Overall: C-
Presentation: B-
Flow: B-
Thrill: D+
Replayability: C-
Background
This is another game I got in the Game Boy lot mentioned in the Brain Drain review. Once again judging from the name alone, I expected some sort of puzzle game or perhaps platformer invoking a Roman Empire aesthetic.
Apparently Caesars Palace [sic] is a famous casino chain. Who knew?
Presentation: B-
The game is presented fairly nicely, even including a small intro scene in which you approach the casino and are given starting chips by a clerk. This is a great touch, though it would be entirely unnecessary if not for the fact that this is where the clerk also tells you you need to go back to the cashier station when you want to cash in your chips and leave. (Wouldn’t take too much hunting to figure this out on your own though.)
The cashier looks kinda unsettling, but the taxi and the outside of the casino look good enough.
You actually play the whole game with a mouse, or rather, a mouse cursor you move with the D-pad. Pretty much the entire game takes place in one room with lots of games, and you see it from what I’d call a “security camera’s-eye view” which allows you to pan the camera by moving the mouse over and gives you a pretty good view of everything. The room itself actually looks fairly nice, and all the games\features are recognizable by their machine\table\whatever—with the exception of the slot games on the right hand side. Beware: they all look the same in the lobby, but the amounts the different slots let you bet literally ranges from $1/click to $500/click.
The most hilarious example of attention to detail surprising me here was how the bathroom doors have detailed wood textures and the shiny metal plates you push on. The true Caesars Palace experience.
Also, if you click on the front door, you see what is probably the front of the casino. It’s mostly the Caesars Palace logo and an LED sign with the time and temperature, which actually do change with time, which is pretty neat. It’s not much but is nice. Notably, the same music from the beginning cutscene plays when you look outside. Is that just what music they have playing out there?
Speaking of which, don’t expect so much work put into the sound. The opening cutscene, as well as when you look outside, have their own theme, and there’s the lobby theme, and that’s it. The former is a pretty nice little track that does set the right mood (anticipating a casino?).
The latter is what you’ll hear for most of the game. It’s pretty lowkey background music that you might also expect to hear in say, a detective’s office. It would be really great mood music for playing the games and gambling, but it actually stops when you’re on a “game screen.” This kind of makes it feel like the lobby is the main focus of your time, rather than the actual casino games you’re here for.
The sound effects are very minimal. To be honest, it’s just low boops you’d expect from an Atari game. Not like gambling is all about the sound effects though.
What bothers me a bit is that the game doesn’t really invoke the glitzy, exciting idea of casinos people might have from movies and such, with all the fun lights and sounds. That would be a much more fun game. The atmosphere here by comparison feels kind of drab and lonely.
Tl;dr: A little more detail than I expected in the graphics department, and it shows well. The music and sound are much less developed, contributing to a rather unexciting mood.
Flow: B-
The whole game is basically a simulator of the casino, with a few games included such as slots, blackjack, and roulette. There’s some waiting before it starts, but it’s not too awful. Once you enter, starting to play is pretty straightforward. As mentioned earlier, you move a mouse cursor (it literally resembles the standard tilted arrow) around the room and click on the game you want to play.
When you click on a game, you go to a view of the machine (or table) where everything is laid out. The games, too, are played with the mouse cursor. On machines, you click on the coin slots and levers you’d be operating with your hands, pretty straightforward. At tables there are clearly labeled “BET” buttons and you have access to a selection of chips so you can control how much you want to bet. The cursor feels a little slow, but other than that the interface actually works great.
Playing the games works just fine. Figuring out which slot machine is which can be a hassle since they all look the same, but it doesn’t take too long.
Thankfully the games go quick too—very little unnecessary waiting, except in games involving spinning wheels (roulette, slots) where it’d be present in real life anyway. Sometimes the odd quickness makes the experience rather underwhelming, but other times, it enhances the addictiveness of games like blackjack.
Hilariously, there are bathroom doors you can click on, which take you to a close-up of the door. If you press A, it plays a pshhhhh sound and cuts back to the room. Is that the sound of me washing my hands, or peeing without washing my hands?! There are actually 2 bathrooms, a men’s and women’s, though you can use either—one after the other, in fact. Caesars Palace said trans rights I guess.
