Hail King Elvis by John Grochowski 

 

Don't let any old Hound Dog tell you different. Leading Edge Design and IGT have a solid gold hit on their hands. Pair the King of Rock 'n Roll with the enhanced payoffs of Leading Edge's Multi-Strike format, and you have a game that cries out "Love Me Tender."

And when you reach the top level, there's no need to plead "Don't Be Cruel," because you could wind up with a hunka, hunka burnin' cash.

Elvis Multi-Strike, the latest game from the designers of Multi- Strike Poker, is ready to rock through the Midwest. First stop on the tour: Wisconsin, where the Lake of the Torches, St. Croix and Northern Lights casinos had installed the game by midsummer. More were on order throughout Wisconsin and in Michigan - by the time you read this, another half-dozen late summer installations should have been made.

And while the game is awaiting approval and licensing for play on Midwest riverboats and barges - chugging through regulatory bodies in various states can be a bit of a mystery train - it won't be long before Elvis is top of the charts throughout the region.

Leading Edge is a Northbrook, Illinois, based firm that designs games, which then are manufactured and distributed through a working agreement with Reno, Nevada, based IGT, the world's largest slotmaker. The biggest hit so far for Leading Edge has been Multi-Strike Poker, but the company has plenty of creative games with a difference under its belt, including Othello, Gems Wild Tiles and Big Split Poker.

The new Elvis game takes the Multi-Strike format and applies it to a video slot machine. In Multi-Strike Poker, a winner on your first hand brings you a second hand worth double the payoffs, a winner there brings a third hand worth four times the first, and the winner on the third brings a fourth hand worth eight times the first. On a quarter game, a royal flush with maximum coins played brings the usual $1,000 on the first hand, but at the top level, it's worth $8,000.

Elvis Multi-Strike is a three-level game instead of the four levels on the poker game. Each level is a 20-line video slot game. A winner on the first level brings a second worth double the first, and a winner there doubles the payoffs again, so that the third level is worth four times the first. That adds a lot of excitement, as video poker players know. Even a small hit can be pretty lucrative when it comes with a 4x multiplier.

"The game has two great attractions, and some players like one while some like the other," said Larry DeMar, president and CEO of Leading Edge. "There's Multi-Strike play, and that's exciting even for non-Elvis fans. There's the chance for big wins as you move up that worked so well with the poker game.

"The other side, of course, is Elvis, and Elvis is timeless, classic, appealing to all ages and all genders."

Oddly, Elvis Multi-Strike is more like the game DeMar had in mind when he first came up with the Multi-Strike concept that is Multi-Strike Poker.

"We actually did the slot game first," DeMar explained. "We were not video poker experts at the time we were developing the game. I was a video poker player, but we didn't have a handle on ferreting out the math for video poker yet. We created the slot first, then quickly developed the video poker.

"The slot game turned out to be more ambitious, both with the Elvis material and the AVP platform (IGT's Advanced Video Platform for slot games) not quite ready for the game." The easy assumption would be that when the Multi-Strike format worked so well with video poker, designers thought it would be cool to apply it to a video slot.

"That's the exact concept, except we went at it the other way," DeMar says. "We designed the slot first, then made it into poker. We called the original game Triple Strike, and it was a three-stage slot. Then when we came up with a four-stage poker game, we couldn't call it Triple-Strike. Quad-Strike didn't sound quite right."

For one thing, Quad-Strike might have led video poker players to believe bonuses were triggered by quads - four of a kind. Multi- Strike it was, and is. When Leading Edge took the concept to IGT, Elvis entered the building.

"That was Joe Kaminkow (IGT's vice president of engineering and game design)," DeMar explained. "IGT hadn't refreshed the Elvis reel- spinning slots since 1999 when they came out with Elvis II, and there never had been a video Elvis slot. We had a long discussion, and came to a pretty good agreement to do Elvis.

