this version has stopped rotating poor performing games?

Istenem wrote:.. and the six shooter thing is a pseudo reel-skill AWP feature

I've seen one of these - and correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Skill Six Shooter have a huge JP - £100 or so?

It was certainly the highest pot I've seen on a touchscreen outside of a casino before. It did make me wonder whether it should affect the licence fee payable.

Nixxy wrote:I've seen one of these - and correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Skill Six Shooter have a huge JP - £100 or so?

I'm 99% sure it is a £50 JP - I saw this one in passing last night. The Ant and Dec Jiggy Bank game also has a £50 JP on the £1 a go version and, as I reported a month or so ago, this isn't actually fictional as with some other games, although of course such a big prize is necessarily going to be a pretty rare beast.

Came across the new Paragon menu at the weekend and it's certainly a big improvement in terms of numbers - about forty games on there now, I reckon, so roughly a doubling. Didn't stop for long, but I did note that:

(a) the Celebrity WWTBAM is a mixture of the ItBox and GamesNet versions - 50p play and similar difficulty to the GamesNet, but the endgame works properly and doesn't start the clock immediately; and

(b) Caesar's Palace is a port of the ItBox and not the GamesNet version - so no chance of a £20 JP there then.

Again, the encroachment of gambling games is worrisome...

grecian wrote:Caesar's Palace is a port of the ItBox and not the GamesNet version - so no chance of a £20 JP there then.

Is the difference simply that the Gamesnet offers the occasional game where you could get the required seven keys, and the ItBox doesn't, or is there something else that I have obviously missed? (I'm ignoring the cosmetic differences in the end game).


One other point to make is that a favourite game of yours has I'm afraid been chipped in quite a subtle way - I'd need to see a few more to be certain but I reckon that Trivia for Dummies is now impossible. I have seen three separate machines with the same unusual pattern - each time there has been only three prizes (say £1, £5, £10) which in the past has meant that the game is in non-pay mode. At the same time however the rounds are only three or four questions not six, which is usually a good sign. Each time I got through to the £1 prize round however the difference was very hard to spot - I failed on seven or eight attempts in a row. All these factors make me think that the game has been altered to encourage punters by letting them get quite a way up the trail, only to dash their hopes when they can't win a quid.

In other news, the rest of the games are the usual load of old Paragon tosh...

On Caesar's Palace, broadly I'd say yes. On the ItBox I've pretty much stopped playing it but 99 per cent of the time the maximum amount of keys was five (I never had more than six), whereas it's quite common to find seven keys on the GamesNet version at a virgin location.

On Trivia for Dummies, I totally agree this has been re-programmed, which is very disappointing. A few months ago they seemed to do a big overhaul of the question bank, and at the same time (I think) the endgames did become a lot more difficult. I agree with your observations that there seems to be less questions per round now, but harder endgames. I doubt I'd spend more than an exploratory 50p on this now, and would look elsewhere for Paragon winnings.

from what the engineer said when i caught him updating one of these recently, the fast games you talk about (Royal Casino and Six Shooter) run a lot higher than the normal SWP 30% - although he wasn't so forthcoming on the actual percent

I can't find this 40 game Paragon of which you speak. The one I played looked redesigned (it had a different 'More Games' button at the bottom instead of its usual position on the side), and it contained Caesar's et al so I assume it is the latest version.

It crashed when I tried to launch Six Shooter. Blank screened for about 3 minutes before returning to menu. Did the same again so I gave it up and went elsewhere.

Nuts_4_nuts wrote:I can't find this 40 game Paragon of which you speak. The one I played looked redesigned (it had a different 'More Games' button at the bottom instead of its usual position on the side), and it contained Caesar's et al so I assume it is the latest version.

I may have overstated with forty games. There's a nine-game frontscreen (IIRC) with two backscreens of sixteen games each. But - cheekily - the second backscreen contains the nine frontscreen games as well! So actually I reckon there's about thirty. I think I also noticed an updated version with fewer games than that - about sixteen or eighteen.

Skill shix shooter is also hosted on The Infinit cabinet. I'd be very surprised if it has a target of 30%, it's definitely more generous than that.

Played WWTBAM and won a fiver.

Played the Casino Royale without realising it was costing me 50p every spin and lost very very quickly without even appreciating what was happening.

My bad. Instructions are there for a reason. (makes you less of a man if you read them though, put those instructions away princess, its only a bloody bookshelve - managed it with 4 pieces to spare).


(puffs out chest, hides little belly, and feels damn proud).