Gambling Control Board Allows Possible Conflict

In the mid-1940s, Harry Williams revolutionized the pinball business and became one of the country's leading manufacturers of slot machines. His company, WMS indusries, makes the slot machines that are used here in Maine. But now WMS is being acquired by Scientific Games. That's the same firm that monitors the slot machine revenue for the state and alerts gaming regulators if slot machines are out of compliance with state standards. The deal has triggered a tilt warning of sorts for Timothy Doyle, chair of the state's Gambling Control Board.

"I almost likened it to a referee owning a football team, at least in my mind," Doyle said.

The board has been grappling with the WMS acquisition ever since Scientific Games announced the $1.5 billion dollar transaction in January. Even before casino gaming, Scientific Games has overseen online lottery sales like Powerball and Megabucks Plus, as well as lottery scratch tickets. Patrick Fleming, the Gambling Control board's executive director, says Scientific Games must undergo the same level of scrutiny as WMS to ensure it meets state qualifications as a slot machine distributor. But Fleming says a financial review by Macdonald-Page, a South Portland accounting firm, turned up nothing of concern.

"Macdonald Page did not find anything in the review that would lead them to believe that Scientific Games or WMS gaming are not financially viable or financially responsible nor did they find anything in the financial or tax information submitted by the key executives to indicate that the key executives are not financially responsible," Fleming said.

Fleming said Don Armstrong, an investigator for the board, looked into the past activities of the Scientific Game's top three officers and failed to find anything that would adversely affect the individuals' suitability to distribute slot machines in Maine. Despite Fleming's analysis of the firms and its principals, Doyle remains troubled that the state is paying a company to essentially track its own stream of gambling revenue.

"I'm still concerned for what appears to be a conflict, the monitoring system and the slot machine distributor being the same entity," Doyle said.

Just because Scientific Games is the holding company though, does not mean the firm cannot independently monitor the slot machines it will acquire from WMS. Maine is among 14 gambling jurisdictions that permit a company to conduct central site monitoring of machines that it owns. Mike Freese, vice-president of regulatory affairs for Scientific Games, told board members that stakes are high for the company to ensure that its operations meet the highest level of scrutiny and accountability.

"I think it really comes down to one of the charges of all regulators and that is to maintain the integrity of gaming," Freese said.

"Gambling is such a morally suspect industry that you really have to stay away from perceived conflicts as well as real conflicts," said Professor I. Nelson Rose.

That's I. Nelson Rose, a professor of Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa, California and a recognized expert on gambling laws. He says if he were advising Maine's Gambling Control Board, he would recommend putting the slot revenue tracking out to bid simply to eliminate A potential conflict -- despite Scientific Game's ability and intention to keep both operations separate.

"There's no reason why this has to be the same company that's both monitoring and operating the slot machines," Rose said. "Self-regulation is really never a good idea."

The board voted to ask Scientific Games to provide it with additional written information explaining how it will prevent perceived conflicts of interest. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.happmart.com.

Ouya Console Looks to Fill Gaming Market Niche

I’ve spent the past couple days trying out the Ouya console. While it is a legitimate gaming machine, it’s not a real threat to grab serious market share from any of the “Big Three” console makers.

At $99, the tiny box and downloadable games in the $20 range are priced low enough to attract casual and occasional gamers who dig playing time-wasters on their smartphones. And, because of the Ouya’s potential to emulate several other earlier-generation consoles, it’s also likely to appeal to nostalgic and retro-gamers.

Ouya was funded through a Kickstarter project. Reviews of an earlier, beta version weren’t flattering, so I was somewhat skeptical as I unpacked the console. The strip of red plastic film printed with the message “And so the revolution begins” atop the console did nothing to allay my journalistic skepticism.

There’s literally not much to Ouya, which was released on June 25. I’ve had coffee mugs bigger than the little round-edged cube, which features a single power-on button, but an array of ports on the back. The Ouya has an HDMI port that let me display at a full 1080 resolution on my home LED television, plus a LAN port, a power port and a USB port.

The Ouya started right up,

but required us to both establish a network connection and update the console’s Android-based firmware. That proved to be somewhat of a problem in my office. Our intranet firewall settings precluded our using a wired connection, so we quickly paired the console’s wireless controller to the Ouya and sought out one of several wireless networks we maintain. We connected to the first and began the system update, but the Ouya kept getting disconnected from wi-fi and cutting off the update. We then tried a second of the office wireless networks, with the same discouraging result.

At that point, we opted to tether the console to the wi-fi hotspot created by a colleague’s iPhone, and around a half-hour after getting started, we were updated and ready to go. It’s important to note that you’ll have to create an account for yourself on the Ouya, including providing your sign-in name, a password, an email and a credit card number. That raised some questions in my mind about the security of Ouya’s servers, ones that I will be posing in a telephone interview with CEO and founder Julie Uhrman on Tuesday.

I took the Ouya home and found it failed to stay connected to my wired LAN. I play Xbox Live just fine on that connection, so I don’t understand why the Ouya kept disconnecting and canceling game downloads or giving me error messages. That, by the way, is a common theme with the device, I’m finding. Often, after clicking on a button to start a game or perform another action, I’d get an error message on the screen. Clicking again would make the message disappear and the game open or the action continue. I noticed the machine worked fine when in constant use, but after I’d put down the controller for a minute or two, I’d tend to get the errors. Anyway, I was unable to tether the Ouya to my own iPhone’s hotspot, but it worked very well on my home wi-fi network.

