A few years ago Barcrest were one of the best fruit machine companies out there. Their games were all very playable. This machine was no exception.

On the outside it was a horrible game, extremely nasty to those who didn't know how to play it, extremely great for those that did. If you tired to brute fore this one you were going to get your wallet drained very quickly! You couldn't just go lower than 10s and higher than 3s, it would kill you off almost straight away. What you had to do was step to a decent number and then you were odds on to a hi lo gamble win. This meant you needed as many steps as possible and when you ran out you had to know what to collect.

Here's a clip of the machine in a happy mood, offerening lots of steps from the bonus and giving bad numbers that step too good numbers, if that makes sense.



The machine also had some great SFX!

Getting a jackpot repeater was hard work. The only 2 ways of this were a supermode jackpot or filling the steps. Filling the steps was much easier to do. All you had to do was have a cople of step and have a couple of nudges left. Simply respining the reel would often bring in other numbers adn alot of the time hitting the 4 or 5 which would give you a huge step boost! Check the vid out.



There were some sure signs of readyness on this machine. Just from the bonus aswell. Selector was great, usually giving 4 steps but if it gave nudges someone had done something seriously wrong! With nudges you could nudge as many times as possible but as soon as the numbers were nudged in for the feature, that's what you'd end up with. Blue 7s, melons and red 7s could be had from nudges! Starting a feature with a win like this would usually give you the top. Maybe a big top, again from selector :-)



This machine and it's clones loved to do a 3 jackpot run. Jackpot was prety hard to get if you dodn't know what to look for. The 3 stand out features were reel roulette on super mode, step to nearest either super or normal and loco hold. Step to nearest was easy as, there was 1 set up where you needed 5 nudges and then enough to get to the feature. Basically you'd have a red 7 on reel 1 and reel 3, on or close to the winline. Within 5 nudges jackpot symbols could be nudged in the reel 1 and 3s winline. From this point jakcpot is there with step to nearest.

Reel roulette on super was easy enough. Just have a jckpot symbol on basically anywhere but the winline on reel 2. A slow pick of whichever win you wanted. Stop it on a jackpot symbol for jackpot!

Loco hold was a bit more complex. You had to set the reels up so that when the reels stepped round jackpot could be taken via a super hold. Sounds easy but takes a bit more setting up.

Here's a clip of this machine giving a couple of jackpots.



If on the feature you were offered supermode or boost then the machine was ready to pay. The machine was most of the time in this state due to it being a bastard to the casual punter! Hitting super mode was great, you just knew a jackpot wasn't too far away!



This machine is quite old now. Not many about anymore. Your only hope is in a seaside arcade but then it'll be on a £5 jackpot, which to be fair, isn't worth the bother. Luckly for you (and me) there is fruit machine emulation. The video is Golden Dragon running in mfme9.4, the unofficial leaked version of mfme. Te layout is a 'Classic' version. None or little graphics involved but the machines is functional. I personally created this layout, pretty much because I owned the machine for a year or so and loved it! I still to the day wish I still had it.. At least owning it gave me the chance to photo the reels and the machine. I used the reels and some one within the fruit machine emulation scene used to photos to make a DX.



If you want to have this machine running on your pc, ask me how to here of via my youtube channel

http://www.youtube.com/FruitVideos