GHOST TRAIN - "It's a pile of malformed crap"

Empire is to fruit machine design as the Real IRA is to murderous terrorism. It’s not that they’re particularly bad at what they do, they both just lack a certain finesse.

Undisputed masters of the blatant rip-off, (they even use old cabinets that once housed other fruit machines), Empire have enjoyed some degree of success by taking a long, hard look at what everyone else is doing, copying it, and charging less for the result than is being asked for the original.

In all fairness, they’ve become increasingly competent at it over the years, with the result that some of their newer machines are pretty much as good as those that inspired them (and in a couple of instances, actually a bit better).

Unfortunately, Ghost Train is not one of these machines.

Its inspiration is (i.e. it’s a rip off of) JPM’s classic “Roller Coaster”, but where RC is a well-designed, exciting, challenging machine that responds well to skilful play, Ghost Train is a hateful, tedious, predictable pile of malformed crap.

Basic gameplay is fairly simple, there’s a feature entry trail that runs 1-7, feature entry is at 7. Numbers are overlaid on certain symbols and these add to the trail, the middle reel has one symbol with an overlaid “Bonus”, which awards one of the usual suspects; Boost, Respin, Skill Stop and so on. (Even at this point Ghost Train falls down, where as with Roller Coaster you can, for example, hold reels that you want to keep when given a respin there’s no such trickery available to the Ghost Train player). There are no extras to be had by having enough numbers to take you beyond position 7, there’s just feature entry and that’s it, off you go. It may seem harsh, but life was brutal back in those days.

OK then, what’s so bad about it? Well, just play it, go on. Each feature can be in one of 3 “modes”. Mode 1 involves landing on stupid, pointless extra skulls, surviving a mystery or two, not landing on a single thing that’s worth collecting and then finding your way to a Ride Over or fatal mystery square. Mode 2 is a slight variation on Mode 1, maybe giving you the opportunity to collect a half-decent feature before killing you off. Mode 3 is, ooh look here comes a jackpot and it’s so obvious even a quadrospazzed (TM Brass Eye) Stevie Wonder could see it coming.

The strange thing is that Roller Coaster does this type of thing as well, but it manages to do it with some degree of style and not be quite so tiresomely predictable. For a start, it has 8 decent features instead of 7 (mostly feeble copies), and the trail is much longer. There are some “blank” squares that it can use to let you make more progress along the trail before killing you off. To get the big money repeater on Ghost Train you simply have to light the 4 skulls. On Roller Coaster you have to spin a 3,5,7,9 and 11, each number awarding one of 5 coconuts. This introduces extra strategy and skill as you can try to get extra coconuts using the hi/lo gamble up the columns or, should you get a Roll Up off the mystery (this has been replaced with a simple “Continue” in Ghost Train) you can (if you’re a bit special) hit the number you want off that.

Ghost Train’s problems with having a short trail are compounded by the fact that it offers higher values earlier on, increasing the need for a hasty death before anything remotely decent is offered. The Add Again squares are largely pointless in Ghost Train, Roller Coaster uses them as a clever gameplay device, and you can combine skill stops or roll ups with them to great effect.

To top it all off, Ghost Train’s features manage to be dull and require little in the way of skill, despite being largely stolen from Roller Coaster. For example, features such as The Waltzers on RC (crudely implemented as Win Roll here) could be manipulated to offer high amounts; you just get what you’re given on Ghost Train.

The original machine had terrible artwork and appalling sound. As Empire’s sound ROMs aren’t currently available the implementation of Ghost Train in MPU3/4 uses Mad House’s sounds, but don’t worry, you’re really not missing much.

As an emulated game Ghost Train is tolerable, basically because you're not pissing your money away by playing it. But believe me, this really isn't a machine that you'd want to play for real. I did once, and I've been in therapy ever since.

One final thing, the ROM you downloaded for Ghost Train will be set to 10p play, £10 jackpot and a 70% payout, at these settings the “gameplay” (such as it isn’t) is execrable. Fiddle with the dipswitches to change to 25p, £10, 84% and it gets a bit better. Not much mind. Just a bit. (For details on how to alter Empire machines’ settings see the MPU3/4 V6.0 readme file).

Overall then, I don’t really like it much. Do you see?

9th August 2001