We drove home from vegas. No more super high stakes low limit poker for this guy. Boo. The end.

The Sigma Derby horse racing game at MGM Grand is the best game in Vegas. Apparently there used to be a bunch of these, but this is the last remaining one for some horrible reason. It takes only quarters, you click the little yellow buttons to bet a quarter on whichever horse combination you think will finish the race in the top two, little fake horses run around the track while the game plays fake galloping noises, and if one of the combinations you bet on wins, you get paid out according to the odds posted around the inside edge in red numbers. It’s awesome!

For example, in the race above, if you clicked the yellow button corresponding to 1-2 and the #1 and #2 horses came in first and second place in either order, you would win 53 quarters for each one you bet. $13.25! Endless excitement. The odds change with every race and range from 2 to 200. 200 would be $50 won per quarter, which would be pretty exceptional. For a stupid, cheap game there’s a decent possibility for a large payout, which makes for extra excitement. Here’s a couple more pictures:

And here are two incredibly awesome videos showing the horses in action. You can hear the cheesy galloping noises and people cheering for their horse combinations. “Never bet on 5!”

Rapid Roulette is the automated touch-screen roulette game. It’s just like roulette only more rapid. The dealer still takes your cash, throws the ball into the wheel, and pays you when(if) you cash out, but your personal touch screen computer does everything in between. You make bets using the computer and it takes your money or pays you out. I threw that ‘if’ in there because I didn’t make it out with any of my $40. I hit a 17 early on to get 35x on my big $0.50 wager, but it went downhill from there. A couple spins later I couldn’t decide what number I liked because I had already used all the luck on 17. I went ahead and picked the same thing before exclaiming, “oh, crap, I should have picked 23. It’s going to be 23.” Michael Jordan. And it was. Anand asked “how’d you know that?” I’m magic. A crazy string of 23 of 25 or so numbers being black messed us both up too. Rapid roulette is nice because they let you make little wagers; this table allowed 50 cent bets for a $2.00 board minimum, which is 1/5 of what you see at any normal roulette wheel. My 40 bucks lasted three Coronas. Not bad. Here’s Anand at his roulette command center:

Any game with a “Shake Your Booty Bonus” must be fun:

There are any number of reasons to like this one, not the least of which is that the one cop is using his hand as the gun:

What the hell kind of animal is this between the lion and the rhino?:

Keeping on the animal theme, we have Crab Mania! The official slot machine of the Shady Lady Ranch brothel!

But if crabs aren’t your thing, how about shrimp!?

No? Well everyone likes Sea-Monkeys!

Although, for the same price you can get Twice Your Monkey! (I don’t even know what that means):

And we’ll round it out with Hoot Loot, Moo-lah, and Barkin’ Bucks. Barkin’ Bucks is supposed to be lots of fun, and once when I walked by, it yelled out to me “you’re a good dog” in a scooby-doo type voice.

I learned a lot about vampires last night at Bite in The Stratosphere. They are rock and roll enthusiasts! Styx, ACDC, and Guns and Roses headline a long list of 80′s and 90′s power rock groups enjoyed by our undead counterparts. And they are dance enthusiasts! Not surprising, I suppose, given the amount of rock music they listen to, but I was surprised to see they were such fans of ballet-inspired choreography. I was more expecting the blood orgy feeding frenzy rave dancing that the vampires do in the Blade movies. They must outgrow that phase?

If you’re curious, here are some recent happenings in the world of vampires: The single Lord Vampire has a coven of “erotic rock angels” who were dying to replace his lost wife. Unfortunately for them, the Lord Vampire would just as well take a human for a bride and make her into a Vampire than pick a Vampire and make her into his wife. I thought he was courageous and open minded, but some people are less progressive than I. On the other hand, it’s possible the Lord Vampire only picked his human wife based on her more generously proportioned bosom. The thought wouldn’t have crossed my mind had I not noticed one other interesting tidbit about vampirettes: they really enjoy running around topless. Topless in thongs and occasional mesh stockings. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say they’re worried about dripping blood on their shirts when they chew necks and add to their minions. What is for sure is that vampires seem to have fairly modest chests, while the Lord Vampire’s human selection did not. I’m probably just being overly critical though; I’m sure he appreciated her personality, and wouldn’t you know it, despite coming out of the audience, she was also a great dancer! So fear not, all is well in vampire land, there is a new queen on the throne!

