G2E, day 2, Aristocrat, Spielo, Konami

A few  notes from Global Gaming Expo, Day 2:

**After two days of being accosted by zombies near the exhibit hall --- they growled at me, but ultimately parted enough that I could get through without turning undead --- I got my chance to see Aristocrat's The Walking Dead game through its license with AMC. It's feature rich, with Reel Growth extending reels 2, 3, 4 and 5 up an extra 1 to 3 spaces for added potential wins. In The Horde bonus, the Horde invades the screen and leaves wild symbols behind. As Aristocrat's Dallas Orchard demoed the game, a zombie took a shot in the head, splattering blood --- and wild symbols --- across the reels. When the blood starts flowing, it's good for the players.

**Spielo's Sphinx 3D is spectacular. Sphinx has been a great title for Spielo (formerly Atronic) for a long time, and in the new version, the 3-D effects are spectacular. As Mike Brennan, who was showing me the game watched, the coins from a big win seemed to jump right off the screen, and right at me. I reach out and grasped, and told him I'd like to take some of those coins right now.

Stacked wilds here are really stacked wilds. Coin-shaped discs depicting a scarab stack up on the same reel position. As the stack grows, it increases the number of times a winner is collected. At one point, I had a winner that included a stack of five scarabs. I collected the 250 credit win once, and a scarab disk was taken away. That was repeated, repeated, repeated and repeated again, until the last scarab had been used, I got the 250-coin win five times. It's a new way of stacking wilds that would work effectively only with great 3D.

**One of the pleasures of G2E is experiencing game features without investing any money. At the Konami booth, I sampled The Force of Legend, an Xtra Reward Game featuring Action Stacked Symbols The lion was a wild symbol, and each lion expanded into a stack to fill a three-symbol column. I triggered a bonus event, and had to choose credits or 45 spins under Konami's Balance of Fortune mechanic. I choose spins, and on No. 44 triggered 150 more. The total for 195 spins: $1,524.50 in imaginary money for a $4.50 imaginary bet.