SUPER STREAK - "Frozen horror of poverty stricken granny".

If any of you out there have been wondering whether or not there's a God, or a number of Gods, or indeed, any kind of benevolent overseer of this world of ours then stop your ponderings right now; because I can tell you for a fact that there isn't. How do I know this? Because there's a Super Streak. It's really that simple. Some people question the existence of God on the grounds of all the floods, hurricanes and terrible human suffering that blights the earth. You know, "If there was really a God he wouldn't let all those poor Ethiopians starve, he'd redistribute Burger King so that everyone could get a Whopper and large fries", that sort of thing.

There's a much simpler way of proving that there isn't a God, and that's the actuality of Super Streak. If there was a God, long before he or she even got round to thinking about the merest possibility of considering doing something about bombs and wars and starvation and Mazooma fruit machines, he or she would make absolutely sure that, under no circumstances, could a machine like Super Streak even be conceived of, let alone actually be built and unleashed upon an ill-prepared world.

You could probably write a little equation for it. IF SUPER STREAK = EXIST THEN GOD = NOT A FUCKING CHANCE MATE.

So then, having established that there isn't a God, let's get on with the important stuff, like Super Streak.

And where can one possibly start? How does such a preposterously horrible machine ever make it beyond the drawing board? How do designers sit around a table for a meeting and, at the end of it declare "Yeah, Super Streak, we'll do it!". Perhaps there is an evil, all-powerful, lunatic chief designer who all the other designers are scared of, and he decided that he wanted Super Streak to be built. In the same way that no one in the Cabinet dared tell Margaret Thatcher that the Poll Tax wasn't one of her best ideas, were all the junior designers so terrified of Evil Chief Designer that they went along with his insane wishes and made Super Streak a reality, despite the obvious peril in which it would place humanity?

Super Streak is bad, like, really horribly awfully bad. It was first released by Barcrest in 1994, and was a typical no-brainer lo-tech machine, the type of which still finds willing players in mental asylums and bingo halls across the land to this day. There's really nothing to it; on top of the usual "start" button, Barcrest gave it "hold", "streak" and "cancel/collect" buttons too, but they really needn't have bothered. Just a "start" button would have sufficed, and would have saved congenital idiots the extra mental strain of having to concentrate on more than one flashing button at any given time. In fact, why not just do away with the machine altogether? A potential player could simply enter an arcade, say to the attendant "I'd like to play Super Streak please", hand over between twenty and one-hundred pounds, get hit over the head with a hammer and leave, job done.

Gameplay is achingly, depressingly simple. Spin the reels time and time again, three like symbols on the win line awards the relevant value. Any three "streak" symbols in view awards a streak; three blue for the blue streak, three red for the "big" (ha ha) red streak, and three mixed for the pitiful mixed streak. Three holds and holds after nudges work, and wins will sometimes hold too. The streaks are awarded on all three visible lines, giving a massive twenty-seven winning streak combinations, how could you possibly lose?

And that, as they say, is it. The machine can be set to between 70% and 98%, or in English, excruciating torture right through to painful torture.

The version of Super Streak emulated in MPU3/4 is BWB's marvellous "rebuild". A rebuild is a peculiar thing, it's where fruit machine manufacturers get so painfully short of ideas (even more so than usual) that they dredge up an appalling machine from the annals of time and reincarnate it as some kind of hideously deformed bastard offspring of its long lost parent, usually utilising an exciting new cabinet design. BWB's rebuild of Super Streak deserves a special mention here.

When Barcrest originally released Super Streak the sound hardware used by MPU4 was somewhat primitive, and took the form of an FM sound chip added to the MPU4 card itself. This could create a range of fairly basic bloopy bleepy sound effects and tunes, rather like the original PC Sound Blaster cards' MIDI music. Of course, when BWB came to do the rebuild the Yamaha sound chip had long been dispensed with, and funky modern samples ruled the roost. So of course, BWB used a range of infinitely more pleasant, tuneful samples and good, solid sound effects for the rebuild. Except they didn't. What they did was to sample all the original horrible bloopy bleepy effects and play them back using the fancy modern sound hardware. The mind boggles.

That heresy aside, they didn't even bother to update the code properly. When it was originally released, Super Streak had £6 token, £3 cash jackpots. The streak values reflected this, so mixed streak would give as little as £2, blue streak at least £3 and the red streak at least £6. When rebuilt, £10 (and then £15) jackpots were all the rage, blue sevens had been promoted from £3 to £5, and red sevens to the new jackpot value. So of course, what BWB did was to alter the values of the streaks to reflect this, mixed at least £3, blue at least £5 and red at least the value of the jackpot. Except they didn't do that. They left the values exactly the same as they were. The mind stops boggling and gives up completely, retiring to a quiet nursing home in Skegness.

What else is wrong with Super Streak? It's a dull dull dull lo-tech; it requires no skill, brain activity, thought, consideration, guile or cunning on the part of the player whatsoever. It barely even requires the player to have a pulse. It can take huge amounts of money and give practically nothing back. When it does finally produce a super streak it will cheerfully do it for a half-blind half-senile granny who's prepared to chuck her pension at it every week, who then freezes to death during the next winter as she can't afford to feed her gas meter, newspaper headlines subsequently scream "FROZEN HORROR OF POVERTY STRICKEN GRANNY", and arcade operators relax on beaches in Florida whilst their psychotic armies of Super Streaks go about their despicable work back home.

Everything about it is wrong. It is pure, undiluted fruit machine balderdash of the highest order and anyone who plays it has either had a lobotomy or desperately needs one.

14th December 2001.