The Ouya’s opening menu features several very clear and basic commands, like “play,” “manage” and “discover.” “Discover” takes you to the games menu, where you can find listings for around a couple hundred games in several easily navigable categories. All that I tried were free to download and play in a test or demo version, with a button to purchase the full game. The games, themselves, are a mixed bag, which I will get into later. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.happmart.com.

Could SC see a revival in video poker?

Last winter as the Legislature took its first steps to outlaw Internet sweepstakes games, an experienced lawyer with the S.C. Attorney General’s office warned lawmakers that video poker barons always have another card up their sleeves.

Just months after that warning, a bill filed late during the legislative session has some worried the next card may have been played.

The bill, sponsored by S.C. Rep. Bill Herbkersman, R-Beaufort, was introduced, referred to a committee and even received a hearing late in the legislative session. Lawmakers will be able to pick up on the bill where they left off when they return in January.

Herbkersman said the bill would not allow the return of video gambling. Instead, he said, he is filing it on behalf of his constituents in the Sun City retirement community who have complained that the state’s gambling laws are too restrictive.

“We want to get ladies in Sun City to be able to go in the clubhouse, have a glass of wine and play cribbage,” Herbkersman said. “It’s not a gambling law. It’s a personal freedom law.”

Others who have battled video poker for years said some of the same industry players who have been around for years were at the spring hearing, leading to concerns that the bill is another back-door attempt to bring back video poker. This summer, Herbkersman and others who support the bill will meet with State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel to discuss it.

Meanwhile, police across the state continue their efforts to stamp out video gambling that popped up a couple of years ago when game operators argued they had found a loophole in state law that allowed their machines.

At iInternet sweepstakes parlors, customers paid for a product such as phone cards or copying services and then got to play video games for a chance to win prizes, including cash. They said their games were no different from McDonald’s Monopoly promotion. They also pointed to a measure in the state’s gambling laws that says businesses with beer and wine permits can hold promotional sweepstakes.

Law enforcement, including Keel and S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson, said no loophole existed but urged legislators to rewrite the law to end any debate. Legislators complied, and Gov. Nikki Haley signed the bill into law in March. The warning that the poker industry always will try another tactic came during a Senate committee hearing as legislators moved to close the perceived loophole.

Since then, the sweepstakes parlors, which mostly operated out of strip malls and only served the purpose of gambling, have vanished. Police have reported finding machines scattered across the state in bars, convenience stores and other locations.

Sheriff Leon Lott said sweepstakes parlors vanished from Richland County after he raided one that had opened in the spring of 2012 on Sparkleberry Road Extension. But individual machines occasionally are found in businesses across the county, he said.

Last week, the Columbia Police Department reported it had seized 22 machines from several businesses in Columbia. Most of those machines were called Palmetto Gold or Chess Challenge II, according to incident reports. At one Farrow Road convenience store, the owner told police that customers played the games for a chance to win tickets that could be redeemed for groceries and beverages at the store, according to a May 29 incident report. The machines and $22 were taken by police. Click on their website happmart for more information.

The tedious act of recovering Lost Wages

It turns out that the name Leisure Suit Larry has become an ironic title, as the cold reality of the game’s resource management tasks set in and reloading the game to fill your wallet becomes a painful chore. Again and again you scurry off to refill hapless Larry’s wallet at one of many electronic gambling machines, where luck rather than skill determines how quickly you can move through the game. Do you spend time walking outside and receiving a $10 gift from a homeless man when you’ve gone broke or do you simply “cheat” and reload the last save, from when you actually still had money to gamble?

The blame isn’t entirely on N-Fusion Interactive or publisher Replay Games. To be fair, going broke in the original Sierra title meant a game over and forced reload. Turning the clock back is much more of a voluntary act here, since that same homeless fellow will keep feeding you a sawbuck every time you bottom out. Instead of being forced to reload, you simply want to because it’s so horribly dull to keep betting your $10 and losing it, over and over, until you hit a long enough string of jackpots to fill your wallet anew. The difference now is that you feel like you’re cheating every time.

There are other strange design choices here as well. Increasing your bet can only be done in $1 increments, each of which requires a single click, since holding down the mouse button brings up a radial menu for swapping between the different pointer commands. It’s a redundant feature, since you can also use your scrollwheel, your right mouse button, or a drop-down menu at the top of the screen to switch. Then there’s the lack of quick-save/quick-load buttons, forcing you to dive through a series of menus every time you want to recover your lost dollars.

If you’re wondering you’ve just spent three paragraphs reading about a story-driven adventure game’s slot machines, it’s because of how much time you spend staring at them. Larry’s money is constantly trickling away as you play, whether you’re spending it on cabs, on booze, on paying for an ill-advised wedding, and on any number of other things. You need it, and you’ll need considerably more in the end than the paltry $100 you start with. Gambling is a requirement.

This was a poor choice in the original game and it remains a poor choice now. The lingering importance of gambling in the game is frustrating, but it also speaks to the bigger issues at play in Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded. There’s a failure of design, but there’s also a creative miscalculation. Replay’s successful Kickstarter campaign for Reloaded could have delivered a re-born Larry for a 21st century audience, but little has been done to fix what was fundamentally broken before.

The finished product here feels more like a direct port of the VGA remake from the ’90s with a new skin on top of it. Fan service is valuable, but Larry felt uneven in 1987. N-Fusion could have gotten away with taking some creative license here and there to deliver a more fun game instead of just an HD re-release. There’s new content in the form of an extra woman to spurn Larry’s advances, and the point-and-click play continues to be charming, but the hoop-jumping progression through the story hinges too much on luck rather than the player’s powers of deduction. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.happmart.com.