Casino Kid (NES)
A little context can go a long way in making a virtual gambling game where no real money is involved feel like it has more of a purpose. In Casino Kid you’re just a young man entering a casino with 500 dollars and a dream of building that up to the million dollars required to face off with the mysterious Casino King. To earn that kind of cash though, you’ll need to work your way through 16 opponents, a password system helping you pop back in if you do lose it all but the progression still a nice way to ensure there are consequences in place to prevent you from throwing down huge bets carelessly.
Rather than throwing you right at the table with your set of opponents to work through one by one though, you do actually enter the casino as the titular Casino Kid. While fairly humble in its overall size, you can see other patrons milling about, waitresses dressed in bunny outfits compliment the casino if you speak with them, and there are a few decorative touches like a bar and many slot machines that you unfortunately won’t be allowed to play. To get to the card games that make up the bulk of the experience you’ll need to find an opponent who is willing to face you, but there will be at most two players in the casino at a time who are willing to play. Casino Kid features 8 opponents who will face you in blackjack and 8 in poker, but only one opponent for each game is available and you’re essentially working yourself up a ladder in terms of difficulty and how much cash will be in play during the game. Finding these opponents is a bit tedious, if you want to play blackjack you can at least approach the tables and see if the dealer is willing to let you play, but poker players mill about the casino itself, many looking similar but you never really know who the next player you can face is so it’s matter of hitting up each one again after a win.
Some people milling about the small casino will give you tips, usually ones that might help you zero in on where a player who is willing to face you is hanging out. Since many characters aimlessly walk about though someone might be said to be in the poker room when they’ve moseyed on out before you got there, but in a matter of time you’ll find a willing opponent and you can even try to mix up which of the two available card games you play if one is losing its luster. Some patrons of the casino will give you tips about certain players though, although practically none of them are helpful. A fair few have someone telling you a blackjack dealer shows their emotions clearly on their face when the blackjack dealers all do so and only after a round is over, meaning that advice is entirely pointless. You might be told an early poker player is expressive which isn’t really a secret for the early opponents, so ultimately the person who told you that one specific poker player has the opposite reactions to how well their hidden hand is doing is essentially the only thing making this advice concept mildly interesting.
Finding your opponents and talking with people who don’t have much to say is hardly the most important part of the experience, so most of it will come down to how a player likes the game’s approach to the two card games featured. All games are one on one contests to completely claim the opposition’s entire stash of cash, this number often being fairly equal between both players unless you overly favor one of the card games over the other. Poker is perhaps the more compelling way to play of the two, the specific form used being draw poker. Players get a hand of five playing cards, make their starting bets, and then choose which cards they want to hold onto in their hand while replacing the others with draws from the deck. Another round of bets start, after which the hands are revealed and the player with the superior hand claims the cash. Folding is possible at any time bets are being made so you don’t need to over-invest in a bad hand, but draw poker’s very limited opportunities for getting good hands make it more of a risk taker’s game. There are rounds that are very likely to end with you and the computer controlled opponent having no meaningful hands and the highest value card determines the winner, and your opponent certainly isn’t afraid to bet high on bad hands at any difficulty level. However, getting matching pairs or a set of three identical cards are in the realm of possibility, and you can reasonably gamble on having a hand of the same suit if you luck out with your first draw. Straights are perhaps the least represented common hand type since you’d need a lot of luck to successfully get an uninterrupted set of cards in number order, but weighing up your options against the mystery of what your opponent might be holding makes for some decent mind games.
While the maximum bet will change depending how high up the ladder of opponents a specific player is, in draw poker you are allowed to get fairly high with the amount of cash you can put in each hand. The game likes to bet high even at lower levels it seems, keeping things fairly quick and adding that sense of danger to the affair since you can be drained of a good amount of cash relatively quickly if you don’t know when to back down. Usually at some point in the round though the opponent will declare they’re going all-in on the next round, and while you can refuse the dramatic bet, neither side yet knows if their hand is going to be a favorable one or not so matching it is truly a matter of luck. This can speed up the process of taking out a foe and helps alleviate some potential repetition, but the gamble is fairly risky even if you don’t need to put all your money in to match how much your opponent laid on the line. Visual tells on the small picture of your opponent’s face can give them away even if no casino goers warned you they might be overly reactive, but since they don’t often seem too strategic in how they react to your bets and bluffs it’s mostly about deciding if your hand is worth the wager. King’s battle at the end is draw poker as well, technically putting the number of unique players in that format at 9, but since both of you will come to that match with one million dollars, it ends up having far more gravitas. King throws in huge wagers that can lead to big payouts and rapid shifts of fortune, this final boss of sorts even needing to be played to the very last since he only goes all-in when it’s his only option. While draw poker does lead to a fair amount of less than exciting rounds where neither side has anything good to work with, it does offer a serviceable adaptation of the card game that holds it up its side of the experience.
