FingerGaming

Rating:

• Price: $0.99 (Get It)
• Version: 1.0
• Official Site: Parallel

Now, I’m not one who has ever been willing to talk fondly about my school days — especially not my time during high school. Not that I’m one to hold adolescent grudges long after they have relevance; I’ve just never considered them interesting or remarkable enough.

However, Place Your Bets reminds me of the short but glorious period of time when computing students in their final year were given their own private computing lab. It was where we spent most of our free periods — and even a few periods that weren’t free — rarely doing anything other than wasting time.

As we were saddled with Macintoshes locked up tight so we couldn’t install anything, there wasn’t a lot of gaming to be done in the lab, but we did manage to find one game that worked — a little application called Snail Race.

In Snail Race, there were six racing snails that you could bet on, and it supported several players, so often we’d find ourselves crowded around one of the Macs, literally screaming in encouragement trying to get our snail to the finish line before our opponents — until the reliable point where we were told off for disturbing other classes. No money ever changed hands, but it was about as enjoyable as a group experience could get, and it was this I was hoping for from Place Your Bets.

No such luck, obviously.

Place Your Bets is a strictly single player affair, meaning that any fun you’re going to have is going to either be on your own or working out the odds for other players on paper — which won’t really work, anyway, as you don’t get told the exact finishing order for the horses (just where your horse came in.)

Place Your Bets is a very limited gambling game, in all honesty. You can bet on one horse to win, and that’s about it. It’s kind of disappointing, especially when a game is as attractive as this one is. The unique paper cut-out look is whimsical and pretty, and it’s probably one of my favorite looking apps on the system.

So much so, in fact, that I do still play this when I have a spare moment. Even for a 99 cent app it offers low functionality, but there’s always been something pleasing about gambling — even as simplistic as this — and it’s more attractive and fun than getting a video poker sim for iPhone/iPod Touch, really.

Anyway, while I know the App Store is full of user reviews where people just moan about the features they’d like to see in updates, I can’t help but think of Place Your Bets as the “lite” version of the app they should release. There are a variety of simple improvements that I’m surprised aren’t already included. For example, in each race, the six horses are exactly the same, only their odds change. Why not randomize the look and name of the horses?

Why can’t I mix up the way I bet, by betting on my horse coming in the top three, or bet accumulators, or some other combination?

And above all, why can’t more than one player get involved? This would be a great title for a few games down the pub — sorting out who is going to get the next round in, perhaps — and I just think the potential of this title has been overlooked.

So come on, Parallel. Make this the title it should be; you can even charge us all a couple of dollars more. We won’t mind, I promise!

Tags: Gambling, iPhone, iPod Touch, Place Your Bets, Racing, reviews