In all, the games you can play are blackjack, slots, roulette, an electronic poker game, and some bizarre roulette-like game I can’t figure out. They all work exactly like they do normally—or at least, like how I remember them working. (I don’t really gamble.)
-As I said earlier, there are several different kinds of slots, but they all work about the same. Put in 1, 2, or 3 multiples of whatever bet the machine wants ($1, $5, $25, $100, or $500), then pull the big fun lever and stop the slots. You don’t actually stop each slot yourself, it’s automatic. This is very unsatisfying and not very fun, but maybe that’s how real machines work?
-Roulette actually has a table you can scroll because there are just so many places you can place chips. Wow! It’s pretty much just like real roulette, which some people enjoy I guess? But I tend to get sick of it pretty quickly.
-The poker games, like the slots, actually have different machines for betting different amounts. It does work just like real poker, but just like the rest of these games, there isn’t actually any reference for how to play (perhaps it was in the manual?), so I tend to just discard whatever cards are low and hope for the best since it all seems random anyway.
-The roulette-like is odd and seems to be some kind of Caesars Palace specialty, as it has spots named “Caesar” and “Cleo.” Instead of betting on a jillion different numbers, you can place chips on spaces marked $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, and the Caesar\Cleo spots. This doesn’t actually affect how you can bet—you can put a $25 chip on the $5 space, for example. Ratio labels on the side of each space seem to indicate that these mean how much you get paid back, i.e., $2(\5\10\etc.) for every $1 you bet on it. Why they couldn’t just put 1x, 2x, etc. is beyond me.
-Blackjack is, to me, the only game that’s really any fun after a few tries. It’s simple and quick, and allows for some control so it doesn’t feel like it’s completely up to chance. (Poker does this too, but blackjack doesn’t require memorizing any combinations of cards or anything.)
There are two ways to end the game. If you run out of money, the cashier politely consoles you and you get kicked out and sent home from Vegas on a bus. Harsh!
Your other option is to just go to the cashier window (which you can do at any time) and choose to cash in your chips, at which point you leave Vegas of your own volition in a taxi. In both scenarios, you see a “NOW LEAVING LAS VEGAS” sign and it resets to the title screen. Hope you remembered how much money you made!
Tl;dr: The game’s pretty straightforward, and the games aren’t too simplified or modified. Everything works just like it should, but ultimately only Blackjack is any fun.
Thrill: D+
As cool as it all looks, there isn’t much to do here. You just play casino games. Casinos are known for being pretty fun, which is why this game was probably made, but without the elements of drinking, partying, and desperately trying to make up the money you’ve lost, what’s the appeal?
Most of the games are of some novelty value initially, but don’t really hold up after a few plays. Blackjack is fun, and poker might be too (still need to learn how to play), but that’s really it.
Tl;dr: Don’t expect a riveting experience.
Replayability: C-
I actually wanted to rate this much lower—with so little to do, and the content all being stuff you can play without a Game Boy, why bother with this game at all? I realized though that due to the very quick nature of the casino games, and how little you are likely to care about progress in the game, Caesars Palace is actually an excellent pick-up-and-play game for things such as lines and other quick waits or downtimes. Don’t you hate starting a game of, say, Tetris in line or something and having to quit in the middle because you stopped having to wait? You can legitimately start a game of Caesars Palace, play a round of blackjack, and quit in 45 seconds. So I suppose it’s great for passing very small amounts of time, but…not much else? Unless you’re into casino games.
Tl;dr: Come out of mild curiosity, revisit for blackjack and poker if you have a very short amount of time to kill and don’t want to play a better game.
Overall: C-
While it works well within what it attempts to offer, that is exactly the problem, sort of—it really is just a casino simulator, and that is, inevitably, not going to be all that exciting as a video game. It’s boring to play, and it’s direct to a fault, accurately representing the games from a casino without adding anything to make having a video game version worthwhile.
It’s an alright experience, but if you really do want to play it, don’t get it for more than $5—or better yet, pay a little more (if you don’t have it already) and just play the minigames in New Super Mario Bros. There are much better Game Boy experiences you can have.
"Retro" video game reviews from a Gen Z perspective. 