Luck Be a Landlord

This was such a wacky, random find.  I don't know what made me install it and run it, since I don't like slot machines or old-style pixellated graphics at all.  The basic idea is: you rented a new apartment and it's pretty much empty except for a mysterious slot machine.  You get a notice from your landlord that you need some amount of coins in just 5 spins.  So you start spinning the reels to try and get enough money. 


When you do come up with the money, the landlord raises your rent, and sometimes a mysterious group ("the local aid network") emails you trying to help you out.  These messages include obscure notes about the game itself, and also red herrings like "you can pet the dog."  Which does nothing, as far as I could tell.  Another message said "these three things refer to previous games the developer has created," but I could not recognize any of those tiny icons.

In between spins, you get a chance to add new symbols to the reels, and these symbols interact in bewildering and sometimes hilarious ways.  Some items appear above the slot machine itself, giving special bonuses.  There is a swear jar and a piggy bank that collects coins along the way and can be broken to give 3X the coins it collected.  So when you come up short on rent, these coin-gathering items come up and you smash them and find that you're still short on coins.

Before spinning the reels, you can click all the symbols to remind yourself what they do.  It just hurts my head when this thing has a bonus if it's next to one of these six things, and the toddler eats all candy and burps up coins, and the anchor scores more when it's in a corner, and there are dice that roll a number of coins with some other item that rerolls any dice that come up too low.  And that's just the beginning.

There is a sort of level indicator suggesting there are 12 levels.  I have gotten to "7 of 12" with no idea if it's even possible to beat the game.

It is soooo weird.  I like weird.  I'm not sure how many other times I will try to beat this fiendish thing.




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