My online slots videos (plus UK AWPs)

Staying way from seedy world of pub gambling, with a focus on a gentler and far more noble pursuit, the lost art of the SWP (Skill With Prizes) quiz machine.

In this case a rather fancy affair that used a CD-ROM drive in the machine to deliver...... FULL MOTION VIDEO! (swoon!)

 
As hard as it might be to believe here in the year 2025, there was a time that the gambling industry was actually capable of innovation.

A fruit machine with a telly in it!

 
Child gambling in kiddy casinos is alive and well in the UK.


From the age of 6 or 7 to around 15 id go with my dad to the south coast to visit my cousins. When I was around 7 my dad would give me a pound and say make it last because that's it kind of thing so id play the 2p ledge falls or the 2p roulette or sometimes the 2p horse racing (even at that age I thought the horse game was rigged!)

Around 10 I was given a little more maybe £2 or £3 and would venture on to the 2p lite a nudge etc and by 14 - 15 was given nothing but I had i think £10 a week pocket money.

I'll always remember being 14 (in 1999) and putting 10 quid into a fruit machine, that was my entire pocket money and my auntie going nuts saying how coupd I do that and being so upset.

It was a strange reaction to me as almost every week I put the tenner in a fruit machine and it should be me that was upset idk.

Gambling has always fascinated me. Also remember the national lottery started when I was 9 sitting around the television with a ticket that was bought for me with mystic meg and the machine that spun the balls.

Drugs never really bothered me and I stopped smoking when I was in my early twenties (I'm 41).

Totally agree the under 16 ticket machines are designed in that way to create a new generation of gamblers shouldn't exist.
 
Child gambling in kiddy casinos is alive and well in the UK.


Super video, could be a proper TV documentary with a bit more editing, top stuff!

Love the World in Action? theme sampling at the end, one of the best bits of proggy-type music ever, haven't heard that since I was at school lol, who made it?? Sinister yet beautiful.

One thing I have always maintained is the UK's execrable record of protecting minors from gambling, right in their formative years when life patterms and behaviours are initiated and established.

I think the first thing would be to ban online gambling, all gambling until 21. Not 18+, but 21+. Then a few years later to 25+. We have a precedent now with the UKGC rationing stakes until people are 25.....

Those random cabinet games with 35% RTP paid in tickets, exchangeable for Chinese junk not even worth £1 in the £1 it's priced at in ticket equivalent. So spend £3 cash, get (on average) £1 of paper tickets to exchange for 15p's worth of shite or sugar. Real return = 5%. It's worse than I ever remember it. 'Family Entertainment Centres' my arse.

The only people who should get away with such punitive 'social' taxes on the weak and vulnerable are the government, as at least they can say it will get spent back into the economy on defence and health or whatever. Right now it's collected by an elite few and spent on McLarens and apartments in Dubai, footballers' wages or leaves the country.

The Chesterfield apologist at the beginning is a great analogy as one day we'll surely look back on today, once we've got a grip, and ask how it all came to prevail.
 
Super video, could be a proper TV documentary with a bit more editing, top stuff!

Love the World in Action? theme sampling at the end, one of the best bits of proggy-type music ever, haven't heard that since I was at school lol, who made it?? Sinister yet beautiful.

One thing I have always maintained is the UK's execrable record of protecting minors from gambling, right in their formative years when life patterms and behaviours are initiated and established.

I think the first thing would be to ban online gambling, all gambling until 21. Not 18+, but 21+. Then a few years later to 25+. We have a precedent now with the UKGC rationing stakes until people are 25.....

Those random cabinet games with 35% RTP paid in tickets, exchangeable for Chinese junk not even worth £1 in the £1 it's priced at in ticket equivalent. So spend £3 cash, get (on average) £1 of paper tickets to exchange for 15p's worth of shite or sugar. Real return = 5%. It's worse than I ever remember it. 'Family Entertainment Centres' my arse.

The only people who should get away with such punitive 'social' taxes on the weak and vulnerable are the government, as at least they can say it will get spent back into the economy on defence and health or whatever. Right now it's collected by an elite few and spent on McLarens and apartments in Dubai, footballers' wages or leaves the country.

The Chesterfield apologist at the beginning is a great analogy as one day we'll surely look back on today, once we've got a grip, and ask how it all came to prevail.

