Boulderdash

10 PRINT "RIP SIR CLIVE" 20 GOTO 10

Was playing DOND Mega the other day and Noel said "I can't work you out" when I must have accidentally gambled against a number. Never heard that in the wild. What other rare gems are there, not necessarily on DOND? For example, Addams Family Pinball says "Dirty pool old man, I it" when you manage to hit the ball over the bookcase into the vault, and even rarer "Great curve shot old man".

I thought magic carpet was a bwb remake of Arabian Knights. BWB remakes tended to be nothing more than changing the badge and reducing the jackpot to £5...

Has anyone mentioned that the boxes are the wrong colour? The small amounts should be blue and vice versa

The thing I love(d) about the older DOND machines was that there was so much strategy involved. Even if there was no emptier, a player could extract far more value from the machine than a casual. Unlike the Betcoms where you just press start 1000 times until it relents and gives you a jackpot that may or may not leave you in profit.

You won't be allowed in without a "covid passport". Absolutely nothing normal about that. Yesterday Johnson officially announced the Digital IDs to track your every move (back doored via covid "passports") that they all flat denied last year and all of us who saw this was the end game were dismissed as tin foil hatters and conspiracy theorists. Imagine if you could go back ten years and speak to your former self. What would you tell that unsuspecting fool? “In the future, many of your national assets will be owned by China. Most of the goods you buy will be manufactured there too, which you will not buy from your fellow countrymen, but a sole supplier owned by an American. The most successful politicians will not be elder statesman committed to public service, but young upstarts who view the job as a stepping stone towards tremendous personal wealth in later life. Your government will pass bills to quash peaceful protest and enable the recruitment of child spies. This will not be limited to the intelligence services, but bodies like the environmental and food standards agencies too. When you ask what this is for, nobody will be able to tell you. Your government will set up ‘nudge units’ staffed by behavioural scientists who will tell you what to eat, drink and how you should act in public. The media will grow dependent on government advertising revenue and cease reporting opinions and events that contradict official narratives. The internet will be dominated by a small number of big-tech companies, who will censor any information that it disagrees with. In the name of safeguarding its students from harm, schools and universities will cease debate and enquiry. People with contrary views will be barred from them. Even student newspapers will be censored by ‘sensitivity readers’. At work, you will be made to undergo psychological re-education. Those conducting it will have little to no knowledge of psychology but nonetheless try to change you at a subconscious level. People will be sacked from their jobs for saying there are two biological sexes or for telling an ill-judged joke. They will not be forgiven if they apologise. Every major institution and employer will take part in this censorious culture and soon, you will censor yourself when speaking to friends and colleagues without even knowing that you’ve done so. When a respiratory virus emerges that only kills 0.3% of those who catch it – the majority of which older than the average span of a life – you will be bombarded, 24-hours a day, by terrifying public messaging. The police will stop you from meeting a friend for a coffee in the park. They will look through your shopping bags to make sure you’ve only bought things that they deem essential. They will film you as you walk in the countryside and put the footage on the internet so to shame you. Neighbour will spy on neighbour, and when you have friends’ round for dinner, the police will knock on your door and give you a fine. You will be told to stay two metres away from other people at all times. You will be made to wear a facemask even though there is no evidence that they do anything at all. When this becomes apparent, scientists will say you must wear them so not to frighten other people. Your freedom will end where another’s fear begins. Families will be kept from dying loved ones. Daughters will be arrested for collecting their mothers from care homes. Vast numbers of children will be sent home from schools and denied a proper education because one classmate lost their sense of smell. Weddings will be cancelled. Nightclubs will be closed. Churches will be shut. Singing and dancing will be prohibited. Lovers will be kept apart. For the first time in the history of vaccinations, several vaccines will be created using messenger ribonucleic acid technology. When the inventor of that technology cautions against its use among those at little risk from the virus, he will be discredited and deleted from internet platforms. You will be told that the vaccine is not compulsory and yet, those who refuse might be sacked from their jobs. They will be made to queue for longer at airports. They will be put under house arrest if they come into contact with someone who has the virus, whilst those who have had it will not. They will be stopped from going to bars and stadiums. There will be two two classes of people: the clean and the unclean. Your unassailable and decadent leaders will ignore the rules they set for others again and again, blissfully untroubled by the cries of hypocrisy. International leaders, bureaucrats, scientists, royalty and the super-rich will meet in private to discuss how we all must live. They’ll say there’s too many people and not enough resources, but nobody will ask who we should get rid of and how. Their hubris will make them believe they can bring about a utopian future. Their language will be impenetrable to most, them using meaningless terms like ‘stakeholder capitalism’, ‘collectivization’ and ‘sustainable development’. Every now and then, they will make easy to understand proclamations such as their prediction that by 2030, ‘You will own nothing. You will rent everything. You will be happy’. Few will question what this means, how it will be brought about or what mandate they have for doing so. Those who question this, or any of the above, will be insulted, ridiculed and so pushed to the margins of society that they are effectively silenced. Most will stand on the front door step at 8pm every Thursday, clapping their hands and bashing on saucepans.” Now, what do you think your former self would say?

