Over the last few years, a new type of game has appeared—the casino genre. Rising to the top of its genre, as well as the family entertainment category, according to NPD Entertainment November industry statistics, is a dark horse from Phantom EFX....Reel Deal Slots: Mystic Forest. Apparently Mystic Forest has become the favored game of thousands of players according to a list headed by the #1 game of all videogames...you guessed it, World of Warcraft. Being a slots game and named 8th for all videogames in October (according to PC Gamer) in the same list as WoW is an almost-unheard-of achievement in the gaming world.

So, what IS Mystic Forest? According to Pit Boss Ernie739, it is a game, not a gambling site. As such, it is accorded all the bells, whistles, and earmarks of a videogame. Said Ernie739 when I asked him if real dollars were played and won, “Yeah, right, I’D like to win that kind of money.” Real money doesn’t enter into the game at all, other than the initial cost of the game of $19.99 and a modest monthly subscription fee ($7.99 per month on a yearly basis, or $9.99 per month on a monthly basis). Oh, and in Mystic Forest, the GMs are called Pit Bosses – nice casino touch there.

I played Mystic Forest for a few days – and found it much more fun that I thought it would be. Basically, the game has four divisions to it—slots, poker, card games (such as Hearts, Spades, etc.), and table games (such as Let It Ride, Keno, Bingo, etc.). In single player (or offline) mode, you just play the slots as you would any of the dozens of solitaire games available at any number of sites throughout the internet. The difference here though is that the slots are FUN. The graphics are bright, colorful, and, well, different.

For one thing, many of the slot games are animated, and the animations and accompanying music and sound effects are delightful. Two of my favorite slots are Dragons and Froggies. In the Dragons slots, when you get a match according to the paylines you have picked, the pictures in the payline are animated, accompanied by the appropriate sound: one of them is a flying dragon who breathes fire onto a village...you watch the dragon flap over the village and you hear the whoosh of fire and the screams of the villagers. I know it sounds gory, but it isn’t – it’s too cartoonish to be gory. The animators and sound EFX people (in-house by the way) have done their jobs well. I am almost too squeamish to be a gamer, but this animation elicited a few chuckles out of me. Really, you have to see it to appreciate it.

Froggies slots is adorable. That statement will pretty much guarantee that most of the guys won’t play it, unless secretly...behind closed doors. However, it will be their loss. The music for Froggies (also written in-house, as are all the tunes in Mystic Forest) is a rollicking country melody, banjo and all, and the pictures on the slots are appropriately slices of nature...swinging opossums, which, when rolled into a winning combo, stick out their tongues and go PHLOOOOOO. Or words to that effect. The deer combo will wiggle their ears, and the flower combo sparkle appealingly. When you hit the Froggies bonus round you have a whole pond full of lily pads, with a number of frogs awaiting the start signal. When it goes, so do the frogs, from one lily pad to another. The lily pads have numbers, or COLLECT, or NEW FROGGIES, on them. Wherever the frogs jump, that is what you gain. If they jump on a COLLECT pad, they go “Blahhhhh” and are taken out of the game. The best thing is, as the bonus round keeps going, the numbers increase. Unfortunately, so do the COLLECTs. However, the results can be pretty impressive. I have gained as much as 536 credits...at $0.05 per credit...you do the math. You can set the number of paylines, by the way, as well as how much you are betting on each line-up to a maximum of five cents per line.

Now, I am not a slots player by nature. I generally find it too boring (along with Bejeweled and other games of that ilk). But these slots kept me captivated for quite a while. I counted 25 different slots games in all, but there may be more, and I tried about ten different ones. There is the type of slots where the columns roll and the idea is to get the paying pics in the middle of the line on each of the three columns. Even in Mystic Forest, that bored me, but the slots where there are animations and sound effects are so much fun I forgot I was even playing slots. AND the best thing of all in my opinion was that, once I got the hang of it, I was usually winning money...not so much with the slots themselves, although I could sometimes get a pretty good roll...but with the bonus rounds.

Each slots game has a different kind of bonus game. In the Pharaoh’s Prize II, for instance, a bunch of scarabs run around, with an eerie, rattling sound. When they stop, you pick one – it reveals its prize, whether it be a number of credits, a bonus multiplier (such as 2X on the next pick), or GAME OVER. In Knight’s Odyssey, the bonus game is a mini-game within a game and is a lot of fun to play.

Okay, we are still pretty much talking single-player. I finally screwed up my courage to go to the multiplayer side. I had hesitated, because I was under the impression that I would have to pay real money to play on the multiplayer side. Wrong! It is the same deal in the multiplayer mode as the offline mode, i.e. no real money allowed, just the game money, and it is worth the trip. The graphics and sound effects here are very entertaining. The opening scene is the entrance to a majestic casino, complete with marble columns and stairs. It is a vast and sophisticated layout, with people entering the casino and the buzz of people talking and laughing. You enter the lobby, which in the game is also the lobby, i.e. you enter the lobby chat and get to talk to the Pit Bosses.