Caesar's Palace

When the editor gave me Caesars Palace for Windows I thought: at last, the Mafia meets A-Train. Perhaps Id get the chance to play one of those legendary figures like Bugsy Siegel who changed Las Vegas from a sleepy railway junction in 1931 to the monument to western civilisation it is today.

Alas, no. This is a gambling game, of which there is a fair number already - especially for Windows. Caesars Palace has the gimmick that you wander round the casino, dropping by 16 individual games. You can bet or you can watch or you can play against three computer players of differing skill and recklessness. Its a good idea to watch them for a while before you put your chips on the table. Or else you can make them watch you lose your pot.

Its an unnerving experience to play poker against these faceless opponents. In games of bluff you rely on other peoples expressions. The best card games here are those when all the players are against the house, rather than each other. The program doesnt cheat, and the payouts from the slot machines seem, for want of a better word, fair. Is this like the real world? I mean, when the fbi raided Caesars Palace in 1970 they found one million dollars in cash that had been skimmed off the takings for the mob.

Or blue eyes

Theres no bar, and blue eyes isnt singing in the corner. Some authenticity has been sacrificed here. For a start, it doesn't hurt. I dont mean that when you win you can make it to the car without being rolled by the owners friends. The essence of gambling is risk. Unless youre gambling something you dont want to lose, theres little point. In this game you can give yourself as much money as you like and bet what you like on whichever game takes your fancy. If you lose, just give yourself more money. This is not realistic.

If unlimited money takes the thrill out of gambling, it also robs winning of its savour. Why be excited about winning $500 when you could have just given it to yourself in the first place? I got lucky at roulette, clearing two grand. But I couldnt spend it. No honey-skinned blonde hooker sat on my lap and stuck her tongue in my ear or anything. Im not sure how Virgin are going to get round this.

Okay, so the games wont jeopardise your house, car or marriage. So what are they like to play? There are 16 of them including four poker games, seven types of slot machine, baccarat, roulette and craps. Some of these are further subdivided so that you can play for a minimum stake of $2.00, $5.00, $25.00 or $100.00. All of the games play easily with the mouse.

The help file gives a good and concise introduction to the rules and strategies for them all and you can call it up at any time. As I said, you can start with as much money as you like and add to it at any time. You can alter the attributes of the other players on a scale of one (Mug Punter) to four (Diamond Jim Brady). You can change the amount you bet, the number of packs and the odds.

As usual in software, many of the terms are American. Blackjack, for instance, is pontoon except that you dont get anything for a five-card trick. (I was outraged at this, and demanded to see the manager). You also say stand instead of stick and hit instead oftwist. And you cant buy cards. Other games are home grown. Keno is the infamous numbers; a game of pure luck and lousy odds. The slot machine version has a choice of up to ten two-digit numbers out of 80. The real thing has any three digit number and odds of 1,000 :1 (and pays 600 :1).

I come to praise Caesar

In spite of everything Ive said about the gambling side of things, I found the games pretty addictive. Even with pretend money I still doubled up when on a losing streak and kept on playing just one more game to recoup my loses. This is quite obviously a game for punters like me who shouldnt be allowed out of the house.

Now, there are many Windows shareware games that cover the same ground as Caesars Palace - I can think of three poker games, roulette games, keno and three versions of blackjack. There is even one called Las Vegas which has blackjack, video poker, baccarat, five card draw and Pai Gow poker in the registered version. Caesars Palace wins (ho, ho) by being a good integrated package. It takes up a fair amount of disk space (4.2Mb). The backgrounds are .bmp files so you can alter them to your taste with Paintbrush. When you lose you can write fix in big letters over the roulette table.

Caesar's Palace might be the venue for PlayStation casino fans, but don't bet on it. CP houses five games--craps, slots, blackjack, roulette, and baccarat--plus full-motion-video tutorials of the complicated casino contests. The high-res graphics are stunted only by low-res TV sets; it's sometimes hard to read the card faces. Frequent loading times don't help much either. The dealers' accented voices, along with the cheesy jazz music, can be turned off, while the button layout is sometimes trickier than necessary.

The staid Caesar's Palace really could be more inventive, and it's already been bested by this season's other gambling sim, Golden Nugget.

Overview

One of the most famous casinos in Las Vegas is now available on your television screen. Caesars Palace, the new PlayStation game from Interplay, is a blessing for gambling addicts because the money is not real, unlike the real casino. Unfortunately, this is also one of the problems with the game.

