Vegas Stages is a game which takes a plunge into the glitzy facade of gambling... which is apparently filled with the most honest and pleasant people on the planet!

The list of games to chose from are:

• Black Jack
• Slots
• Roulette
• Craps
• Poker

There is also a kind of sub-plot which goes on in the background which there really is nothing to. Basically from time to time, randomers will come up to you and say something, and you have a choice of answers, and pickpockets from time to time. That's pretty much all there is to that aspect of the game!

The real game lies in the 5 games bundled in the package, of which poker is by a long way the most satisfying. Blackjack is interesting and will generally generate a steady stream of income, but there's no real excitement with it - the same goes for the Roulette and to an extent, the Craps, which I didn't feel any satisfaction whatsoever from playing. In the poker game, however, you get the impression that an effort was made in getting this right.

The Poker game is 7 stud and seems to be reasonably fair (i.e. it doesn't seem to gift the computer or yourself with overly improbable hands). The one aspect of the poker game which is successfull in wearing my teeth thin is the prompting between players answering with call/raise etc. Every time the computer scratches it's ass, you have to hit a button! Aside from this, HAL have made a decent effort at getting the computer characters to make "conversation" (using quotes as it's only really about a dozen sentences) which was pretty ahead of it's time for this kind of game (outside the PC).

So overall, it's a pretty decent effort at a casino game, with an effort made to make it interesting with a splash of an underlying story buried in the backdrop, but it is pretty limited and poker ultimately ends up being the only game you come back to!

Review supplied by the SNES Reviews Webmaster and many thanks for it! :)