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

Can't Stop Flippin'

 

When I heard about Unfair Flips I honestly thought it was a joke game, one of those stupid titles that you gift a friend where they play with it for 5 minutes and then it sits in their Steam library unplayed for the rest of time.  For £1.69 on Steam though I had to at least go and give it a look and I was honestly quite surprised at how much I enjoyed it.  

 The premise of the game is extremely simple.  You are given a coin that has a base 20% chance to flip heads when you click it.  When you land a heads you are given a few in-game cents to buy upgrades with and the game ends when you flip heads 10 times in a row.  Flipping heads with a 20% chance each click sounds insane, and it is, so the game allows the player to buy an upgrade to heads chance in 5% increments so you can slowly turn things in your favor although the game likes to emphasize that it is entirely possible for a person to never win.  The chance upgrade will cap out before 100% as well so in a way they really aren't kidding.  On top of that you can upgrade the value of the coins heads result so you can get your upgrades faster and, what is probably the most important upgrade, the speed of the flipping animation so you can do more flips in less time.  

What makes this game really funny is that when you hit your 9th heads combo, the UI falls away and your next flip has a fixed chance to get a certain ending.  You can what these probabilties are in the Steam achievements with the chance to hit a full 10 in a row locked at a pitiful 20%.   Thankfully it's not the only ending there is so I suppose its not really a flat 20% to just "win" but the game can end in a number of ways that don't involve the 10th head.  What makes it even funnier is that what ending you get is chosen at random so if you're REALLY intent on getting that 10th flip then multiple playthroughs are going to be required.

What's surprising about this whole thing is how strangely exhilarating the whole thing is.  When I was clicking after a chain of tails flips and then the counter would start building up and up I could feel myself leaning into my monitor.  Then you hit a 7 or 8 chain when you get a heads and all the tension rushes out of you, it's a weirdly enjoyable feeling.  I think maybe this is how gambling addicts are formed.

While Unfair Flips didn't turn me into an addict, I stopped after a single successful run, it is a game interesting enough where it sits prominently in my memory.  It's one of those games I can see myself coming back to every so often to fiddle with and see which ending I can get this time.  One of the few games in my steam account where I might actually give a shit about getting all the achievements since there is one for each ending

It's a tough game to suggest that people should actually go out and play but if you're open minded and enjoy games of nothing but pure chance then Unfair Flips is a great title to pick up.  Put on an album or a podcast or something and get to flipping, enjoy the thrill when you get your 10 piece.  Worth every penny  

Have the Waifus gone too far?

I'm doing two things in this post that I don't usually do.  The first is putting a stupid clickbait title because of COURSE the waifus haven't gone too far, they can never go too far.  The second is commenting on a thing that I have no experience of but the very concept of this franchise is too funny to not at least point out.

In Japan, gambling is illegal, you can't just walk into a casino and hopefully make a couple of beers worth of Yen in Blackjack because gambling for money is against the law.  Pachinko and Slot places are an exception to this because what you are doing in those places are trading tokens/balls for physical prizes.  We won't talk about the little tinted windows around the back but these places get around the issue by offering goods rather than cash.  There is however a few exceptions to this rule in the form of boat racing and horse racing.  I've never done it myself but as far as I'm aware, gambling for cash on these two things is totally fine.  Probably as a result of this, horse racing games are quite popular.  I was in a store the other day and saw an advert for the latest Winning Post game on PS4, just to give you an idea of how much this is still a thing.

So then yesterday a friend of mine sent me an image of Uma Musume: Pretty Derby, a game for the iPhone.  What I can gather from what he told me is that it's a visual novel/management game where you have to manage the girls to participate and win in horse races.  The kicker? the girls aren't the jockeys, they are THE HORSES THEMSELVES.  Fire the starting gun and watch as 12 anime as fuck waifus run down a track and bet to see which one of them is the fastest, the concept is hilarious.  What makes it even funnier is that the story behind the franchise is that the girls are actually reincarnated famous race horses from the past who have to train at an academy to become, not only good racers but pop stars as well.  

