caesars palace journey

I wish had some cutesy story here like “I used to play this at my great grandpa’s house…” but actually I was playing slots to get myself to stop playing gacha like a nicotine patch or something. my great grandpa did have super caesars palace but I never played it and never seen him play it, definitely not a formative childhood memory, probably.

I don’t know how these games normally work, but caesars palace throws you in a casino with $5,000 and to “win” you have to transform that into $140,000, though you get different endings before then too depending on when you decide to cut your losses (and of course like any casino the only way to win is to leave, lol). I played the game boy one first which has a cutsey point and click presentation so it feels like a cd-rom era game. the game doesn’t have saves or a password system so it was just a sisyphean luck challenge I was doing when I needed to stim… until last weekend a good friend of mine got me an everdrive x7 for christmas and I used save states to extend my play sessions and eventually win from hitting good paylines in slots and then getting the last bit from blackjack.

so with one portable caesars challenge down, I had the tiny brain idea to see if it was the same game on the game gear. it wasn’t much at all. instead of a point and click carnival thing, they give you this real schlub down on his luck looking avatar who slowly shuffles through casino purgatory.

now “embodied” it felt really creepy and estranging to slowly map out and walk through three floors of this casino where every other interactable is a copy paste interface into the same 4 games. and the walk speed is slow, slow, slow, it feels like you’re playing a jake clover or jack king-spooner game or something. it is credibly a “walking sim” only you’re walking around the evil that would later infect videogames. this is all enhanced by the washed out game gear lcd that can barely contain any game to begin with. when you finally make it to a table or a machine and hit the 1 button, you’re just like a disembodied hand that plays very slowly and methodically, it’s really uncanny valley.

but the cincher for the game gear version is that they opted to not put in an ending at all. so you can’t leave. there’s no goal to reach a certain amount of credit and there’s no way out of the casino. you’re stuck in las vegas purgatory until you turn off the game. I got bored of the sim and eventually put in a password for 9 million and wasted it all on horse bets and turned the game off.