On this site I’ve spoken a whole lot about online casinos and online games. We’ve discussed topics such as finding the perfect blackjack and roulette game online, as well as topics such as videogames, retro games and online entertainment. But for the most part, I’ve intentionally kept the two areas separate. Sure, they have a bit of an overlap, in that both gaming and iGaming are interactive fun, but honestly? The people who play videogames are rarely the same people who gamble, and vice versa. Which, to me, seems kind of weird, considering the fact that they both share a whole lot of the same design sensibilities. I mean, come on, you guys, when you’re buying a Weapon Case in “Counter Strike: Global Offensive”, where you purchase a random weapon for real money which could be either completely useless or really valuable, and if it’s truly valuable you could later resell for more money… Isn’t that essentially gambling? And similarly, while most people imagine online casino as nothing more than simplistic card games, that’s extremely far from the truth – there’s plenty of awesome games out there that come really close to videogames while still having a gambling element to them! So why don’t we take a brief look at three of them to illustrate my point? Keep in mind, I’m only going to be talking about games you can find on UK online casino sites like bestcasinosites.net and not physical casino games, because if I was talking about the latter I’d need to take into account arcade games and the new skill-based slots, and it just becomes too much! So, without further ado, let’s get right into it!
1. Aliens
Let’s start with a game that proves that you don’t even need interaction in order to have a fun and rewarding gaming experience! In the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of us played the classic “Alien vs Predator” games (which today are most known for being adapted into utterly terrible movies like literally any other big videogame ever), falling in love with their claustrophobic hallways and terrifying alien encounters as a lone space marine tried to survive a climactic battle between two alien species! Well, years later, we’ve got almost the exact same thing, minus the Predators and any interactivity. “Boo, lame,” you might be thinking, but that’s only because you haven’t actually tried it! Each spin of the reels moves you forward in a fully 3D environment and determines how many magazines you’ll get for your rifle – two, one or zero. If you run dry, you die! If you manage to gather enough to survive until the end of the maze, you go on to fight the alien queen! And it is utterly exhilarating, even if you aren’t required to do as much as to push a single button!
2. Spider-Man
Like I mentioned earlier in this article, some regions of the world have recently obtained skill-based slots in which the bonus games require the use of your skills rather than luck. Typically, slot bonus games consist of trying to guess something (think a variant of the ball and cups game, except you don’t get to see the cups move), with absolutely no skill involved and a 100% reliance on luck to get you money instead of something that relies on your skills as a gamer, like, say, a bonus game that’s basically a round of Pac-Man. That’s because most countries have rather strict laws when it comes to those sorts of things, and the laws prohibiting skill-based slots have only recently started getting repealed. With that limitation in mind, I do need to point out that certain developers have pushed the laws to their absolute limits in order to provide us with quality gambling entertainment, and one of those companies is most certainly Microgaming! They made quite a lot of really high-quality slots, but the one that’s most interesting to me is certainly “Spider-Man”, which offers dozens of unique bonus games within itself! One moment you’re fighting the Green Goblin in a scene that looks remarkably like “Street Fighter”, another you’re swinging across the city… It’s great, great stuff!
3. Deal Or No Deal Roulette
Now, for the most part, this is just roulette. It’s the same old boring, unremarkable roulette that we all know and love – you play, you spin, you bet on red, yada yada yada, we’ve done this a million times. However, aside from the main wheel, you have a second bonus wheel, and when that wheel lands on the appropriate symbol… Well, you play “Deal or No Deal”. And I don’t mean some kind of roulette version of “Deal or No Deal”, I literally mean the exact same version from the TV show, complete with picking boxes and rejecting the bank’s offer. Do these two concepts mesh well? Not one bit! Are they completely awesome? You can take that deal!