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While every player has their favourite slots game, games that have gained a well-deserved place in the pantheon of slots royalty - like Starburst, Cleopatra II, Thunderstruck II, Immortal Romance or Gonzo’s Quest - variety is the spice of life and there can be no doubt that everyone loves the opportunity to try something new and engage with novelty that new slots games offer.
Recent years have seen online casinos expanding their portfolios in a shift from operators running on a single casino software platform to operator offering an array of software providers with hundreds of games available in the one place.
This has blown the market wide open, allowing scores of new smaller companies, who perhaps don’t have the portfolio to offer a complete casino suite, to gain traction providing additional games as part of a package of softwares bought in by casino operators. This increase competition on the markets has fostered creativity and ingenuity as software providers strive to create new slots games providing users with an experience that they haven’t seen before.
Established industry leaders like NetEnt and Microgaming lead the pack, constantly pushing forward with new and creative slot bonus features. Net Entertainment in particular have really set a high bar in terms of innovation with bonus features and game structures from the old staple of free spins and pick and click bonus features. NetEnt’s creative approach had challenged other providers to match them in terms of player driven games intended to keep you engaged and entertained.
This is a challenge that has been gratefully accepted by many up and coming firms. Yggdrasil Gaming have really stepped up to the play with their Vikings series (most recently Vikings go to Hell) offering a spectacular visual feast while the bonus features draw the user in as you progress towards triggering the bonus feature. Releases from this provider are continuing to improve and we’ve little doubt that players will be excited to see what they’ve got in store.
Play N Go are another top slots game production house release games with superb graphics and a intuitive user interface. Their bonus features are getting consistently better and the slot RTP figures are certainly in the competitive zone.
WMS Gaming have redefined slots games by allowing players to buy multiple spins at once. When you buy groups of spins at higher stakes you get improved chances of triggering bonus feature and a increased RTP figure (meaning the game costs less to play in the long run).
There’s plenty new to see in the online slots sector, so keep an eye this section to find out about the latest releases!
With Easter just around the corner it’ll soon be time to fill up on the chocolate eggs left for you in the night by a giant chocolate egg laying rabbit.
Daylight saving has been activated. Daffodils, lambs and some occasional good weather mean winter should be firmly behind us and the smoke from our summer barbeques can begin their premature waft into neighbours’ gardens.
Easter is the most important of all the Christian festivals. If you’ve ever been to church then you might have noticed that the vast majority of the responses, the prayers and the hymns all hark back to that single pivotal moment in the Christian calendar.
Jesus is obviously the most important figure in the Easter festival but there is one person who often gets forgotten in all of this. One person, without whom none of this would have been possible. And by none, I don’t just mean Easter, I mean everything that Christians hold dear.
No-one gets as bad a rap in any of the Christian texts as Satan. That’s because he literally ruined everything. He took God’s plan and wiped his charred, eternally weeping backside all over it. Sure, it still worked, it still functioned but not in the manner that God intended. If you were to sacrilegiously compare God’s plan to a Toyota Prius then just imagine Satan came along and stole the battery.
Adam and Eve had the lot. Eternal happiness. No shame. No sin. They had it so good that they didn’t even have to worry about dying. Chilling the Garden of Eden for eternity, feasting from the Tree of Life and questioning absolutely nothing.
Satan wasn’t too keen on this set up. He had questioned God and it hadn’t ended well for him. For his exploits he was destined to spend the rest of forever in eternal suffering whilst these mindlessly insufferable humans hit the bloody jackpot.
That’s the point where he decided to ruin everything.
One rule. That’s all God made. One little rule. Every tree in the garden was fair game except one. All Adam and Eve had to do was not eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Satan took his opportunity and convinced Eve to do the one thing she was told not to and with that humanity was cast out of the Garden of Eden, we lost our Tree of Life privileges and we were now horrid sinners.
Satan couldn’t beat God in any kind of a contest but he could irritate and annoy him by ruining his creations. A veil of sin now existed between humanity and God, making us more inclined to do what pleased us, opposed to what pleased God.
But, fair play to God, he sat down and wrote out exactly what we could not do to make it clear for those of us who don’t know any better exactly what sin was. God’s not-to-do list comprised of 10 bullet points that if stuck to would keep you in his good books.
Unfortunately, Satan knew that even the best of us couldn’t go a day without at least thinking about something on that list. As far as God was concerned even thinking about doing stuff on his list was sinning and because of those sins we could not stand before him and had no chance of getting into Heaven.
Satan was very pleased with all this; he hadn’t won the game but he had burst the ball and ran away with it. However, surely somewhere in the back of his mind he must have remembered that God can do whatever he likes, so when God said that sins could be abolished as long as the blood of an innocent animal was spilled without blemish once a year, Satan is unlikely to have been too surprised. He was forced to hand back the ball, but got to keep the puncture repair kit.
