Publisher: Phantom EFX
Developer: Phantom EFX
System requirements: Windows XP (32-bit) or newer with administrator rights, 1 GHz Intel Pentium IV, Celeron or AMD or better CPU, 1 GB RAM, 64-MB DirectX 9.0c or OpenGL 2.0-compatible video card, DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card, DirectX 9.0c, 2 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Casual
Release date: Available now

Humans are truly a strange species. Most of us work all of our lives to make enough money to live and thrive, then we jump on a bus to our closest casino and gamble it all away. Those with skill and discipline usually manage to come home with more that they took with them, but most of us aren’t so lucky. It’s the unfortunate many for whom developer Phantom EFX’s Reel Deal casino simulators are targeted, including Reel Deal Slots: Treasures of the Far East, a collection of virtual slot and video poker machines that tries to give you the excitement of the one-armed bandit, but without the unfortunate consequences.

Far East starts you off in a character-creation screen, where you can design your on-screen avatar. It allows you to create a surprisingly detailed simulacrum, all the way from body type to facial hair and clothing. From here you are taken to a mountaintop Chinese-style structure, where you find 25 slot machines and five video poker machines waiting to accept your cash. You’re given $5,000 in virtual funds to risk on the machines, which you can play using either Real World or Dream World odds (the latter offering a slightly better payoff).

The slots themselves feature a wide variety of themes, from the expected Asian influences to slightly goofier fare (ants in an anthill, a disco ballroom, a dance competition and a magic show, among others). Most of them are five-roller slots, with a few sporting the old-fashioned three rollers, and all of them are penny slots, except for the “Big Bonus” machine, which uses dollar coins instead of pennies. Each game, along with the standard “watch them roll and wait for a payoff” gameplay, includes a bonus minigame that offers free spins, bonus credits or both as prizes. The games have as many as five to 40 paylines to play, at up to five or 10 credits per line.

Getting started playing Far East is a bit tricky, since Phantom failed to include a printed manual specific to the game in the box (leaving you to search the game’s folder on your hard drive for a PDF manual). To begin, you enter the amount of your bankroll you want to use on your first machine and click the money slot at the bottom right of the screen. Then you set the number of paylines you want to play and the number of credits you want to risk on each line, and press the “Play” button on the right of the console. It’s obvious that a great deal of care and imagination went into the creation of these slots; they all have a little touch that helps each one stand out from the rest. But all of them have a meter on the left edge of the display that gradually fills as you start winning. If you manage to fill the meters on all of the machines, you unlock the game’s grand prize, which can be found in the Prize Vault. There you’ll find the mother of all slots, a giant machine made of stone that you need Ancient Tokens to play; you receive these special tokens periodically during your journey through the slot collection. The video poker machines are all of the five-card draw variety, with subtle variations in strategy included in each game. These work the same as the slots: enter your seed money and play up to five credits per hand. A payoff table shows you how much you can win for each possible winning hand.

I wanted to see just how random the Far East slot machines are, so I played each of the 25 machines 150 times, using the same bet each time (100 credits per pull, or as close to that as possible). In the end, I made money on 18 of the 25 machines, anywhere from $2.25 to $201.00 on the penny slots, and a mammoth $14,000 on the only dollar machine in the collection (not bad for a $150 investment). The displays are all very colorful and imaginative, each with its own musical accompaniment. The avatar that you create is something of a annoyance; he sits at the bottom of the screen above a display showing how much of your starting bankroll you have left, all the while making spastic hand gestures at the end of each pull. He even goes so far as to make the sign of the “L” with his thumb and forefinger and place it in front of his face, which made me want to erase him the first time I saw it. And aside from the unidentified grand prize that you can unlock in the Prize Vault, the other items available to buy there are painfully dumb gag gifts, such as a paper snake in a can, a slingshot or a fortune cookie (if these are prizes, why do I have to buy them?). I hope this grand prize is worth the effort; I spent more than eight hours playing the Far East slot games and I barely got just one of the prize meters halfway filled, so you’d have to be a true casino-game fanatic to fill them all. The video poker games seem to have been thrown in for variety’s sake, since they all have the same playscreen graphics and the same controls, and since you’re playing by yourself, they’re not particularly thrilling. But if your basic poker skills need a polish, you might find some value in these games.

Reel Deal Slots: Treasures of the Far East sits firmly in the casual-game category, offering gameplay that’s easy to pick up and put down. You have to give Phantom solid marks for the time and energy they used to make the collection varied and creative. I would’ve liked to have seen more than the single dollar machine in the group, a paper manual would’ve been a welcome addition to the package, and the pretentious and lame Prize Vault has to go. But if you’re feeling the slot-machine itch and your bank account won’t let you scratch it, Far East is a passable alternative.

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