Slot Manager - January 2009 - (Page 24)

G2E SLOT REPORT technology can take us. There are a variety of game themes, but in each you’re trying to collect specific reel symbols for bonus rewards, going on a scavenger hunt through the game. And the player doesn’t have to complete the hunt in one session. “We have you enroll in the game,” Griffin explained. “You print a ticket with a bar code. That identifies you. Then the next time you play, you start with that ticket, and the game remembers you. You start with your items already collected in the scavenger hunt.” Collecting symbols in the hunt brings bonuses, so the ability to carry that collection forward, even at Scavenger Hunt games in a different casino, helps the player on the way to bonus rewards. The community-bonus Star Wars game adds some extra thrills. The bonus event is timed — it goes off every eight minutes. So players just hurry through the game to try to earn bonus entries. The winner of the bonus event not only wins the Speeder Chase bonus, but also advances into a round of destroying enemy ships for a chance at the five-level progressive jackpots. Off the beaten path a little in the IGT booth was Leading Edge Design’s Multi-Strike Triple Double Red Hot 7s. It’s the second time the Multi-Strike approach that has been successful in video poker has been applied to a slot game. Winner on one game brings a spin on a second set of reels with payoffs doubled, then multiplied again on third and fourth sets. That adds volatility to the slots. The first Multi-Strike slot game, Multi-Strike Triple Diamonds, was a very high volatility game that attracted a niche following, but was too wild a ride for other players. Triple Double Red Hot 7s is a gentler version, offering a little more time on device. IGT remains the king of video poker, and the way I’ts extending that product is through features that attract extra wagers. In Dream Card, in Triple Play/Five Play/Ten Play versions for playing three, five or 10 hands at a time, the maximum wager is 10 coins per line instead of the standard five. The extra wager brings a randomly occurring Dream Card, which improves the starting hand to the best it can be. In Jacks or Better-based games, for instance, a starting hand of Queen-9-6-4 of mixed suits plus a Dream Card would turn the Dream Card into a Queen, so the player would have a pair of Queens before playing out the draw as normal. It’s a frequently occurring feature, dependent on the specific game – 59 percent of Bonus Poker Deluxe hands will include a Dream Card, as will 31 percent of Deuces Wild hands. “Advantage 5 has been a big success for us,” said marketing manager Leah Steinhardt. “So we’re showing five new titles this year.” Along with the full-sized reels, Advantage 5 incorporates an LCD screen in the top box that can be used to display progressive jackpots or for video bonus rounds. New titles include Thailand Fantasy, African Diamond: Jewel of the Wild, Gold Frenzy, Secrets of Egypt and Challenge of Perseus. Konami also featured an innovation on both reel-spinning and stepper formats: Mirror Reels. In a bonus round, different reels reflect each other — reels 2 and 4, or 1 and 5, will have the same symbols in the same rows. That’s a head start on winners anytime those symbols fall into place on the other reels. In addition, it showcased communitystyle gaming with Beat the Field. It’s a fourlevel mystery progressive, on both reel stepper and video formats. The main bonus event is a horseracing run for the roses, with players allocated horses based on bet level. The winner in each race brings a progressive, while other players win consolation credits. Everyone wins something together. “We think we’ve hit a home run with MLD,” said Ryan Griffin, IGT product manager of standard products. “MLD” stands for Multi-Layer Display, the technology developed by the California firm PureDepth that gives IGT’s REELdepth games their three-dimensional look. On games such as Diamond Fire, that means giving the game a reel-stepper look. Players who are used to the stepper-slot experience of watching physical reels spin can get the same kind of game play using REELdepth. “Listen to the clicks,” Griffin said. “It sounds like a stepper slot. Feel the vibrations on the button panel. It has sounds and feels like a stepper slot.” Then he touched the screen to switch to a main screen allowing for a change from the stepper-like game to a video slot. “You can have a three-reel game, fourreel game, five-reel game all on the same machine,” he said. Among the choices were Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Magic Butterfly, with butterfly symbols that seemed to fly right out of the back of the display. When a butterfly lands on a reel symbol, the symbol turns wild, matching all others in potential winning combinations. REELdepth is even being used to bring back classic IGT features, such as nudge symbols, where symbols above and below a payline nudge up or down into place, and Haywire, in which the reels randomly go into a free-spin mode with no telling when they’re going to stop. In Silver Hawk, a three-reel, 20-line game, the hawk flies from the back of the screen to the front, looming larger and larger in its 3-D image until lit triggers the Haywire mode. Marketing full banks of machines under a common bonus concept was another point of emphasis at IGT. Griffin pointed to a bank of Greenback Attack games, where, during free games, reels turn green and players are awarded amounts shown on the reels up to $20. A quick-hit mystery top box bonus can award up to $100 in random winnings. With maximum bets, Griffin says the Attack feature occurs an average of once in 60 plays, meaning that somewhere on the bank of machines, someone is just around the corner from the attack mode going off. Off the 3-D path, IGT introduced a fourin-one video slot called MultiPlay. Each set of reels is a traditional video slot display — five reels across, each displaying a column of three symbols. Displays are of equal size, each positioned in a quadrant of the screen. In game themes including Golden Eagle, Cleopatra and Wolf Run, MultiPlay features a four-level progressive jackpot. Game play is independent – results on game 1 don¹t affect game 2, and so on– but a single push of the button starts all reels spinning. It is possible to go to the bonus round on more than one game at a time, and it’s possible to win all four progressives sequentially as you work your way through the four games. Scavenger Hunt is a fun take on where Konami: At G2E, the company showed it could build upon the success of its Advantage 5 game, which features full-sized symbols on a five-reel-spinning format. WMS Gaming: Since the introduction of its Sensory Immersion line, WMS has taken the trend in different directions, including the thrill-seeking jet-fighter bonus round of Top Gun, and the gentler journey through a storyline of The Wizard of Oz. At G2E 2008, WMS continued in both directions with Dirty Harry: Make My Day and Time Machine. “Dirty Harry is that thrill seeker, which Top Gun brought to a new level, and Time Machine is that journey, where people can go into the future and back into the past,” said WMS vice president of marketing Rob Bone. In Dirty Harry, based on the popular police action films starring Clint Eastwood, the Dirty Harry slot machine takes you on a car chase through the streets of San Francisco, and you’re wielding Harry’s .44 Magnum to shoot down the crooks – and the bonus rewards Time Machine bonus events are more journey than thrills, as you’re catapulted into the past and choose your road through dinosaurs or ancient human civilizations, or are zapped into the future where you might find yourself in a world dominated by robots. In Sensory Immersion games, player sit in a special chair that can rock, roll and vibrate, and is equipped with Bose speakers in the back to give the players a full sensory experience. Along with a Community Gaming line in which customers go to bonus rounds together, and Transmissive Reels, which can transmit video images on the clear glass in front of reels, Sensory Immersion has quickly become part of the foundation at WMS. “Players are clearly voting with their dollars,” Bone said. “Wizard of Oz and Sensory Immersion have been a huge success for us. Transmissive and Community games have given us some of the best performance our SLOT MANAGER ❘ JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 ❘ www.slotmanager.net http://www.slotmanager.net

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Slot Manager - January 2009

Slot Manager - January 2009 Contents Editor's Note Quick Hits New Games Cover Story: Going Strong At 30 Game Changer: IGT's REELdepth Operations: Where There's a Will, There's a Way Games: G2E 2008 Slot Report Common Ground Marketing Inside Edge Advertiser Index Forum

Slot Manager - January 2009

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