HI JINX - "You can have three bones at once. Fnaar."

Now here's an enjoyable machine, and one I used to enjoy playing in the pub. It has similarities to Cash Attack, but instead of hi/lo gambling to move across the board there's a looped trail to move around. Nothing too remarkable about the overall design, there's a trail 1-8, with entry to the cash ladder at 9. There's no feature exchange, every cash win automatically puts you on board, the better the win, the higher your start position.

Bonuses are given from overlaid symbols on the reels, there are boosts, stoppas, skillstops, selectors and nudges. As with Cash Attack, clever use of nudges can bring in bonuses, and extra nudges to get more bonuses or higher wins. Some of the set-ups can be quite complicated, and with a little thought you can turn what looks like a 60p win offered from autonudge into a £4 win (or even a jackpot), or get enough bonuses to put you high up on the cash ladder. Don't blindly nudge in the closest win or bonus, think about what each bonus does, how many nudges you need to get the next one and so on.

Every so often the machine will give you a superhold (listen out for a funny noise and watch for the Mr.B light flashing). Press cancel to activate super hold, again, devise a strategy and bring in the best combination of nudges and bonuses. 

Simply maximising your reel wins or entry to the cash ladder is an entertaining challenge in itself, once you've got a win you're given a starting position on the board and you have a looped trail game to play. Each spin moves you the number of spaces shown on the hi/lo reel. There are move up and down sqaures (one or two spaces), add to the cash ladder squares (+1 and +2), a Bone square (allows you to survive landing on the dog square on the trail or the board, you can have up to 3 bones at any time), a Dog square (kills you unless you have a bone), Cheese squares (adds to the Supa Streak cheese stack) and mystery squares.

As you move across the board various features and cash repeaters are offered, you can also collect the cash ladder value at any time. However, don't think you're safe just because you have a bone or two hidden away (fnaar). The mystery square has a few options available to it for killing you off. There's a good old Game Over, along with a Spin Even and a Continue YES/NO. On the neutral/plus side it can give a bone, a taxi, collect prize, do or die (a re-run of Death Or Glory from Cash Attack), add cheese or skillstop. Truth be told though, the mystery is pretty nasty except when the machine's jackpot happy.

Features to look out for are Reel Skill (same as Cash Attack, an easy jackpot but don't expect to be offered it too often) and Seventh Heaven, which, in a touching display of marvellous generosity always steps to a 3 of a kind 7s win. All you have to do is make sure a red 7 (for £6) gets to the win line first, as opposed a blue 7 (£4), by selecting step up or step down. Stop 'n Step can go mental when it wants to, as can Crazy Cash, although the bold player would choose to press on for the ultimate prize of jackpot repeater were he (or she) to get that far. 

Making progress on the board can be tricky, when it's in a bad mood it can get frustrating, this is exacerbated if set to low %ages. It will sometimes put you straight back on the board after killing you off, occasionally 3 or 4 times in a row, but never offering anything better on each subsequent attempt. This does give you more bangs for your buck, but can get quickly get annoying.

As always, keep an ear and eye out for cancel bonuses (a notable one is on the stoppa bonus, which changes the usual frantically flashing light into a nice easy skillstop for a jackpot). 

Everything is wrapped up with an excellent sound package, great artwork and a "friendly" design, along with genuinely engaging gameplay. Having said all that, on less than 78% it's a shadow of what it is on even a slightly higher payout (such as 84%), the set-ups are much less challenging and imaginative, the board is predictable and dreary and it rarely gives a decent streak.

Those greedy operators and arcade owners. Gotta love 'em, eh?

August 2001