| Don't get me wrong. I truly enjoy Las Vegas. I've rarely had a bad trip, even when I've lost money. The constant circus, the all-night restaurants, the 24-hour show has always been appealing to one who was a night worker for most of the last 25 years. But when it comes time to deal the cards, more and more I find myself shuffling off the Strip and making my way downtown or to locals casinos on Boulder Highway, Rancho or in Henderson. The Strip, it seems, is no longer about gambling. It's about pirate battles and dancing fountains, magicians and designer restaurants, "Mystere!" and "The Folies Bergere." But it's not about getting a decent blackjack game or video poker pay table. That feeling has been building over the years as I've chosen to invest more of my wagering dollar off the Strip, at locals-oriented casinos including the Palms, Fiesta, Orleans and Arizona Charlie's. I've known for years--and have written often--that players get more bang for the buck at the locals joints. But now it's gotten to the point that a popgun could overwhelm the bang at many Strip resorts. During the Global Gaming Expo in September, I checked out the Tropicana, a place where I've stayed and played often since the late 1980s. The gambling hasn't been first-class there in a long time, but a liberal comping policy and the presence of 8-5 Bonus Poker, a 99.2 percent game with expert play, on its quarter Triple Play/Five Play video poker machines made it a reasonable play. I headed to the Triple Play/Five Plays ... and found the Bonus Poker pay table had been reduced to 6-5. Full houses now returned only 6-for-1 instead of 8-for-1, and the 99.2 percent game was now a 97 percent game. Room and meal comps may be easy, but not enough to make up THAT kind of a shortfall. So I headed toward the blackjack pit, and at first was pleasantly surprised to find a hand-dealt double-deck blackjack game. Then I inspected more closely. There was an automatic shuffler on the table, shuffling six decks, then separating two decks for the dealer. This is no double-deck game; it's a fooler of a six-deck game with really lousy penetration. For a basic strategy player, the house edge is as high as on any other six-deck game. I mentioned the blackjack game to Henry Tamburin, a friend and author of Blackjack: Take the Money and Run. Henry says several casinos have gone the phony double-deck route, and that there's a certain meanness about blackjack on the Strip nowadays. Single-deck games that pay only 6-5 instead of the normal 3-2 are common on the Strip, including tables at Paris, Bally's, the Flamingo Hilton and Harrah's, and paranoia about card counters has grown all out of proportion. Bonus rounds on modern video slot machines resemble nothing so much as animated film shorts. Characters, witty dialogue, even mini-plots make the games go, and keep the customers in their seats. These grown-up equivalents of Saturday morning cartoons need someone to organize the storyline, animation and features beyond the bare math of the awarding of a bonus. So it came as only a mild surprise at the recent Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas when Bill Wadleigh of Waukegan-based WMS Gaming told me his job title: Producer. Wadleigh gave me a guided tour through the WMS booth at the expo, where suppliers show off their latest and greatest wares to potential customers in the gaming industry. I took a look at products from all the major slot machine manufacturers, and will give my impressions on new games over the next several weeks. At WMS, Wadleigh was enthusiastic when showing me the games that will be available soon including Ms. Pac-Man, a new version of Hollywood Squares and two new games in the Monopoly series. But Wadleigh's enthusiasm really showed when he took me into a booth within a booth, a sneak preview area for attractions WMS hopes will be ready for prime time by next summer. There, we looked at games on the new CPU-NXT operating platform, with enhanced video, more color capability and vastly improved resolution. It's a platform that lets WMS, which has attracted creative people from Disney and other studios, really go to town with animation. "Look at the leaves on the trees move," Wadleigh said, pointing out the background animation on one bonus round. "We've always had the great characters at WMS, and now we have the capability to really use them to best advantage. Now we can let our people really show what they can do." |
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