The World In Action theme was a very deliberate choice, I know from my channel analytics that the vast majority of my viewers are blokes in the UK who are within around +/- ten years of my age, so I figured there was a very good chance that the music would have a resonance with those people, and take them back to the days of those serious and brilliant documentaries that we used to do so well in Britain.

The kiddie gambling machines are the most obvious villains of the whole piece, but I still think the sheer ease of accessibility to gambling the adult population has, and the freedom the 'industry' has to promote and advertise itself to that population, is completely mental.

As I mentioned in the video, people of 18+ or in their early twenties are legally adults, but that doesn't mean that wider society doesn't still have a duty of care to afford them protection from the worst excesses of corporate capitalism whilst they're still, in the grand scheme of things, pretty young.

I know we all do silly shit when we're young and make a lot of mistakes, and that it's part of growing up, but that shouldn't mean it's basically just an 'everything goes, survival of the fittest and/or luckiest' type arrangement to see who gets to make it to adulthood relatively unscathed.

Just as an extra easter egg on the World In Action theme, there's this comment on the YT video of it.....

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I can't stand it any longer. My name is Mick Weaver, and I played the B3 on the World in Action theme music. Shawn Phillips gets all the bloody credit. Yes, he came to me with a descending chord progression, I did the rest. We spent an evening in a recording studio in the west end of London putting together segments of different lengths, and Granada T.V. used it for 20 plus years. Not only did I not receive one word of credit, I didn't even get the session fee. Phillps gets the musical credit, Jonathon Weston got the money, and I am down the price of the tube fare I payed to get to the bloody studio. Makes me fucking SICK.

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Any comment about the world in action theme being written by Shawn Phillips, is utter bullshit. I played the B3 Organ parts over a descending chord progression that Phillips came up with. It was a 50/50 collaboration between he and I, and I am utterly pissed off with this charlatan claiming or being credited with having "created" the entire thing. What happened was that Shawn came to me and said that he had been asked to compose some theme music for a T.V. programme, and that he had come up with a chord progression, but needed help with putting some melody lines to it, and would I be interested in collaborating with him to complete it. So, I came up with some vaguely Bachish melody lines and we spent an evening in Trident studios in Wardour Street, London, recording several segments of varying lengths of my melody lines, and Shawn's chord progression. We were told by the Granada people, some of whom attended the recording sessions, that the music would become the property of Granada, and that we would be paid M.U. scale session fees for the evening's work, which at the time were nine quid an hour. Not only has my contribution to this music (not to imply that the stuff is a work of magnificent art) never been acknowledged, but I never even received my session fees. Not only that, I had to take the tube to Piccadilly Circus to get to the studio, and was never reimbursed, so, as well as never having been credited, financially or otherwise, with my participation in the project, I am down the fucking tube fare. I was young and easily conned in those days, but to be worked over by a fellow musician is especially galling. I think Shawn is somewhere in South Africa now, no doubt crediting himself with being something he isn't. Good luck to him, and even better luck to his "believers."

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Back to basics for this video, but not in the John Major sense of shagging Edwina Currie (there's a mental image for you). In this case it just means me waffling on about an old fruit machine.

 
I like to stay in and keep warm and dry

I'm a sucker for the sea, growing up in miserable Radcliffe up in north Manchester, getting out to any sort of coastal region was always a treat.

I've lived on the IOM since 1996, and I never get tired of being close to the sea.

Moreover there's something very impressive about an angry sea, although slightly less impressive when it turns me into a drowned rat :D
 
I'm a sucker for the sea, growing up in miserable Radcliffe up in north Manchester, getting out to any sort of coastal region was always a treat.

I've lived on the IOM since 1996, and I never get tired of being close to the sea.

Moreover there's something very impressive about an angry sea, although slightly less impressive when it turns me into a drowned rat :D
😢

Us soft southerners with our inside toilets, sunshine and block paved drives...
 
😢

Us soft southerners with our inside toilets, sunshine and block paved drives...

Whoever bought our Dad's old house (for a ridiculously large sum given the state of the property and the area it's in), has turned it into a House Of Multiple Occupancy, by adding an entire extra floor to the top of it.

As you can see the new floor blends in seamlessly so you'll have to look very closely to notice where the original house ends, and the new floor begins.