Whilst the sacrifice of innocent animals was a solution to the problem it only really papered over the cracks. People would sin, sacrifice a lamb and then keep on sinning until the following year when they would kill another lamb and continuing on sinning.
What God needed was someone to show all us frightful sinners what living without sin looked like. He had a look around and couldn’t find a single living human that could go for long without sinning in one way or another. He turned to his only son and in making him the “Son of Man” he sent Jesus Christ out into the world, a man bound by the same sinful desires as the rest of humanity but with the light of the Holy Spirit to guide him.
Jesus did what no one else could and lived a life without sin. This meant that when he died he replaced the innocent animal that had previously been used as a sacrifice, cleansed us all of our sins, walked the earth a bit after his death and then went back to Heaven.
That last bit is a rough and potentially blasphemous summary of what Easter is. Christians believe in Jesus Christ and try to live as he did, even though we have no chance of ever managing to do so, the point is to try.
Christians celebrate Easter because they see it as a new beginning. In much the same way that Pagans would celebrate the earth’s rebirth from winter into spring, Christians celebrate what they see as humanity’s re-birth. One where we still have our list of rules, acting as a sort of success criteria on how to be a good person and one where we have that good person behaviour modelled for us. Like the daft kids in class, us getting it right is an unreasonable expectation but that’s OK as long as we’ve struggled and persevered our way towards trying to get things right and then feel genuine self-loathing when we do that thing we shouldn’t have.
Christians who hold their religion dear should spare a thought for the Devil because without him nothing they believe in would be possible. The opposing argument, a compelling one if you buy into all this in the first place, would be that there would be no need for any religion without the Devil because we would be living in a fuzz of perpetual, eternal bliss in the Garden of Eden, following God’s will because we were programmed to do so.
And because of all of this we can now expect to find egg shaped chocolate appearing in our homes, left there by a giant rabbit who is conveniently called the Easter Bunny.
To be honest I don’t see how a religious festival soaked in sin and suffering was ever going to be marketable to children. Those wily chocolatiers were always going to have to find inspiration elsewhere and, let’s face it, Pagan beliefs might seem less sophisticated and grown-up than Christian ones, but they have always made better movies and appealed more to children.
It is most likely that our good friend the Easter Bunny is based on Eostre, a Pagan goddess of fertility whose animal symbol was a bunny. The eggs themselves are a symbol of new life, mirroring the regeneration of winter into spring. The eggs would have originally just been a normal hard-boiled hen’s egg, decorated by children in bright colours.
The first chocolate Easter egg was made by British company Fry’s (famous for their chocolate creams) in 1873. Leading us to the present day where roughly 80 million Easter Eggs will be sold in the UK alone, with the average child predicted to consume 8 of them each.
Traditions also include making and wearing Easter bonnets, making Easter baskets and going on Easter Egg hunts.
For Christians, the festival begins 6 weeks prior to Easter Sunday. Those 6 weeks, known as Lent, are set aside as a period of abstinence, wherein people choose to make particular sacrifices in an attempt to mirror the sacrifices that Jesus made whilst he was alone in the desert for 40 days and nights without food or water. His only company during that time was Satan who tried and failed to tempt him into breaking his fast.
The Thursday prior to Easter Sunday sees close ties being drawn between Christianity and Judaism, as Passover and the Last Supper intertwine. Passover is the celebration of Jewish liberation from Egypt, led by Moses, as told in the Book of Exodus. Jesus, a Jew himself, celebrated the occasion with his disciples. His first meal since his self-imposed exile in the desert and his last before his crucifixion the following day. The scene is most famously depicted in Leonard Davinci’s famous painting, “Il Cenacolo or L'Ultima Cena”.
The Christian story of Easter is an exceptionally complex story that can be tricky to get your head round if you are new to it. Marry with that Jewish and Pagan festivals and it is no wonder that many of us end up not knowing what Easter is all about.
For some it will be a day spent eating copious amounts of chocolate. For others it will a day of religious devotion. Whatever way you intend to spend Easter, the best we can offer is our list of the 5 best Easter themed slots games.
The same rules will apply for the soon-to-be mentioned 5 Easter themed games as I apply to all these lists. The game will have received more that 7 out of 10 on initial review and will tie in with the theme as best we can manage. In this instance I can say with confidence that there are four excellent Easter themed games out there and one loosely themed game that we are throwing in to make up the numbers.
Red Tiger are relatively new to the industry but have managed to create more than just a few excellent games during their brief time making slots games. Their most recent efforts have impressed the most, with Lucky Easter up there with some of the best games they have made. What I love the most about this game is the bonus. I’m always a bit disappointed when a game comes without a bonus and then I’m just as disappointed when the bonus sucks. Red Tiger are good at getting the bonus right. With Lucky Easter they do just that. A game worth playing for the bonus alone.