"We started creating the bonus rounds, revisiting Graceland. There was a lot of time taken with the AVP team, working with them. They didn't have a facility to handle Multi-Strike on the original system, and that had to be developed." Along the way, Leading Edge came up with a number of bonus rounds that put the King right at center stage.

You might find yourself reliving the glory days in the Photo Memories bonus rounds, where a record spins on a turntable, with dozens of tiny photographs of Elvis lining the perimeter. As an Elvis tune plays, an arrow at the center of the record spins through the photos. When it stops, the indicated photograph is enlarged, giving a good look at an Elvis memory and a bonus award.

Or you might take a walk through the Hall of Gold, with walls lined with Elvis record plaques. You'll stop at a group of eight, each with a different Elvis song. You choose three, starting the music, and as the King sings, meters indicating record sales mount at the bottom of each plaque. As the numbers get bigger, the records change from black to silver to gold to platinum, and the longer Elvis performs, the bigger the sales, and your bonus grows.

Elvis diehards will swoon over the Fan-O-Meter bonus. You choose from among five Elvis songs, and then concert footage shows the King singing your song. At points during the performance, the crowd cheers and claps and roars, and a meter in the top box of the machine registers just how big a crowd reaction Elvis is getting. The higher the meter rises, the bigger your bonus.

"We see some players cheering along, as if their noise can help move the meter," DeMar says.Elvis Multi-Strike includes 18 songs, with 45 different performances by Elvis in concert. "The player gets to choose the song most of the time, and there are two, three, four performances of a song," DeMar points out. "So even if you choose "Love Me Tender," more than once, each time can be a different performance."

The three second-screen bonuses are augmented by a Rockin' Respin feature on the first screen, with Photo Memories and Record Sales serving as the Rockin' Respin symbols. Any time two Photo Memories or two Record Sales symbols land on the first two reels, they lock in along with any other wild Rockin' Respin symbols on the other reels, and the remaining reels spin again. If another Rockin' Respin turns up, they too lock in, and the other reels respin. If no new respin symbols land on the paylines, the round is over.

That's plenty of bonus excitement to go with the anticipation factor of climbing from single to double to quadruple payouts. Only when you have a loser on the first screen is it really Heartbreak Hotel time.

But then, designing interesting, fun games with a difference is what Leading Edge does. Here are some of the other Leading Edge games you may have seen in casinos in the last several years.

Multi-Strike Poker; Five-Play Multi-Strike Poker: The original Multi-Strike has been Leading Edge's biggest success. Multi-Strike is available with a variety of video poker favorites - Jacks or Better, Double Bonus Poker, Deuces Wild and many more. It's a volatile game, because the player is making maximum bet wagers of 20 coins at a time, instead of the usual five on single-line video poker. And despite that large bet, there's no guarantee that you'll get to see more than one hand.

You will advance about half the time. Leading Edge has designed a "free ride" feature into the game. It appears randomly, and when it does, you advance a level regardless of whether you have a winner. When you do advance, the wins can mount up nicely. On the fourth level, where wins are worth eight times those on the first hand, even a common high pair that usually brings only a five-coin return instead is a nice 40-coin win. A full house that's worth 45-coins on a single-line 9-6 Jacks or Better game brings 360 coins on the top level of Multi-Strike. And you collect any wins on the lower lines, too.

Five-Play Multi-Strike marries Action Gaming's multi-hand play, as in Triple Play or Five Play Poker, to the Multi-Strike format. On each level, you see one hand, choose which cards to hold, then the draw is played out five times. For each winner, you get a hand on the next level up. If you're dealt a pat winner on the first line, for instance, you get the full five hands on the second level. If you then draw only one winner on the second level, you get one hand on the third.That gives you more chances to get to the top, and smoothes out some of Multi-Strike's natural volatility. In the basic setup it's a 100- coin maximum bet, so the game really works best on low denominations such as nickels.

