I Have A Gambling Issue

 

Slot machines are absolute dogshit and I hate them

Let me take you back to the year 2010, when I had come to Japan for the first time as an exchange student on my Japanese language course.  While at the university I met a girl who had a fairly deep interest in slot machines.  I saw her once sitting in the communal study space reading a magazine and when I asked her what she was reading it turned out to be a strategy guide (?) for a recently published Evangelion themed slot machine.  The magazine outlined how the machine was played along with how to trigger its various modes and even had these big ass diagrams of the reels.  After a short conversation about it I tagged along with her to the local Pachislot place where I gave it a try for myself.  I got 5000 yens worth of tokens, took a few spins of the machine and within about 20 minutes all my money had gone.  I wasn't expecting to win and I wasn't expecting to play for a significantly long amount of time but I was expecting to at least get a bit more than 20 fucking minutes.  In that moment I vowed never to play slots again and left the place.  

But the truth is I don't actually hate slot machines, I hate losing large sums of money in small amounts of time so when you tell me that I can play fakey rougelike video game slots with no risk to my families financial situation I'm fucking all in on that one.  

Cloverpit on its surface is a very simple game.  You are locked in a small, somewhat Saw-esque room, with a mini slot machine and an ATM.  The ATM tells you that you have to pay it a certain amount of coins within a certain amount of rounds or you get ejected into the abyss below.  If you pay the coins then your debt goes up and you do it again until you either win a key from the game master or the debt gets too high to clear and you fall to your doom.  That by itself would only be fun for a few tries but Cloverpit mixes things up by giving you trinkets that can modify your luck or modify the value of things on the machine greatly and now you get the true addicting quality of the game.  Not only are you pulling the literal slot machine but you are also pulling the trinket machine and when you get that pefect mix of items and circumstances that make one value on the reels super high and then you manage to finesse your way into an insane jackpot and that rush is basically unmatched.  It gives the game a real "just one more run" quality where a failed run can be frustrating but then "if only I had gotten <trinket> that time" and so you play again hoping to get your ideal setup.  Couple that with an additional phone mechanic where every round a mysterious caller gives you a chance to change things like the value of things in the machine or give you free shots at rerolling trinkets and all the moving parts make for a truly compelling experience.  

On top of all that Cloverpit offers a number of challenges to keep you spinning for hours and hours.  The game has a number of endings that can be achieved by fulfilling a number of conditions that amount to the gambling equivalent of self-harm and the game reaches Kaiji levels of fever pitch when you have these conditions active.  Not only that but you can also activate a number of "memory cards" which are like special challenge modes that make you rethink your approach to the machine and your trinkets.

There's just no better feeling in the world than when you're behind on tokens, its the last few spins of your final round, you have a high value mark on the machine but you just cant get it to come out.  Then you hit the lever, your luck trinkets all pop at once, the reels line up and the machine goes apeshit as your high value marking hits a jackpot, you go from guaranteed death to two more rounds of safety instantly, absolute euphoria.  Thank god these developers only made a fakey video game slot machine because if you hired them to make a real one then there might be a lot more people filing for bankruptcy in the world. 

BUT THATS NOT ALL 

 Scratch cards were also a thing I quite enjoyed in my student days.  I'd grab one whenever I did my grocery shopping and just the act of winning a fiver would get me giddy for the whole day.  So when I saw an incremental game based around doing scratch cards I had to buy it right away.  

In Scritchy Scratchy you are trying to avoid your shitty dish washing job by winning at scratch cards.  If it was just that it would be kind of bullshit but there are upgrades for you to buy that allow you to manipulate your luck and win more consistently.  From there you buy more expensive cards that have higher payouts to increse your luck to repeat this cycle seemingly ad-infinitum.  Eventually you are granted the ability to buy a "final ticket".  You scratch it, lose and it causes you to die.  

From here you get another upgrade system that allows you to manipulate your luck and payouts even further and you keep scratching cards and unlocking more stuff until eventually you win that final ticket and I will not spoil in this post.  It's a simple little incremental game with a theme that appeals very specifically to my vices that also doesn't overstay its welcome and has the good sense to roll credits just as its getting obnoxious.  A lesson that a game like Cookie Clicker could really benefit from.  If potentially life ruining bits of cardboard appeal to you as much as they appeal to me but you don't actually want to financially cripple yourself, Scritchy Scratchy is a game that you should grab off Steam ASAP.  