Easter Eggs is a simple but effective offering from Play n’ Go. The game has everything you would expect to see from an Easter themed game. There are chicks, rabbits, daffodils and the obligatory Easter Eggs. By far the best inclusion in Easter Eggs is the low house edge. Play ‘n Go never have a house edge lower than 4%. Well, actually they do and Easter Eggs is all proof you need. Add to this free spins and a bonus and you have an excellent Easter slots game.
I don’t think we’ve ever had a Multi Slots game on any of our lists before but here they are, better late than never. This game scored well for us on its initial release and like the game that precedes it on this list it owes an awful lot of that to it’s lower than average house edge. At just over 3% Easter Egg Hunt is offering better value for money than any other game on this list. It also happens to look great and have a few interesting features to top the everything off nicely.
EggOmatic might not be an Easter themed game but it is about eggs and it is amazing. From the opening sequence you know that this is offering something a little bit more ambitious than your standard slots game. It looks incredible and has some of the best bonus features around. This is Net Entertainment doing what they do best.
Last on our list and the oldest game up here is a little offering from Playtech. A number of years down the line and this little gem still looks great, with bright vibrant colours and our second lowest house edge. It might not be the most sophisticated of our 5 games but it still holds up against most games out there today.
And there we have it, our list of the 5 best Easter themed game out there, with some absolute beauties for you to check out at this particular time of year.
Texas Hold ‘Em Bonus is a derivative of everyone’s favourite version of Poker. In this incarnation you will pit your wits against the house instead of a table of opponents. In our guide we will explain to what Texas Hold ‘Em Bonus is and will provide you with a strategy calculator, a fairness calculator and a guide to the house edge. All of which should help you become a more confident, more informed Texas Hold ‘Em Bonus player.
There are some online slot games that will forever be seen as classics by players. They are not always the games that critics (like us) think are the most impressive. They are the games that players vote for with their fingers. The games that get disproportionately high volumes of spins. The games that players come back to again and again and again.
Every software provider knows which games fall into these categories, many will try to copy the themes and styles of the most popular games offered by their competition, and gambling forums are full of players talking about wins on these big hitters of the slots world.
These games stand the test of time, appealing to something in the playing community that is hard to place a finger on, but once tapped into demands loyalty from slots lovers everywhere.
Take NetEnt’s Starburst. Deconstructed, this game would not appear to offer anything all that spectacular. But the game sums to far more than its parts. Something about the aesthetic combined with that spacy soundtrack, the ratio and size of wins and the free spins with expanding wild symbols has made this easily one of the most popular slots games of all time.
If creating a classic slot game was easy, everyone would be doing it. The combination however, is intangible. Hard to define and harder to recreate. Game after game has been put out by competing providers trying to capture that x-factor that Starburst captured, but all have fallen well short of their goal. Even Net Entertainment have not managed to re-create this success.
And NetEnt are far from alone in this experience. Look to Microgaming’s Immortal Romance and Thunderstruck II. Both games that could be considered old by current market standard, yet both games that consistently rank highly on many operators lists of ‘most played games’.
Whatever it is that lodges these games so firmly in the consciousness of slots players everywhere, these games have reached heady heights with their appeal and longevity amongst players.
Here at ThePOGG, the busiest section of our site is definitely the casino complaints section. We deal with a large number of player complaints and the number of complaints being submitted to our mediation service is growing all the time. We believe that every player has a right to fair treatment and that casino support staff have the right to work in an abuse free environment – a rule that we enforce on our site too.
We have a vast amount of experience dealing with complaints management arising from a variety of the areas associated with online casinos. Casino bonuses generate a fair number of complaints at this portal – often such complaints arise as a result of player mistakenly not completing wagering requirements associated with the bonus, or breaches of the maximum bet term stipulated for a particular bonus. Reading bonus terms and conditions is of paramount importance when accepting a bonus.
Casino software also gives rise to a number of complaints for a variety of reasons ranging from genuine glitches to provably unfair games. Our complaints manager’s background in mathematics and statistics means a unique skillset is at our disposal in-house when we are investigating such issues: a definite advantage to our users.
More and more complaints are arising as a result of responsible gambling issues but luckily gambling regulators are becoming more and more adept at supporting players with problem gambling habits and at ThePOGG we have developed our own tool to support such players in the form of our app,BetBlocker, which allows users to restrict their device from accessing thousands of gambling websites quickly and easily.
Generally, operators holding licenses with the United Kingdom Gambling Commission (UKGC) and the Maltese Gaming Authority (MGA) are of good standing and we work closely with these casino regulators to provide a fair and robust complaints management service. We have previously served as an ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) for the UKGC which allows us a unique insight into how this regulator works and we still enjoy a close working relationship with this organization which we believe uniquely benefits our customers.
We strive to resolve every complaint that is logged at our site and players can rest assured that we will thoroughly investigate any issues brought to our attention. To date we have managed to negotiate the return of over two million dollars to players that have logged complaints with us over the course of managing over 2k complaints.
