G2E's Shining Stars
January 1, 2009
A look back at some of the gaming machines that garnered attention
Despite
a pall cast by the tanking economy, the 2008 Global Gaming Expo seemed to
weather the storm.
In fact, many exhibitors even said G2E
proved a good show for them.
Thousands of gaming executives from
around the globe attended the three-day
November event, which featured more than 750 exhibitors, keynote
addresses by industry leaders, an extensive conference with 150 sessions and
more, including the G2E Training & Development Institute, G2E Leadership
Academy, all-new Casino Design, F&B at G2E, and Entertainment Arena at G2E
and Retail Promenade at G2E.
While no attendee figures were
available at press time, the event’s turnout did seem off compared with
previous years, but manufacturers said they were still pleased with the amount
of foot traffic they were getting.
Some said it paid to get a little
creative with how you do business.
“We are being very creative because of the
state of the market right now,” Ryan Griffin, product manager for standard
products at IGT, said. “We are being very flexible if they don’t have the
capital to make those purchases. We’re trying to make things work in this
environment.”
Here are a few of the highlights from the
major manufacturers’ new slot offerings.
IGT touted REELdepth, which Griffin calls a game
changer for the industry and a home run for IGT.
The product uses PureDepth’s MLD, or ”Multi-Layer
Display technology, that gives IGT’s REELdepth games their three-dimensional
look and allows for flexibility never before offered on a slot
product.
An operator can offer a REELdepth game
that mimics a reel stepper, complete with the look and sound of physical reels
and then switch to another screen to change it to a video slot or video poker
game.
“You can have a three-reel game,
four-reel game, five-reel game all on the same machine,” he said.
Griffin noted that the technology can significantly reduce
downtime, because conversions can take place with a touch of a button, or a
machine can go from no progressive to a progressive. All of that is now instant
at the touch of a button,” he said, noting even more innovation will be
possible as server-based technology is adopted.
Among WMS Gaming’s strong lineup of innovative
products was the community gaming
product Reel ’Em In Compete to Win, WMS adds an element of competition to the
shared bonus event. The bonus round is a fishing derby, and everybody wins
bonus credits. Each fish is assigned a point value, and when you see a
big-value fish swim onto the plasma screen overhead, the anticipation builds as
players wonder if it’ll bite, and whose fisherman will reel it in. The player
with the most points at the end of the round not only wins the accumulated
credits but also gets an extra bonus reward for winning the derby.
Aristocrat’s booth featured
the showpiece game Jaws. Based on the shark-attack film classic, Jaws is
immediately recognizable as the bass line from the movie music sounds during
play. The base game is a five-reel video slot with a free spin feature. Bonus
features are all Jaws themed, with Golden Jaws, Shark Hunter and Feeding Time.
Players get a chance at a four-level progressive jackpot through a Jaws dice
feature, which is a trip around a video game board, with your boat trying to
land on the same space as Jaws. If you catch the shark, you can win a
progressive.
At Bally Technologies
booth, one of the most intriguing innovations was its Blazing 7s Multi-Slot,
which puts reel-stepper games in a multigame format.
It is similar to a Bally
Game Maker, which has multiple video games, but instead of video, the games are
three distinct reel products.
The Multi-Slot features
Blazing 7s Free Spin, Blazing 7s Scatter, and Blazing 7s Wild. It’s not the
reels that change; it’s the way the reel combinations are applied to payoffs.
Those 7s can bring players free spins on a separate set of reels in the top
box, or can pay big as scatter pays in the main game, or act as wild symbols to
create extra winning combinations.
Konami
Gaming built on the success of its Advantage 5 games that feature full-sized
symbols on a five-reel-spinning format.
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, giving players a head
start on winners anytime those symbols fall into place on the other
reels.
Atronic showed off its new
Stargate SG-1, both in video and on its new Passion Plus five-reel
format.
The video Stargate, based
on the long-running science-fiction television series, uses a large display of
the space-jumping gate over three game themes. It features a five-level
progressive jackpot, and a side bet on a chance to go to the Stargate.
Cadillac Jack displayed some of its newest Class III
offerings. They included a number of 50-line games with themes including Tiger
Magic and Wild Ninja. On each, a credit buys two lines, so a 25-credit wager
can cover all paylines. All are free-spin type games, with higher volatility
than the second-screen bonus games in Cadillac Jack’s portfolio.
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