NetEnt: The New Kings of Fantasy Slots

Hey guys, Jules is back! After a busy December and a sick (literally, I got the flu) January, it’s time to get back to fantasy slots! However, this time something else has caught my eye – an entire game studio! You probably don’t pay too much attention to the developer logos on your favourite casino games, but there seems to be a complex world hidden there. I was wondering which fantasy slot to talk about this time, when I noticed that all the games that I liked in the past few months were made by one and the same company – so, why not just talk about the game-makers this time around?

NetEnt – that’s the name of the gaming company – comes from Net Entertainment. It turns out that this is a Swedish studio specialised in making games for online casinos. It’s no wonder that I stumbled upon so many of their slots, because they are wildly acclaimed as the best thing since sliced bread – or sliced cards, I guess. Honestly, it was a neat little Robin Hood slot (expect a review soon!) that got me interested in them, and then I noticed that Dragon Island is also theirs… well, long story short, I started browsing for more NetEnt slots, and I found a rather useful site (http://slots.info/netent/) which had a ton of titles listed.

Many of those appear to be fantasy-themed, so I am planning to try some more during the rest of the winter – keep your fingers crossed that I manage to stay flu-free this time around! I hope that they keep the great level of graphics throughout the rest of their titles. There are 3D animations, different special effects, and even the semblance of a story from time to time! True, other things are important as well, but when you are trying to give something a fantasy feel, graphics are by far the best way to do it! NetEnt slots seem to have huge potential for that, I can see so many possibilities to expand the genre with the visuals that they are producing!

Honestly, I am still a little unsure in what order I will be posting the next few reviews. To be frank, while browsing through slots, I was a little tempted to try out some non-fantasy titles too – the twin spin slot just looks so retro! However, I will try to stay true to the theme of this blog, and resist the temptation of more mundane games! The plan is to cover only the NetEnt titles with a fantasy theme, though I might be a little more lax with what counts as fantasy – I noticed several steampunk posters that looked rather alluring.

I am planning to remain an online player for the foreseeable future, by the way. Not that there aren’t any real casinos near my place, but I am not even sure whether their games would be any good – most of the online slots that I like just wouldn’t cut it if they made them for real! Besides, stories like the one about the poor shmuck who got cheated out of his winnings because of a stupid casino rule just kill off my desire to experiment. Online slots seem to suit me more, especially if they give me reason to do some reading on background and lore, rare as this is.

Oh, I’ve also taken up a creative writing class! Hopefully this will start to show in the next reviews that I will be posting. Looking forward to our next meeting – Jules, out!

Microgaming released not one, but TWO different slots based on Arthurian legend – “Avalon” and its sequel, appropriately titled “Avalaon 2”. I don’t know, if it were me I think I’d have come up with something a bit better, like “Avalon 2: The Revenge”, or “Avalaon 2: Electric Boogaloo”, or “Avalon 2: Bigger, Longer & Uncut”, but honestly, that’s probably why I don’t make slots. Sure, you may argue that those titles wouldn’t be too appropriate for an Arthurian legend, but to that say… Have you even read an Arthurian legend? Those things are absolutely insane! We’re talking drama that wouldn’t be out of place in a prime time soap opera, magic that can literally do anything at all (except when it can’t, for whatever reason) and so much 18+ material that even Quentin Tarantino would blush! Sure, a lot of it ultimately depends on which version of the tale you end up reading, but the most famous one, and the one that most sources reference, is the 15th century French novel “Le Morte D’Arthur”, by Thomas Malory.

Malory was working from several English sources he could find, mostly poems about the legend of King Arthur, which he translated into French, organized and expanded upon. It seems kind of weird to think about, but a good part of what we know today as the Arthurian myth is essentially fanfiction by some French dude who lived five hundred years ago. While most definitely not the earliest story of King Arthur (that would have to be “Historia Regum Britanniae” by Geoffrey Monmouth), “Le Morte D’Arthur” is the most well-known iteration, as the overwhelming majority of interpretations and retellings of the legend have been based on that. The overwhelming majority of elements that are today considered synonymous with King Arthur, such as Excalibur, the Round Table and Merlin, were popularized in that book.

With that said, however, not everything you know about King Arthur stems from the 15th century book. Certain elements have been streamlined and outright reinvented throughout the years. For example, we all know the story of Excalibur – the sword in the stone that no one but the true King could pull out. Problem is, according to earlier versions of the legend, that’s not Excalibur at all – the sword in the stone and the sword that Arthur used throughout his life are actually completely different. Originally, Arthur pulled a sword from an anvil (and not a stone), and upon passing the test received Excalibur from Nimueh, the Lady of the Lake. Excalibur was later returned to Nimueh by Sir Bedivere (the last survivor of the Round Table still in Arthur’s service – many were released to return the Holy Grail, or for sleeping with the Queen, Lancelot!) right before Arthur passed away, bookending his story.