The most popular and well known version of this concept I think is Kantai Collection, a game where famous Japanese war ships were turned into anime schoolgirls and they must work together to fight a bunch of deep sea aliens or something, it's a trend that has been going on for a long long time and every time it never fails to make me laugh.

I am not commenting in this post on the quality of Uma Musume as a game or an anime as I have not seen them, but you can bet your ass that I will be checking it out.  Watch this space for a more detailed breakdown of this hilarious concept
 

Giant Robots and Gambling

OK, I didn't make a post yesterday because I spent all day in a free play game centre and then followed it up with some heavy drinking, but I'm back now and ready to talk about more weird shit from Japan.

A long long time ago, when this blog was still in its infancy I talked about Pachinko and Slot machines being strange based on the fact that a lot of them seemed to be themed around anime and video games, but I never really explain WHY that shit is weird, although it should be pretty obvious anyway.

Understand that gambling in Japan is illegal, when you play slots or pachinko you spend money to acquire balls/tokens and then you can trade those tokens in for prizes.  I have heard rumours that you can take your balls and tokens to some geezer round the back of the various pachikno/slot halls and he will give you cash money if that's what you're after but this has to be done on the sly.

This is what makes the whole thing so weird, because despite being so dodgy and under the table, the whole pachinko scene is overflowing with large amounts of nerd shit.  When I think about people who are gambling, I imagine one of two groups.  Tourists having a bit of careful fun in a casino, or dudes in suits gambling large sums of money for kicks.  Neither of these groups, the second especially I'd expect to be the sort of people who kick back after a hard day of gambling and watch their favourite anime.

That's how it seems to be though, people fuckin' love this shit.  The picture above is a new Gundam themed pachinko machine and while usually new machine announcements are limited to posters on the front of parlours, this machine is being advertised out the ass on youtube.  Every other video I watch I get a Japanese dude screaming in my face to come play the new Gundam pachinko machine.

It's a world I would love to be a part of for a short time, but unfortunately I don't have enough disposable income to sit there for hours on end playing the worlds most boring version of Pinball, I'll stick to the game centres.

Pachinko and Slot Machines

Some people like to do a bit of gambling from time to time.  It may to be try and make a big win and walk away with lots of money, or some might just like the thrill.  Well in Japan you can go fuck yourself, that shits about illegal as it gets, but that doesn't mean there isn't something else in place for you to pump money into.

Dotted all over the country are these Pachinko and Slot places, that I have seen many times, but actually have very little experience with.  But what you have to realise is that these places aren't for gambling, not really.  You exchange money for medals (slots) or little round balls (pachinko) and as you play you can win more.  When you are done, you convert these medals or balls into a ticket, which you can then "cash in" for prizes.  Think of it like those ticket arcade machines, but instead of shitty plush toys you can get beer and cigarettes and stuff, hell I've even seen game systems behind the prize counter.  So kind of like gambling but not really.

That said, I've only ever seen pachinko, and I've only ever tried slots once.  I mean I don't mind heading to a casino in the UK to play some card games, but things like slot machines have never appealed to me.

However what does intrigue me is why almost all the machines are themed around some kind of video game or anime series.  When I think about the kind of person that would be into this kind of gambling, I don't think about gamers or anime fans.  These kind of people, at least in my head, would rather spend money on anime and video games than fucking slot machines.

The above picture is the only slot machine type I have ever tried, and I mean look at this fucking thing, it's all Neon Genesis Evangelion themed and stuff.  But they are ALL like this and it's not just slot machines too, there are Evangelion and Tekken themed pachinko machines too! The strangest one I've seen on YouTube was a Shadow Hearts themed machine, I mean goddamn is there anything they won't theme a machine after?

So yeah, that's the phenomenon of pachinko and slot that I just do not comprehend at all.  I've heard that you can go trade your prize ticket to a guy who will then give you cash, but the guy might be yakuza or something, I don't know I've never seen it.  If anyone does have any experience with this stuff I'd love to hear it, I don't really want to spend my money to find out.