Thought I'd put a new post in on general stuff seeing as the board has been doing a good impression of tumbleweed rolling across a desert in the last couple of days.
£5 JP Machines.
I tend to leave these babies alone unless you get into one of the following situations...a) The arcade is empty and everything worth playing is dead.
b) The arcade is busy but the machines you are after are being played..there is no decent alternative so you put your spending rate into low power mode by hitting the £5 JP machines. Having said that there are some entertaining and sometimes profitable ones about..I find the best gameplay tends to come from 10p stake...5p stakes are deathly boring as you can wait for a board as long as dead Snake Rattle and Roll (unchipped of course). Some gameplay profiles need to be tweaked from their £25JP relations..i.e. we have a psycho cash beast £5 JP but you try and force the JP and it will probably cost you as much as the £25. Now the other side to this coin is the really clever (sigh) £5 JP on 25p stake which you find at service stations and some other seedy outlets. These give you the full glory of decent gameplay, feature entry etc but at a serious price compared to payout. Yes, you may get a streak quicker..yes you may get a JP straight away..but straight away can me £3 in for £5 JP so your brain fools you into that 'buzzing' sensation of JP and tends to block out the fact you've only made £2 or even lost on most ocassions. Fruit companies have very varying programming levels for these..e.g. bell fruit are not actually too bad on this stake JP..the flat profile suits them well and say, a crazy fruits down under will play well for a good length of time played by a knowledgable player. Barcrest tend to be crap...there hi/lo number system doesn't relent on the lower JP...there is a services on the M1 which has about 20 machines all on 25p/£5 and includes the likes of King Kebab (not too bad) and Temple of Treasure (awful) ...case scenario...you push a Temple of Treasure for JP....the numbers constantly do you on hi/lo cash trail and you are in for £30 before first JP..easily done, statistically that's the equivalent of £150 in on a £25 for first JP but then the game doesn't streak and you constantly chase....collecting smaller wins on this is much more beneficial. There was once a red arrow that was great to play because it always offered wild thing every other board and you could actually make about £50 if it was full....then along came the rechip to balance the % off the wild thing feature and hey presto it plays as crap as the £25, ALL THE TIME. No profit anymore.
Low Tecs
In my opinion the best profit makers of all time. Yes you have to be very good at watching paint dry but if you know your stuff..particularly on ALL the different bar x chips then you can't really go wrong. Party times are much more risky however but the new fangled plasma screen version is one smooth cookie and just lures you in. Golden game by mazooma is by far their best offering...hey you even forget you are playing a mazooma when you're on it..especially when it drops a £100 off the top feature like it did to me last night
I do play hi tecs...a lot of them but there simply isn't the what I call the 'cycle speed' on them that there is on lo tecs...meaning x amount of pounds in = streak....time on lo tec is always shorter than that of hi tec where feature entries to dead boards get in the way....pushing for JP feature when not ready = longer time....lo tec is just hit and hope and gets through that cycle so much quicker. If you come down to basics the gameplay i.e. the reels and buttons we use are just the entertaining way we use to 'enjoy' the possibility of winning some cash...the bottom line is you enter x amount of cash and y amount of cash comes back out....I wonder who would be prepared to play a black fruit machine cabinet with no reels...just an led win bank where all you did was enter your cash say even £20/£40 in one go and let the machine pop up on the led how much you win back based on all that % gameplay but without doing it...hey you could even streak it every few minutes....but only by entering £500 then seeing your £100 back as opposed to nothing back all the other times. Anyway I'm rambling now...do I get a long post award?