The reason I say I have a gambling "issue" rather than a gambling "problem" is because, thankfully, my weird urge to gamble can be completely satiated by games like this.  I think I owe a debt of gratitude to things like Cloverpit, Scritchy Scratchy and the Yakuza series casino (to name one example) for allowing me to indulge in the thrill of the game without any of the real consequences that would send me down a potentially very dark path.  Even if you aren't weirdly tempted by the casino lifestyle like I am though, these two games are very good and you should grab them anyway 

LETS GO GAMBLING

5 Games I Need to Play ASAP

 

Life has been pretty hectic for me recently. My wife just gave birth to our second child at time of writing and I’ve got a lot of other things going on which means my time to just sit and game is fairly limited. Thankfully, things should clear up at least a little bit in January so I’m going to take a moment to jot down 5 games that I have my eye on and I’m hoping to do a play through of soon
 

Hotel Barcelona

I have an aggressive case of Roguelike fatigue. Nothing makes me skip past a game faster than the seeing that tag in the game description. Not that I have anything against the genre itself, it’s just that there’s so fuckin many of them that I’ve just temporarily lost interest. But then Hotel Barcelona comes along and it’s a game from the collaborative mind of Suda51 and Swery. If you don’t know who these guys are then I suggest looking them up and giving their games a try. Killer7 from Suda I played at launch on my GameCube in 2005 and it has remained, to this day, one of my favourite games ever. Swery is the man responsible for legendary jank fest Deadly Premonition, a game so out there and interesting that despite it being mind bogglingly ass in some places I think everyone, gamer or not, should check it out at least once in their life. So a collaborative work from those two should be pretty good right? Well the names alone will get me to open my wallet so let’s hope I’m in for an enjoyable stay.

House of Necrosis

 

 

Oh god, another game with randomly generated dungeons and perma death, can’t move for games like this I swear to god. This game however asks the interesting question “what if Resident Evil was a Mystery Dungeon game?” and therefore piqued my interest instantly. I bought a Shiren The Wanderer game on my DS many years ago and ever since I’ve been a complete slut for the genre and one loosely based on Resi can’t be a bad idea

Cloverpit

 

Described as a cross between Balatro and Buckshot Roulette, Cloverpit is a game I initially disregarded when it appeared in my Steam discovery queue. My aforementioned Roguelike fatigue has caused me to be completely uninterested in Balatro and Buckshot Roulette was such a nothing game that I was sort of upset I spent money on it. But then I was looking around on YouTube and I saw someone say that Cloverpit was less of a Roguelike with slots and more of a puzzle game where you have to finesse the machine into giving you enough wins to escape the death game you’re in. That’s just fucking Kaiji! In case you aren’t aware, Kaiji is an anime where a dude in crippling debt plays games to either escape that debt or die. None of these games are played on the level and Kaiji has to often finesse his way around the gambles to clutch victory from the assholes that stacked the deck against him. That’s when Cloverpit started to appeal to me, turning a Kaiji-esque scenario into a whole ass game, fuckin great idea. Weather or not this is actually the case is another story but just the prospect of it being MAYBE true has got me wanting to try

Silent Hill F

If you’re in my discord or just know me personally then you’ll know I’ve been slinging a lot of shit at Silent Hill F so seeing it in this post might come as a surprise. All my potential issues with Silent Hill F stem entirely from the “Silent Hill” part of the title. For reasons that would take far too long for this post, the tenuous links to a franchise of a series that should have died in 2004 and hasn’t been good since I find to be upsetting. The original team were done with Silent Hill after the 3rd one, even more done after the 4th and moved on but the franchise has been beaten into a bloody pulp to milk more cash out of idiots who can’t engage with media that isn’t part of a larger IP they’re already comfortable with, a sad state of affairs to say the least. But when I saw the trailers to that game there was one thought that stood out in my mind and that was if it wasn’t for that branding, I’d probably be quite interested in it. If it wasn’t being pushed as a Silent Hill game to serve as more ruination of that original series’ masterful writing then I might have bought it day 1. Just call it “Hinako’s Flowery Trauma Fuckabout” and let it stand on its own and I would have rushed to open my wallet. Instead, you can take that £80 price tag and fuck RIGHT off. But with a discount and if I tell myself that I shouldn’t let bad branding ruin a potentially good experience, I have to admit that it does look kinda cool.

The Entire Sakura Wars Series

 

Throwing one retro entry in the post, a series I’ve wanted to have a go through for a long while is Sakura Wars. A strategy RPG franchise that began its life on the Sega Saturn, sort of pulling a neo-Persona type beat long before Persona 3 was even a flash of an idea in some guys head. It’s not a series I have 0 experience with, I picked up the first game on the cheap for my Saturn back when I used to collect retro games but I didn’t play it that long and certainly never finished it. I’ve also had New Sakura Wars sat in my collection of PS4 games for years now and have never once touched it so maybe it’s about time I get on that.  I adore SRPGs and I’m always down to play games with an abundance of anime waifus and therefore Sakura Wars seems like the kind of thing that’ll keep me entertained for a good long while.