Review: Place Your Bets / FingerGaming
“Now, I’m not one who has ever been willing to talk fondly about my school days — especially not my time during high school. Not that I’m one to hold adolescent grudges long after they have relevance; I’ve just never considered them interesting or remarkable enough.However, Place Your Bets reminds me of the short but glorious period of time when computing students in their final year were given their own private computing lab. It was where we spent most of our free periods — and even a few periods that weren’t free — rarely doing anything other than wasting time.
As we were saddled with Macintoshes locked up tight so we couldn’t install anything, there wasn’t a lot of gaming to be done in the lab, but we did manage to find one game that worked — a little application called Snail Race.
In Snail Race, there were six racing snails that you could bet on, and it supported several players, so often we’d find ourselves crowded around one of the Macs, literally screaming in encouragement trying to get our snail to the finish line before our opponents — until the reliable point where we were told off for disturbing other classes. No money ever changed hands, but it was about as enjoyable as a group experience could get, and it was this I was hoping for from Place Your Bets.”
If you haven’t been able to tell, my reviews for FingerGaming are almost completely stream of conciousness.