They've also put new windows in, which it most definitely needed. (The entire house basically needed gutting and rebuilding from the inside out, I think they'd have had to pretty much strip it back to the bare walls and the floorboards.)

1770632267933.webp
 
If you want to do this efficiently, you can simply take away the key point that I'm now an ex-gambler. (Save yourself an hour and a half!)

 
Watched the video till the end. I found it refreshing to hear about a 'Gambling High Ebb' if you will!

These days I definitely see gambling as entertainment and related to the £20 being your only money and prepared to risk it from when I was younger.

Don't think ive ever played a digital cabinet in a pub even when id be alone.

So no more 3dice missions to look forward to. Can't lie I will miss them but respect and understand why your leaving it all behind.
 
Nice, Chopperz. Capped your graph so we can use it to explain why RTP is so important to the noobs. ;D



View attachment 218587

The budget for graphics was pretty limited.

If it can't be done in Paint, it's not worth doing. Although even Paint has fucking Co-Pilot in it now, insufferable Microslop arseholes.
 
If you want to do this efficiently, you can simply take away the key point that I'm now an ex-gambler. (Save yourself an hour and a half!)



Lots of food for thought there Chop, for a moment I thought the Hotel part might be leading to you going back out to have another go on the fruit machines, and then not having enough to pay the hotel bill! 😅

I also enjoy watching Hypalinx, and that session he had was a shocker, but I always feel those 'pie gambles' are deadly and he was doing and losing quite a few.
 
Lots of food for thought there Chop, for a moment I thought the Hotel part might be leading to you going back out to have another go on the fruit machines, and then not having enough to pay the hotel bill! 😅

I also enjoy watching Hypalinx, and that session he had was a shocker, but I always feel those 'pie gambles' are deadly and he was doing and losing quite a few.

Yes the pie gambles are a very dangerous way to play as they massively increase the volatility, they're bad enough on the pub £100s but on the arcade £500s they're lethal. (Over a large enough sample the win/pie gambles have zero effect on overall RTP as their RTP is 100% so their overall effect on the game's long term RTP is neutral.)

My issue with them is the fact that these machines exist at all, and are so easy to get access to. I'm of the opinion that machines capable of taking £820 in under an hour's play simply shouldn't be a thing in arcades you can walk in off the street to play.
 
Yes the pie gambles are a very dangerous way to play as they massively increase the volatility, they're bad enough on the pub £100s but on the arcade £500s they're lethal. (Over a large enough sample the win/pie gambles have zero effect on overall RTP as their RTP is 100% so their overall effect on the game's long term RTP is neutral.)

My issue with them is the fact that these machines exist at all, and are so easy to get access to. I'm of the opinion that machines capable of taking £820 in under an hour's play simply shouldn't be a thing in arcades you can walk in off the street to play.

Don't you have to be a member or something, required to prove your age?

😂 He wasn't best pleased with the inane music pumping out of the speaker above his head.

Interesting that online you can't gamble more than £5 a spin, but these pie gambles can be well over that, when in effect they're just another win/lose spin.

I asked AI about gambling and rewiring of the brain, basically can you undo the dopamine addiction reflex or have you changed it forever, and it said it takes at least 6 months or more of not gambling to restore the normal, non gambling person's alert system to losing money. Where the pain of losing money matters more than the excitement of gambling to win, the desire to be sensible and keep your money is stronger than to take that risk.

I suppose this is also where low or lower rtp comes in, because it's changing what you perceive to be that risk/reward (though as you say anything less than 100% is guaranteed to take all your money eventually).

Virgin games have all their bass games on the 92% rtp level 🥺, that's not a viable gamble to me, but I see other places have settled on a 94-95% level, which must be the borderline risk proposition for not feeling insane at feeding a game money. (Regularly)
 
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A whole new fruit machine emulator has been released, and this time fruit machine emulation enters the digital cabinet era, with Barcrest's 'Triple 777' system now being emulated.

Lots of UK games across multiple categories, including some brutal £2 per play £500 jackpot affairs which can now be safely played and pie gambled on to oblivion with losing any real money!

