Caesar’s Palace

Genre: Casino Developer: Illusions Gaming Co. Publisher: Virgin Games Players: 1 Released: 1993

Let’s face it; the casino genre of video games is just not anyone’s favorite type to play. From archaic games like Casino and Slot Machine for the Atari 2600 to the various poker rooms and Hoyle Casino CD-ROMs that flood computer illiterate people’s desktops today, we seem to never run out of gambling resources to fuel the Las Vegas gambler inside all of us.

Caesar’s Palace could possibly be the most recognizable casino in Las Vegas, and there have been a plethora of video games with the CP logo stamped on them, from the two NES titles to the SNES and Sega games, which ironically are not the same thing as some multi-platform games were at the time. There even have been some later generation releases that have made little or no splash on the gaming scene of the time. Caesar’s Palace games are pretty much a dime a dozen, no matter what system you have them for, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t review them or have them in our collections.

To sum up my whole feeling towards this game, it’s one of every time I go to the casino: go, have fun, and spend all my money within twenty minutes. You can play Caesar’s Palace and have an adequate experience of it within twenty minutes. There are the basic games: blackjack, roulette, slots (and a various number of them, they get kind of addictive too), video poker and craps. However, there are other games on this that you don’t see “on the marquis” like Keno, and there is an extensive horse racing computer you can bet on. There are even a few scratch-off ticket games you can buy that are sometimes more fun than the table games. For some reason, they make them $100 a ticket, so you can’t be like that local gas station lottery ticket addict if you want to seriously gain some serious dough. There are three types of scratchers: Match Two, 60 Yard Fight and Triple Jacks. I like 60 Yard Fight the most, but all three are kind of amusing and a good break from the table games.

Each one of the table games seems to be well balanced when it comes to winning and losing, though I seem to get a lot of middle cards in blackjack. Roulette is a fun game on here, probably the best of the table games, but it suffers from a control problem in that you can accidentally hit the button and lay chips down where you didn’t want to and then not be able to pick them back up. Craps is okay, but the sound isn’t as good on it as it is on roulette and blackjack. The slots are different depending on the denomination, with a Roman theme, a baseball theme, and a few other themes that keep the game from getting very stale very quickly.

Most of the fun, any fun to be had can be found in the big time table betting. Caesar’s Palace has a high roller area for each of the table games. However, besides the different stakes at the high roller tables, the games are not any different. That’s kind of a bummer, I mean if you start off with two thousand dollars, it takes a while to get up to the high roller table and then there isn’t anything different there than the normal tables besides the higher betting limit.

Regardless, the table game graphics are pretty top notch, and I’ll be honest, I kind of dig them, at least on the table. In the casino though, they could be a lot better. Your character is the only person in the entire casino! There are no other people in the entire building – no dealers, no other players, no one! Not even the lousy bartenders that come around and ask you if you want a drink and then get there twenty minutes after you leave because you’re broke! Anyway, the “casino” itself has multiple floors with different betting levels at different tables and machines and stuff. Even then, everything is pretty much the same on every floor, except for the betting levels.

The sound is of mediocre quality as well. When it comes to music, there is one song in the entire game. Yes, you guessed it, it loops over and over again. It’s not a bad song, but you know with the whole “one song looping over and over again,” it doesn’t matter what song it is, because it is going to be irritating. The sound effects are good, but they seem like they were just slapped on and can get way behind if you start throwing down some serious change on the table games. I like having the whole chip tray available when you are playing table games, but once you get up to the high roller table, it takes up to a minute to lay down all the five hundred dollar chips to hit the fifty thousand dollar max bet. I mean, you should be able to change it out to 1K chips, but then there would have to be someone else in the casino to change it out for you, at a different table, requiring more chip tray slots. You get the drift.

In general, Caesar’s Palace is a decent casino game for Genesis, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is good by any means. I play it every once and a while, and it is fun to hit it big or to go broke and at least simulating the Las Vegas Strip lifestyle. But its overall blandness just makes me bored after a while. Add that to the fact that this game just feels like a slapped together, slightly altered version of the NES and SNES games, and it’s not worth more than three dollars. At least the box looks nice… well, at least I think it looks nice.

SCORE: 4 out of 10