So how well does Microgaming’s slot manage to capture the Arthurian legend? Honestly, it depends on which one you’re looking at. The first Avalon is… I’m not gonna mince words here, fellas, it’s pretty bad. There’s just the most basic aspects of the Arthurian mythos, the ones everyone knows about, and stuck them on symbols like stickers. The sequel, however, manages to redeem its daddy quite well. We’ve got symbols bearing the faces and names of many different Arthurian characters (even the Black Knight, who is merely mentioned in “Le Morte D’Arthur”, but appears in earlier versions of the Arthurian legend), and the bonus games make explicit references to particular points of the Arthurian myths, such as Nimueh’s return, the quest for the Holy Grail and Arthur’s ascension to Avalon. It’s so much better than the original, and far more faithful to the source material than the majority of slots I’ve played! Who knows, perhaps you can use it to brush up a little bit on your knowledge regarding the Arthurian mythology!

The video slot “The Forgotten Land of Lemuria” boasts a unique theme about “a land erased from history” (I’m quoting directly from the slot description here), which, honestly, sounds like a fun concept! It’s not like the idea of an ancient, highly advanced civilization forever lost to time is a new one – all you need to do to realize this trope has been part of pop culture forever is to look at the myth of Atlantis. And I know what you’re gonna say – “But Jules, Atlantis isn’t just something some writer made up for money, there’s ancient proof that it exists, so it’s not pop culture at all!” And no, I’m sorry, but Atlantis was made up by Plato to serve as antagonists for his novels “Timaeus” and “Critias”, so it was quite literally just something some writer made up for money. But what if I told you that it’s not the only civilization like that?

Enter… Lemuria! In 1864, zoologist Phillip Sclater published a rather interesting discovery he made – he could find the fossils of lemurs in Madagascar and India, but interestingly enough, not in Africa and the Middle East – the only landmass that could potentially connect these two places. Or was it? The only explanation Sclater could come up with was that there must have been a hidden continent connecting Madagascar to India across the Indian Ocean. Because of course! I mean, it’s not like all of the current continents started out as one massive super-continent called Pangea millions of years ago which would allow the lemurian ancestors to reside in two seemingly impossible to reach regions. And the existence of Pangea has most certainly not been proven by science using the fact that MANY ancient species used to live impossibly far from each other, looking at the modern map. Nope, not at all. It must be a hidden continent that sunk into the ocean with absolutely no trace! The Illuminati must be behind it.

And, as you might expect, while any scientific backing behind the existence of Lemuria is loose at best, that hasn’t stopped the conspiracy nuts from being all over it! It’s hard counting the number of articles and videos like this one that attempt to desperately convince any gullible soul in their nonsense. It’s funny how what started as “Hey, maybe there was a landmass connecting India to Madagascar millions of years ago” steadily involved into “The Lemurians were godlike beings with power and technology far above our own”. To be perfectly honest, it’s a really fascinating mythology, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s completely insane drivel that actual living people breathing the same air as you and me believe.

Putting certain individuals’ madness, it’s important to note that Lemuria and its mythology has inspired a lot of fictional works. And I do mean A LOT. It has been referenced or featured in movies, TV shows, cartoons, games, visual novels, more books than you can count… Lemuria is at the center of the “Golden Sun” series of videogames, it’s the setting for the brilliant “Child of Light”, it’s featured as a location in both the Marvel and DC universe, it’s the goal in the TV series “The Deep” and so on and so forth. I guess, all things considered, the only thing that’s not crazy about this whole thing is that eventually someone would make a slot adaptation on the stories of Lemuria. I suppose it was only a matter of time, and to their credit, Microgaming did manage to do a pretty decent job with it, featuring many of the elements of the mythology that have been established over the years. I can only hope that the slot adaptation will be the final nail in the coffin of these ridiculous beliefs, but we both know that’s not gonna happen. Or maybe in two weeks they’ll discover Lemuria right where it was supposed to be and I’ll look like an idiot.

It’s no secret at all that slots have a wide variety of inspirations behind them. True, a lot of them are just based on whatever cute, furry animal the developers thought of that day with little effort beyond that, but there’s just as many, if not more, that dig a bit deeper when searching for a source to adapt. Whether it’s some sort of license that the developers are attempting to recreate, or perhaps a story or even an entire mythology (like the tale of King Arthur), or maybe just the general feel of a fantasy world inspired by a classic author like Tolkien. No matter how you look at it, fiction – specifically fantasy fiction – has inspired a TON of classic slots! And I wanna talk about them!

Hi, my name is Jules, and I’ve been reading fantasy since I knew how to read at all! I’ve read them all, from the huge classics to the small (and often terrible) releases that get self-published on Amazon every single day. Of course, Jules isn’t my real name – I took it from an author that you should be quite familiar with by this point, if you somehow stumbled upon blog! What I’ll be doing here is looking at the stories behind various slots, both licensed and not. We’ll be discussing the story of whatever fantasy realm inspired the various slot, its history and context, and ultimately deciding whether the slot adaptation managed to capture the essence and spirit of the original! Please make sure to check in frequently, because there’s a LOT of slots to get through and it seems like we’ll be here for quite a while!