 
Betcoms were alright for what they were. Essentially using the same codebase/game structure that (IIRC) started with an old Global game called Jackpots That Rock & Roll on the £25 jackpot (got an upgrade to £35), two guys left Global and started their own company called AC GAMES which made Poker Face on the £35 jackpot, they then rebranded to Betcom and kind of just carried on reskinning the same code/games all the way through to the last stand of the reel-based fruit machines on the £100 jackpot (via the £70 jackpot).

 
Betcoms were alright for what they were. Essentially using the same codebase/game structure that (IIRC) started with an old Global game called Jackpots That Rock & Roll on the £25 jackpot (got an upgrade to £35), two guys left Global and started their own company called AC GAMES which made Poker Face on the £35 jackpot, they then rebranded to Betcom and kind of just carried on reskinning the same code/games all the way through to the last stand of the reel-based fruit machines on the £100 jackpot (via the £70 jackpot).


They were such boring games.
Every Betcom released was just a clone of another one.
No originality.
Once you played one Betcom, you played them all.
 
They were such boring games.
Every Betcom released was just a clone of another one.
No originality.
Once you played one Betcom, you played them all.

Boring but profitable!

EDIT - Great to play when pissed too, no skill involved and quite difficult to fuck them up, unlike say a late chip Alien or the reel stepper on Electrocoins or whatever, easy to get them wrong when a few sheets to the wind.
 
Boring but profitable!

EDIT - Great to play when pissed too, no skill involved and quite difficult to fuck them up, unlike say a late chip Alien or the reel stepper on Electrocoins or whatever, easy to get them wrong when a few sheets to the wind.
In the beginning, yes.

But because there was no skill to them, everyone with £250 in their pocket could play one.

Soon as you bring skill into it - e.g £100 DOND Desert Island Deal, that seperates the men from the boys. Haha.
 
In the beginning, yes.

But because there was no skill to them, everyone with £250 in their pocket could play one.

Soon as you bring skill into it - e.g £100 DOND Desert Island Deal, that seperates the men from the boys. Haha.

I had a rather charmed existence on the IOM with this sort of thing, and tended to either get machines to myself or with very little competition. Finding an Alien with three jackpots in it, that sort of thing, the type of scenario that was a completely unthinkable fantasy for UK players.
 
Weird, I had an axe trap itself once too. Didn't play it much compared to the rest. Exploder tended to get a fair bit of play round my area at the time by the locals, so was always worth a punt :D
I had one pub you could walk in and sometimes it would be flashing double deal on the side as soon as you slipped a quid in. Great pub for fruits that were :D
 
Weird, I had an axe trap itself once too. Didn't play it much compared to the rest. Exploder tended to get a fair bit of play round my area at the time by the locals, so was always worth a punt :D
I had one pub you could walk in and sometimes it would be flashing double deal on the side as soon as you slipped a quid in. Great pub for fruits that were :D
Had an oliver twist gamble all the way up to £100 off a few quid as well
 
Youre not a million miles off. But seeing as there are actually a few of these about I won't disclose on a public forum.

There are still bits people don't know about these machines.
fair enough :)
ive been stuck indoors for 3 years, my feet are half fucked atm lol. didnt realise they were about thought they'd all gone now. i edited my post anyways,might be worth editing my post within your quote too.
 
fair enough :)
ive been stuck indoors for 3 years, my feet are half fucked atm lol. didnt realise they were about thought they'd all gone now. i edited my post anyways,might be worth editing my post within your quote too.
Yeah I have done.
It's the older companies that have reel based. The newer ones all have the digital.
There are still gems hidden about.
 
If info on Betcoms is still considered slightly sensitive I really feel sorry for anyone still scrabbling around for them out in the real world.

Compensated fruit machines were always a dog eat dog world even in the 'good old days', it's properly feral now.
 
If info on Betcoms is still considered slightly sensitive I really feel sorry for anyone still scrabbling around for them out in the real world.

Compensated fruit machines were always a dog eat dog world even in the 'good old days', it's properly feral now.
I don't believe it is, however, being in the game. I have never been one to give information out. Why would you create competition for yourself?
 
I don't believe it is, however, being in the game. I have never been one to give information out. Why would you create competition for yourself?

Depends where you are I guess. My playing days are long behind me but the reports I've heard from people who are still trying to earn in cities or seaside resorts aren't particularly edifying.

I always thought it was a rather grubby world TBH, even when I was part of it.
 

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