Caesars throws you onto the gaming floor with the option of playing 5 different authentic casino games. For those people not familiar with the games available, you can watch a tutorial video on the rules of the games. Caesars claims to "deliver the total Los Vegas experience"—but I will take the real thing over this any day of the week.

Gameplay

Obviously a casino game is all about gameplay. Actually, it is about the games you play. With five different games to choose from—including Blackjack, Craps, Roulette, Baccarat, and slot machines—here's what you can expect from each.

A cornerstone to every casino, Blackjack is one of the most popular card games in Vegas. The table you play at has a $5000 bet maximum and just about anything else in between. The first thing you will notice about the Blackjack table is the incredibly small cards you play with. Not only are the cards small, but they are blurry. I mean blurry to the point of not being able to tell if you have a red 6 or 8. There were many times I had to count the number of dots on the card to determine the value of the card. This is inexcusable. I use a 35-inch television to review games and if I could not determine the card on a screen that large, I pity someone using a smaller screen. Aside from the small cards, everything else is pretty standard at the table.

The next game you can play is Craps. This is a dice game that has you betting on the outcome of the dice roll. You can bet on different outcomes including guessing the exact roll. I really don't have any complaints or compliments about the Craps table. It is just average. It does not take much in the way of skill, but is more a game of chance.

Third, you can play Roulette, in which you'll bet on where a rolling marble will stop on a spinning wheel. You can bet on colors, numbers, even or odd, or exact numbers. The payoff is different depending on how you bet. Once again, this game was neither great nor terrible. The wheel was pretty clear and you could always tell what number was landed on. There was nothing here that really made Roulette stand out either.

Fourth is a game called Baccarat. This is the game of the true Vegas high-rollers, in which you bet on the bank or player on who will have the highest total cards. I am not an avid gambler and have never heard of this game before, so I was pretty lost. I have a feeling that most people that are not hardcore gamblers will not get into this game either. By the way, it had the same problem with the small cards as well.

Finally, we have good old slot machines—pull down the lever and watch it go. The only problem is that you only have three different slot machines to chose from. You can pay 1, 5 or 25 dollar machines. Part of the fun of slots is walking up to a row of slot machines and trying to guess which one is going to be lucky. You have no choice in this game. You can only chose how much money you want to spend and are limited to a single machine. It would have been cooler to have three machines for each betting amount so you could alt least choose one of three machines with the same dollar amount. Aside from that, the slots were decent. Winning seemed to be a bit easy. It was almost like when my bank roll was getting low, the machine knew it and I would hit a decent prize. All in all, the slots were probably the funnest part of the game.

The interface and menu system of this game also takes some time to get used to. There were numerous occasions where I had to look at the help screen to figure out what I needed to do. Also, changing your bet amounts was a pain to figure out. I may just be dense, but it took me quite a while to remember what all of the controls were.

Graphics

The graphics can be best described as lackluster. They were marginal in the case of Roulette and Slots and below average in card games, Blackjack and Baccarat. I don't understand why they did not make the cards bigger. I was disappointed that you never really got a chance to see the actual casino. I think that a big part of the Vegas experience is soaking up the whole atmosphere, and you just don't get to see much more than the table you are at.

Bottom Line

After playing this game for a while, I asked myself the question, "Who would buy this game?" I still have not found the answer. I can't imagine spending 50 bucks on a game like this. The games were too few and lacked the playability that they could have had. Plus you never really felt like you were in a casino. I know that there is nothing that will ever compare to the real thing, but at least try and give it some of the glitter and glitz that makes Vegas so fun. If you really enjoy gambling at home with imaginary money, you can give it a try—but in the end, you may be disappointed.

Do you have a slight case of gambling fever? Then check out Caesars Palace for the NES! Walk in with lots of cash and proceed to any of the common game tables. You can pick from any of the classic games like playing the one armed bandits, blackjack and, of course, poker. Caesars Palace looks and feels like you are really there, except it is a whole lot cheaper!

Caesar's Palace is a 1990 video game developed by Realtime Associates. It is named after the famous Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip near Las Vegas, Nevada. In this game, you have one thousand dollars in chips and you must try to become rich. This game gives minor children an experience previously limited to people 21 years of age or older.

In Caesar's Palace you can play 5 different games: Blackjack, Slot machine, Roulette, Video poker, and the Big Six wheel.