Gamestec’s Find Five Gameshow

My fight for consumer rights continues with another well placed complaining e-mail:

Dear Gamestec,

I feel compelled to write to you with regards to an incident that occurred last night (the evening of the 29th September 2011) in the Bear’s Paw public house, Frodsham.

I was enjoying a pleasant evening in the company of my friend Joanne and we happened upon one of your marvellous “quiz machines”.

Now, let me state this right from the off, we’re massive fans of your machines and have played them on many occasions. Sure, we realise that they are inherently unfair and that the risk\reward ratio is swung so heavily in your favour that it’s laughable. In many ways, that’s all part of the charm. We’re happy to plough pound coin after pound coin (we’ve not yet resorted to the notes slot, we’re not animals) as we gain enjoyment from playing the quizzes and are complicit in the agreement that this service must be paid for.

We like to sample many of the games on your wondrous devices, so imagine our delight when he happened upon one that we’d never seen before: “Find Five”.

Let me recap the rules: You are presented with a grid of answers and have to find the five correct answers for any particular question. You progress up a ladder with each subsequent round of “Find Five” and periodically you are given the opportunity to win a prize.

The prize rounds consists of a grid of 16 squares distributed between “Prize”, “Continue” and “Game Over” and you have to stop on a “Prize” square when it’s highlighted. Now, we understand the deal here. It’s almost impossible to land on “Prize” fairly. You have to have press “stop” before the square you want to land on is highlighted. Sure, you could learn the pattern of movement – assuming it’s not random – but the time periods involved are too short to do this.

We managed to hit “continue” each time. Clearly it is designed so that “continue” always follows “prize” to lull you into a bit of false hope that you might win. But that’s fine. We know the rules when it comes to quiz machines.

But, imagine our excitement as we climbed higher and higher up the ladder. Soon, we found ourselves on the last question – a particularly tricky Rocky conundrum – and miraculously we succeeded. We had reached the elusive “top prize”.

The horror. The top prize game consisted of 1 “prize” square and 15 “game over” squares. Inevitably, we did not win the prize.

And that was that. No second chance. No “here’s a pound for doing so well”. No nothing. It was nothing less than traumatising. How could you do this to us?

Please, please Mr Gamestec, please tell us that this is an anomaly. Your quiz machines may never seem the same again.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, I’ve had no reply.

The tragedy becomes all the more tragic when you take a look at the Find Five Gameshow’s leaderboard:

We’d nigh on doubled the next best score.  Did we truly deserve to walk away from such a Herculean effort empty-handed? I think not.

Shame on you, Mr Gamestec.