Ellen’s Have a Little Fun Today Slots
Official collaboration slots are all the rage in the modern land based casino floor, the success, or failure of these games depends broadly on three things. The first is the theme, a massive film like Avatar will always generate more fan following than a small series based game such as the original Transformers cartoon slot. The second is how much support and input is given by the official tie in, the recent Breaking Bad slot I covered featured little input from the characters of the series, contrast that with the Bewitched slot which has actual TV series audio and the difference is huge.
The final chapter of the official slot success story is the game itself, you can have a great theme with a huge fan following, lots of great content input from a partner and still mess up the gameplay and features. Taking on slots like this is the preserve of a very small number of game developers, amongst these IGT have become one of the better known and most successful at pulling this off with high profile game productions like Top Gun, CSI and Sex and the City.
The Ellen slot scores very high in the first two criteria, in over 12 years on her show, she has won more than 55 primetime emmy awards and is consistently one of the most watched women in television today. Thanks to Ellen herself the slot scores well for collaboration, instead of just allowing TV footage to be used on the game, Ellen voice recorded fresh content for IGT so all the audio voiceovers are properly tailored to the game, special segments of the show familiar to fans have been used as the bonus round. Score 2 for 2 IGT, the question is – can you make it 3 for 3 and give us great gameplay also?
Theme & Features
The cabinet itself is IGT’s latest crystal core case, which players will have seen on the Avatar slots, this has a single full length vertical LCD which IGT believe creates a more immersive experience, on the right game we would tend to agree and visually it is very impressive. The audio is superb although perhaps not the level of some of the top movie slots given the lack of natural sound effects available to an action film for instance versus a game show slot.
This is actually the 3rd slot released in this series, the reel symbols haven’t changed much from the first two with frequent co-hosts, famous stage props from the show and a variety of different images of Ellen herself available on this 5×3 reel 40 pay-line machine, which is available to play as both a penny and nickel slot machine, jackpots of up to 500,000 credits await lucky winners.
What has changed in the latest slot is the bonus features, first is the 5 free spins bonus, which in addition to the spins features a ‘dunk tank’ bonus based on a part of the TV series, a random character sits above each reel and is dunked halfway through a spin randomly, the player can then touch the screen to reveal a bonus for the dunked character – possibly unlocking extra wilds on that reel for the spins duration.
The second bonus change is the ‘What’s in the box’ round which again comes from a famous part of the show, layers can select one of three boxes to win up to 10000 credits or a special prize from Ellen’s prize parade which is any one of 20x multipliers. Last but not least is the wheel of riches round where random prizes including two jackpot values are available on this cash slot for instant win should the wheel come to a stop at their trigger.
Summary
This game has it all, a big celebrity, great gameplay even in the base game and stunning visuals. What really ties it all together though is the voice work, with Ellen so involved in the game rather than using stock recordings it just blends so much more seamlessly than many collaboration slots. Of all the new slot machines to hit Vegas recently – this is one of the biggest.