Impressions from the ICE and CM party.

Zoozie

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Dec 1, 2005
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Denmark
ICE was mostly B2B, but for a plain non-affiliate gambler like me there was still lots of stuff to see. There were suits all over in the exhibition stands as expected. Luckily many stands also had some nice very lightly dressed promotion girls also. I normally only see girls like that when I go to bars I do not want my girlfriend to hear about :)

The 'online' part of ICE covered maybe 1/4 or less of the floor area, but most providers was there. The only big one missing was RTG and I would have loved to see 3Dice there though. The majority of all stands was slots and most of them 5-reel videoslots of course. But I was not impressed since there has not been much innovation in the last years in the B&M slots. In fact I would say, though some disagree, that Tomb Raider 2 is the best video-slots out there both B&M and online. And generally the online video-slots are ahead of the B&M video-slots. Of course IGT has some new slots, but they are also becoming available online.

The MG stand was an disappointment. I had expected to see a new slot like the previous blockbusters (Hitman, TR2). But there was no new slot, they were still demoing TR2 and the MySlot. The next big slot would arrive in 6 months and they would not tell anything about it. But we know a 243 line will be released within 2 months or so. I had some serious questions about the weighed video-slots and also some irregularites in TR 2, but the tie knew nothing. He was helpful and asked the other 2 people at the stand if they actually knew something about the slots, but they just put on empty faces. You can put a tie on them, but that is basically all these salesmen are good for. On the other side of the MG stand was the MG poker team. Here I managed to talk to a tie that understood a little. I reported the irritating bug that you can not join the waiting line at the table if there is reserved seats. As suspected they already knew this and it might be fixed in next release. I also suggested an easier way to access the player notes instead of clicking and unclicking on the player icon. Maybe just a mouseover pop-up to show it. I am not sure he agreed this was a good idea, but maybe he will take it back to the lab.

Net Entertainment was a quite different experience. I nice girl called the tech dude to talk to me. I started out pretty hard with something like "I have an issue with the overlapping line 17 and 18 for the Super Lucky Frog video-slot, which result in missing a bonus round for a paid line". He instantly recognized the problem, I had expected he might look weird at me. From there it just kept going. They have some high variance slots in the pipeline, which was also one of my concerns. Net Entertainment slots are a little lower variance that the average MG slot.

To make it short I will just mention a few other providers as well. Crypto's next big slot release is King Kong, unfortunately I did not see it. It was not demoed when I was there or it was too crowded for me to notice. WagerWorks is releasing the online version of the existing B&M Dungeons And Dragons video-slot. Since I am an oldtime AD&D player and has completed every AD&D game ever released, I am looking forward to play this. The interesting part of this slot is the feature game which involve some classic dungeon crawling and throwing a d20 to decide fights outcomes. The purpose of the dungeon crawling is to increase multiplier and number of free spins for the feature. After plan it should be released in a few months. At the ICE the one I talked to said it would be in September! But I later taked to the Virgin Casino representative at the CM event, and I trust him more. (However remember how much the Elvis slot was delayed... So lets see)

And in case you missed the CM private event with free beer, well you missed something. Special thanks for KasinoKing and GrandMaster for the long chats. I had hoped VWM would have been there as well for some serious slots talk as well. And it was great to meet the representatives from SlotOCash, Virgin, 32Red and many more as well.

Also thanks to Pat from 32Red for buying me beers after the free beer event stopped. This again shows 32Red are state of the art in customer service when even top casino management please their customers this way. I also think I own Max and CM a few beers+drinks since they paid for everything when we continued at the bar-crawl. That was fun also. The last part is a bit fuzzy, the last thing I remember clear was GreedyGirl saying "Lets have some Tequilas!". It was a long day/night, but a good one to be remembered.
 

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