Gems Wild Tiles: A new video slot game, this isn't exactly Multi- Strike, but it's a game with a difference. Several differences, in fact. You get a grid of 25 gems - diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires and so on. Any three or more that connect on the screen make a winning combination. That connection doesn't have to be horizontal - it can be vertical, up and down the same column on the screen.

If that was the only difference in the game, it would be a nice gimmick. But there's more. After winning combinations are paid, winning symbols disappear, leaving blank spaces. The other symbols on the screen drop down to fill the blanks, and you get new combinations and new chances to win. On any three-symbol winner, only two of them disappear. The middle symbol stays on the screen and turns into a wild symbol, matching any other symbols and increasing the chances at extra wins.

But wait, there's more. The game has a multiplier feature. Each time symbols disappear and others drop, a multiplier increases by one. So your first winner is worth a single payoff, then after gems drop, a second winner is worth double pays, a third worth triple pays and so on. A real diamond in the rough.

Big Split Poker: Here's an easy alternative to draw poker games. There are several paytables, but in each, on the initial deal, the player receives eight cards, which the player then must arrange into a five-card hand and a three-card hand. The five-card hand determines a payback, and the three-card hand determines a multiplier. Multiply the five-card winnings by the three-card multiplier and you get an overall return for the hand.

There are four versions of the game, with the basic version just called Big Split, to go with Big Split Deuces Wild, Big Split Joker and Big Split Joker Joker. The paytable for the five-card hand starts at two pair, with the higher pair being jacks or better. The multiplier hand must be at least a high card. The game tells you whether you have a winner before you arrange the cards - if no winner is possible, the game is over and you move to the next hand.

How you arrange them can make a difference. In some cases, you'll get more money by settling for a lesser top hand to take a bigger multiplier on the bottom.

Othello: Based on the venerable board game that uses black-and-white discs, Leading Edge's Othello is essentially an 18-line video slot with a bonus round. There are 32 discs, arranged in four horizontal rows of eight each (and eight vertical columns of four each). Just as in the board game, each disc on the video screen is black on one side and white on the other.

The player picks either white or black, and may wager from 1 to 18 coins. Each coin corresponds to a payline - the eight four-disc columns are paylines, as are the eight left-to-right diagonals that include four discs. The equivalent of spinning the reels is spinning the discs, virtual end over virtual end. Any payline that includes four discs of the player's chosen color is a winner.

Just how much the player wins depends on how many paylines are winners. Several paytables are available - play for free on the Leading Edge site, www.ledgaming.com, and you'll get a five-coin return for one winning row, with 10 for two wins, 25 for three, 48 for four, 180 for five, 500 for six, 765 for seven, 1,000 for eight, 1,200 for nine, 1,500 for 10, 4,000 for 11 and 10,000 for 12, 15,000 for 13 or 25,000 for 14. The five- and six-line payoffs will be where players make their money, combining the frequency of wins with high payoffs.

The bonus round launches whenever a horizontal row includes eight discs of the player's chosen color - about once per 65 spins. That brings a second-screen bonus that mimics the board game in that the object is to trap discs of the opposite color between two of your own. The biggest bonus, of about 150 times the bet, comes when the player traps exactly one disc on each spin in the round. There's another bonus when the first seven in a row are the player's color, but the eighth is not. That starts the Gold Coin bonus - the eight discs in the row morph into gold coins, and the player chooses three to reveal bonus awards.

It takes only a spin or two to get comfortable with Othello's format. Anyone used to playing video slots will feel instantly at home, even if they've never played the Othello board game.These are all fun, all creative games with a difference that have carved their niches. But Elvis Multi-Strike, now there's a game with a big, big niche. After all, Elvis is the King.

- John Grochowski is the author of The Casino Answer Book, The Slot Machine Answer Book, The Video Poker Answer Book and the Craps Answer Book, available through Bonus Books, Inc. at (800) 225-3775 or online at www.casinoanswerman.com.