My mother is visiting from California. She's here to see the family, get to know her newest grandson (who is now four months old), and to celebrate her seventieth birthday. My mother's gambling "habits" are legendary with the family. Her idea of going crazy while gambling is spending $10 in a casino during one of her senior weekend trips to Laughlin, Nevada. That's why I thought it would be really entertaining to have my mom check out the newest games from Microgaming. When I told her this was the plan she responded with "Think I'll know what to do? Doubt it!" This is going to be fun.

It's the end of another month, which means it's time for Microgaming to introduce four new games. I can't tell you how excited I am about these releases. I was even more excited when I read their press release. I think someone over at Microgaming has been reading my reviews: "Microgaming announces its latest launches for the month of May…" Did you get that? The games released at the end of April are for May! They are finally making sense. In case you just started reading my reviews, Microgaming would release a game at the end of February and then say that it's February's latest games when there was only a day or two left to February. Not exactly a release for the whole month. It's been a pet peeve of mine and I've been mentioning it since I've started reviewing their games. It seems the Microgaming marketing department has grabbed a clue. Hallelujah!

"What is Avalon?" my mother asks. Avalon is a five reel, 20 pay-line video slot with a mythical lady of the lake theme. "What is the point of this?" she asks while we're playing. "Do you ever play slots in Las Vegas?" I answer. "Yes, I play quarter slots." "Well, this is the same thing." "Too bad this isn't with real money," is her reply. We did well. My mom isn't so familiar with computers and she found all of the choices a tad confusing. As such I manned the internet casino and gave her a list of choices, while she told me what she wanted. She liked the game, especially when we got 12 free spins (which is great considering there are 15 total available). We did well with the free spins and mystery multipliers. Unfortunately, we didn't do so well trying to double or quadruple our money on the Gamble feature, where we lost every time. The graphics on this game are wonderful, the castle and the lady of the lake looking ethereal and mysterious.

"Mom, you know anything about roulette?"
"Nope."
"OK, well neither do I."
"My friend Gloria does."
"Thanks, but that doesn't help us much."
Apparently Microgaming did a lot of research to guarantee a realistic, well playing roulette game for their players and European Roulette Gold is the result. This is a new version of an old game where technology is utilized to update the color and quality of the graphics. "Control buttons such as Call Bets, AutoPlay, Redo and Undo are sized and positioned for maximum convenience, together with zoom in snapshot windows to ensure that players remain in the picture and on the numbers." We did well to start off, with a nice win. Of course, it went downhill from there because I forgot to get a screenshot of the win. Those who know roulette will enjoy the ability to edit the layout, list of call bets, and the Bet Timer which reminds you when there's no time left to change your bets. All of that was lost on mom and me.

"What's this one?" mom asks as I open the 100 Play Power Poker. This is Microgamings newest Double Joker multi-hand video poker where players have 100 hands of video poker played simultaneously. This game features Expert mode for those of us who don't want to work that hard to choose the right hand to keep. It took a few games, but finally we had a good win. Finally we had the choice to try and double, or collect. Mom suggested we try and double, and this time we won. Yeah!

Twister is what one would call a "low brow" slot machine. The female characters have enough make-up on to make a drag queen jealous and the long cigarette in grandma's mouth reminds me of the grandma from "16 Candles" whose ash would be three inches long before she would flick it. This five reel, 15 pay-line video slot has Wild and Scatter symbols, a Free Spin bonus feature with spins within the free spins, and a double-your-money gamble opportunity with a $10,000 ceiling. The jackpot on this game is reason enough alone to try it – imagine winning $75,000, an amount that can be lifted up to $150,000 with free spins. The game was wound too tight when I had a go. It took me over one hundred spins to get to the free spins feature, and when I did I only won a whopping $31, not exactly something to write home about. I didn't get a single big win from this game, even still I enjoyed playing it. The tongue and cheek characters leave you with a smile even when you lose.

Microgaming has done a wonderful job this month with their new selection and their CEO agrees. Roger Raatgever, Microgaming CEO comments, “These latest releases further reinforce our commitment to providing players with the best gaming experiences, in the widest number of categories. We are committed to continually improving our existing games, as well as creating totally new gaming experiences and as a result, we’re sure players will respond to these and the rest of the games lined up as part of our busy release programme over the course of this year, extremely positively.” Now that they finally have their months straight and have started releasing things for the month on time, I have to say I'm looking forward to the upcoming games as well.

Related Links:

• Microgaming Casinos

Posted on: May 8, 2006

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