Blackjack, unfortunately, is quite the drag, part of it just because of the inherent structure of the game. The goal is to get as close to 21 without going over with the cards you’re dealt, players always dealt two to start but able to ask for a hit to get more to press their luck. Going over is an instant loss while getting 21 on the deal is an instant blackjack win with a higher payout than if you won any other way save the “double down” bet that doubles your initial bet and only allows you to draw one more card before seeing if you beat your opponent. You can only see one of the two cards the dealer drew so you have to base your approach on what you know you have and what you think they have. The dealer is bound by a set of rules so their knowledge of your cards is irrelevant; the dealer must always hit if their cards add up to less than 17 and will stop the moment they go over it. Whoever has the more valuable set of cards without busting gets the money in play, although a few other fringe rules exist like being able to pay insurance if the dealer has an ace showing so that if they did draw blackjack you get your bet and insurance back.
These rules are fine for a casino game you play quickly with the purpose of building up cash, but Casino Kid makes one big error out the gate by limiting how high a bet for a round can be. For some opponents this is at least a bit proportional, it not taking a lot to clear some out of their cash if you keep going for max bets every round and get lucky. However, usually after that fairly breezy session, the next blackjack opponent will have a lot more cash but the same bet limits, meaning you can find yourself slowly trudging through an optimistic minimum of 50 rounds at one point because you need to clear Clyde out of 50,000 dollars and you can only go as high as 1,000 per bet. Compared to draw poker as well, blackjack has no room for mind games since you’re up against a dealer bound by a set of inflexible rules, and since the cards in the deck are consistent, there are rounds you are guaranteed to lose. You place your bet before you know what you’ll get so there’s no strategic folding to prevent handing money over to the dealer if you lose, so a bad tear might just add more money to an opponent’s purse and thus drawing out the already lifeless play even more. Cards in both games can be dealt faster with a button press thankfully and you can count cards to some degree to know what’s already passed by and what might be in play now, but shuffling is done before the deck is exhausted to prevent this from being too helpful.
However, after the first shuffle in blackjack you are allowed to do an all-in bet yourself, again with no idea what cards might be coming in a game even more dependent on luck than poker. If you want to keep putting in your password and brute forcing it, the all-in strategy is an option, but the eight blackjack opponents end up being a barrier to playing some decent if rudimentary poker. You can technically go for all eight normal poker players first although you will have a cash deficit if you climb without indulging in any blackjack, but having so little control over how high stakes the blackjack games can be ends up making a good amount of them a slog to push through, the randomness of payouts far too influential compared to the small touches of strategy that can be used to slightly tip things in your favor.
THE VERDICT: While navigating the casino in Casino Kid is mostly rather bland, the five card draw poker on offer provides a solid execution of that card game format. There are stakes as you try to climb your way up to harder opponents who make bigger cash bets, and while the limits on the cards you hold can make for less exciting wins, there is still some strategy to knowing which hands are worth investing in or if a bluff feels justified. Blackjack, unfortunately, is far too luck dependent, and while that’s part of the game’s inherent design, the need to slowly whittle down huge cash reserves of a dealer when you can only make small bets really makes the other half of Casino Kid hard to push through. Some all-in scenarios offer a high risk way to potentially expedite the process but with just as much of a chance at making you lose or end up playing at a heavy deficit, so unfortunately the mandatory blackjack ruins what could have been simple poker fun otherwise.
And so, I give Casino Kid for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
A BAD rating. If blackjack kept itself quick with every opponent it wouldn’t really hurt the Casino Kid experience, but every opponent who can be beaten quickly is followed by one that is going to go far slower, especially since you have no handle on your fate. That bet has to go in, and even though there is a surrender option if you’re worried you’re giving the dealer too much cash, they might not even let you leave. A string of bad rounds can undo all the progress you made, and unlike over in draw poker you can’t fold to avoid such losses. Draw poker is a well balanced execution of its specific card game, the bets reasonably high, opponents often risky enough to call them, and the all-in threat can feel like a more meaningful gamble since poker hands can be better influenced than the set of cards you get trying to hit 21 in blackjack. The AI in blackjack also seems to get actual blackjacks far more than one might think and similarly a fair bit of 20s compared to what you’re dealt, but that might just be how my luck hashed out. Even the possibility of odds tilting against you means more time languishing in those longer blackjack battles though. Having only a little blackjack in the game or just the zippier rounds would have been a nice break from the poker, but it does feel like Casino Kid bet on the wrong card games for how its gambling adventure has to be played. Bumbling around a casino to find the next player is a rather unexciting contextualization for how you face your next opponent, but its the overabundance of weakly executed blackjack that makes this experience a drag.
If you don’t need to see the King or at least keep a password on hand for after beating the eight blackjack tables, Casino Kid can still be a fine way to play a very specific form of poker. It’s not the best way, games for more powerful systems would be able to do things like reactive foes better and many gambling games down the line found interesting ways to balance the stakes without real money being involved, but Casino Kid didn’t fail at how it designed one half of the experience. Blackjack makes itself too tedious by ripping out almost all of the excitement the real game could have, the bets kept too low, the number of rounds often obnoxious, and the required nature of it means you can’t step away when you’re on a roll or worried you’re being bled dry. While a step above casino games where there are no stakes at all, Casino Kid’s efforts to add structure to the play help one half a bit while ruining the other in a way that makes the whole experience better off avoided.