It will last as long as you want it to. Personally I've ignored it all, and apart from working from home and a few months when the pubs and golf courses were shut, my life has been the same.

Boris finger will remain in his arse while he thinks there are votes in it. Slavery is a choice.

Tough read. The addiction never leaves you does it. Longest I ever went without putting money in a fruit machine since 1982 was probably when I lived in France in 1990-91. But the second I got back to England I was straight in Medway services. Covid has been good to me as I'm not going to work and having an hour at lunchtime every day to fill. Looking back at my statements I'd usually take out £200 at least 3 days a week and pay back some, all or more than that on the way back to the office. It caused a fair few letters in my ongoing divorce I can tell you! Having been burned badly once, I simply refuse to gamble online. Much like cocaine, I know I'd quickly lose control and can't take the risk. I used to avoid digitals like the plague, having more faith in compensated gambling. But a couple of lucky sessions trousering £300+ and now my addiction spans them too. Fortunately I'm barred from the only pub in my town that has one, after abusing the landlord whose fucking machine twice 'forgot' that I'd won £80ish on one of the games. I'm terrified of FOBTs but every now and again on a complete tilt will find myself in Ladbrokes. I'm fortunate to have had a decent income through the years and a failsafe at about £300 down where I quit. Very occasionally I've chased a DOND past that and got some back, as being compensated it has to pay eventually, right?!!?! So I've never had the 20-mile walk of shame and all those hours to mentally beat myself up. Crying in a corner, physically hitting my head yes... Good luck with your abstinence (I refuse to call it recovery I am afraid). I've now got a £20 cashpoint limit which is a pain in the arse occasionally but it has so far saved me from falling back into old ways.

If you mean the Ace Coin's 'hidden treasure message' machines, they were all being emptied, so you could be getting on a machine where having taken most of the money in free wins, the player had taken a MASSIVE streak to kill the machine so that mug money filled the tubes up. In normal play you'd struggle to put a fiver through them without getting £2.40.

I don't dare sign up to play online in the same way I don't dare try charlie - I know I'd love it too much and lose everything

Not as badly hurt as the nation of addicts growing up with supposedly innocent video gaming, like FIFA Ultimate team packs or other games' ways to steal your money, graduating to online gambling with still very loose controls on spending.

Interesting video thanks Chop, although I watched it feeling rather guilty wondering how much of your cash I pocketed on my road trips to empty Ace Coin machines in the early-mid 90s...

Yep, hence why the pots are always £250 on the ferry machines and are almost never played any more (It's switchable in the dips if you own the machine)

I preferred the simple climbers like Attraction because it took balls to turn down £75 cash trail to go for the jackpot. It rewarded the gambler/player, whereas cops you only got the pot by holding the symbols and getting lucky, or getting the jackpot exchange where it gives you enough nudges.

Exactly

Maybe they should have watched him play it? Presumably all he did was come back when the pots had built up and take them out, then got some of his stake back in afters.

Maybe you misunderstood my train of thought. If a machine is compensated, then any casual punter should reasonably expect that if it has paid out big money it is unlikely to be worth playing for a while. They understand that concept and consider it fair. By compensating the game with jackpots not damaging the regular playing percentage, however, which would probably only cost about 2% of the stated 80% target, ALL players will get a decent game at all times. Compare that to a DOND like Golden Game where someone has taken two or three jackpots, the game is completely fucked and the machine could take £300 before even letting you play the DOND feature. So that's what I mean by 'superbly compensated'. You could walk up to the machine and even if a player had taken two £150 cashpots, the RTP would still be a playable 78%

Bell Fruit clubbers of the late 80s and early 90s, like Club Attraction, Explosion etc, were superbly compensated by means of the free cashpots. A golf club regular could play the game and reliably get some reasonable wins, but almost never win the jackpot. A player could take the cashpots out and make a huge profit without altering the base game for the casual.

This is interesting to me. So what you're saying is if someone wins £500, even if the machine is "random", the chances of you winning £500 immediately afterwards are dramatically reduced because it changes the odds of winning it by adding far more chances to lose. That's not random as far as I'd define it. A random machine should always have the same chance of winning any of the prizes, and achieve its percentage over an extended period of time, as described by @stevedude2above. The machine you define is compensated to bring its percentage back to target soon after paying a jackpot.

I'm surprised he didn't get thrown out for driving in the arcade.

That was such a shame wasn't it. Those new reflex machines look great but just don't play like vamp it up and clones.