The NY,NY roller coaster, The Manhattan Express, costs $14 for a single ride and $25 for an all day pass, so yesterday was our twice-delayed roller coaster day. It wasn’t open the previous two days due to Vegas’s crazy winds. Nine rides, two bruised shoulders, a heavily jostled brain, and a good bit of motion sickness later, I think I’ve gotten my roller coaster fill for the trip. Despite bouncing on the tracks and violently throwing you around in your seat, the roller coaster was excellent. We rode it five times during the day and came back for another four rides at night. The giant, glowing green MGM Grand building, the Luxor spotlight, and the thousands of other bright lights on The Strip made riding at night particularly enjoyable.

For my added amusement, I took to posing for the souvenir photo camera that takes your picture while you’re riding. I started off with ridiculous, mouth-agape screaming poses, but that was kinda boring. So I switched over to feigned boredom. The next couple were more what you’d expect if it were a city bus rather than a roller coaster trying to sell in-action souvenir photos of riders. That was fun, but I like making faces, so giant miserable frowns came next. Those were great. I was tempted to splurge and buy one, but alas, I did not. Here’s a nice fuzzy picture of the car. Killer rims, huh?

If to drive a few miles from Vegas toward the west, in the direction directly opposite from the Hoover Dam, you come to a bunch of big rocks. Some of them happen to be red, so the powers that be created the Red Rocks Canyon National Conservation Area. We went there last Monday. It’s pretty, but I prefer landscapes with green plants and water. Also, despite the visitors center getting my hopes up, I didn’t see a single desert tortoise. Or a rattlesnake. The park consists of a thirteen mile scenic drive loop, many places to park to take in the more significant views, and loads of foot paths. Anand and I were feeling extra adventurous, so we set out on a trail that our map estimated to take an hour. We got maybe halfway through before deciding that buffets and poker haven’t put us in proper hiking shape. Besides, dry crusty-looking shrubs don’t do it for me, and that’s pretty much all there is as far as wildlife goes. Here are a few more pictures:

Thursday night we finally went to check out old downtown Vegas. I didn’t know what was supposed to be downtown and kinda just suspected a few old-timey casinos scattered in the midst of lots of office buildings. Yeah, not quite, and I now i feel bad about not taking any of our Vegas visitors to Fremont Street because it was awesome. Fremont Street is worlds more compact than The Strip and has been closed off to traffic since 1994, so it’s a much more festive atmosphere. We got there just before the 9PM light show, in time to buy a couple football beers, one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

Only cool kids drink beer out of a straw. The light show was impressive. The entire block is sheltered by a canopy with the worlds largest TV screen on its underside. They turn off all the neon casino lights, so it gets nice and dark and then the giant screen goes into action. From Wikipedia:

A section comprising one fiftieth of the total canopy equals the size of the world’s current largest electric sign. Originally, nearly 2.1 million incandescent lights were housed in the canopy. With the completion of the $17 million upgrade, more than 12 million LED lamps illuminate the overhead canopy. Within the canopy itself are 220 speakers capable of producing 550,000 watts of sound.

Here’s a video I took. There are other, better ones, but I wanted to try out youtube and make my own content.

Fifteen minutes after the 9:00PM light show there was a “Sphere of Death” motorcycle show, also free naturally. You know what the sphere of death is – that metal cage/sphere in which Homer rides loops in The Simpsons’ Movie. This particular show culminated with three riders roaming the cage simultaneously. Fun stuff; have a look:

A contortionist preformed after the 10PM light show, but sadly we only caught the last eight seconds because we were touring casinos. There are a number of old, super famous casinos on Fremont Street, like Golden Nugget and Binion’s, the original home of the World Series of Poker.

We went into Mermaid Casino first and the two women in the doorway, all gussied up in the fluffy flamingo feather look, gave us beads and a ticket for a raffle and a free drink. I was halfway through the sentence “now what are we supposed to do with these tickets” when a server ran up, and took our ticket stubs and drink orders. I got the most disgustingly strong rum and coke I’ve ever encountered in my life. It couldn’t have been far from straight liquor, and I would have been well served to not drink it. Anand got a Margarita that was more palatable, so after we walked into Mermaid a second time and got two more free drink tickets, I tried my luck with one of those. Straight Tequila. I swear they must have been trying to kill me. Since Anand didn’t have any singles for the tip, he put a five dollar bill in a slot machine and cashed out after losing a nickel. This works great in the strip casinos. When you cash out of a strip slot machine, you get a ticket which you take this ticket to a ticket-redemption machine that pays you out in proper change. The Fremont Street machines tend to be a little more old-timey, and actually dispense coins. Pretty awesome to hear all the clinking when you win, unless of course you put a five into a nickel slot machine hoping for change to tip with. Anand got back 99 nickels.

Here’s another great slot machine picture. I saw this big bruiser-looking dude sitting by an aisle playing a slot machine and then happened to notice the name of the machine. Check it out.

One more gaming machine photo. This one I decided was my favorite machine in all of Vegas. It’s video poker with an excellent pay-out scale, but that’s not what makes it special. While normally you have to scrounge around to find nickel video poker in casinos, this one you can play for pennies! Whoa! You could play this for days and only spend a dollar. On the other hand, I’m something of a video poker master now, getting quads left and right, raking in the big bucks through sheer luck, so I’m a little too much of a baller to play for pennies. But here you go; behold its blurry beauty:

And one last picture: the food we ate with our beer and disgusting liquor drinks. Another definite highlight of the trip, coming from a grill in the Mermaid Casino. Actually, I think this may have been why we walked into that casino to start with. A fried twinkie – the first of my life. It was magnificent.

We capped off the night with some blackjack, which I had sworn off but seemed like a decent idea at the moment. I won a couple dollars, playing $5 blackjack for a pretty decent length of time. I’ll take it.

]]> http://lowroller.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/fremont-street-experience/feed/ 1 Jake patents pending on the football-beer coozy time to \ It was even better than it looks http://lowroller.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/spiral-escalator/ http://lowroller.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/spiral-escalator/#comments Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:25:47 +0000 Jake http://lowroller.wordpress.com/?p=44 ]]>

How cool is that? This is in the Forum Shops of Caesar’s Palace, and I’ve ridden this thing up and down like eight times for no better reason than that I think it’s wonderful. The Forum Shops is basically a high-end mall with faux Roman structures all over the place. Did you know that the spiral escalator was developed under emperor Septimius Severus in 194AD? It’s true; look it up. The center of the mall has a fantastic fountain with giant horse sculptures and some dude standing in the middle, although my curiosity didn’t take me so far as to figure out who he was. The most exciting store, head and shoulders above the boring designers I’ve never heard of and wouldn’t be able to afford anyway, is the FAO Schwartz toy store. It’s three stories high, has enormous stuffed animals including rhinos, a life-size cow, and a $4500 or so dragon, and has a forty foot tall Trojan Horse in its entrance that you can walk into.

Well, there’s no casino Photo Hunt as far as I know, but there is nickel video poker and it’s wonderful! I played a few times this week since Shayerah was in town and didn’t have the experience, bankroll, or desire to play live poker in the card rooms.

My most horrible video poker session to date has cost me a whopping $1.50 over an hour or so, which is outstandingly fantastic when you consider that that last Corona I had in a restaurant here was $7. Ouch! My best hand yet was four 10s, but I’m on a mission for that elusive royal flush. Apart from video poker in the casinos, slot machines are agonizingly dull and mindless; I don’t know how all these blue-haired ladies sit there by their walkers, playing for hours. Then there’s blackjack. I played my first (and probably last) blackjack of the trip yesterday at Tropicana. The cheapest game you can find on The Strip is $5 minimum bets, and I came away with what amounted to a $41 Corona. What a steal! I’m sticking to nickel video poker from here on out, and once I hit that royal flush and score a cool twelve dollars and fifty cents, I’ll fly you all out to join me!