18+ Only. Play Responsibly.
The lightning struck the fruit machine.
The cherries survived.
The bells survived.
The red sevens survived.
I picked the top-right symbol.
It contained absolutely nothing.
No MINI.
No MINOR.
No MAJOR.
No GRAND.
The storm cleared.
The reels came back.
A plum appeared on the left as though no electrical event had taken place.
I had been given four possible places to touch during an unexpected thunderstorm and had selected the one containing €0.00.
Top right was finished.
I didn’t need evidence.
40 Hot Lightning had been open for only a few minutes, and one corner of its random lightning feature was already dead to me.
The session had started at €100.00 with €0.80 spins.
Visually, it was an old fruit machine that had suffered a major upgrade in meteorology.
Red sevens.
BARs.
Bells.
Cherries.
Plums.
Blueberries.
Orange slices.
Then, around all that perfectly traditional produce, electric blue light and enough lightning to suggest somebody had wired a thundercloud directly into the cabinet.
The reels were five wide and four high.
Forty paylines crossed them.
That was a lot of possible routes for a cherry.
The first few spins were quiet.
Three plums.
€0.80.
Some bells.
€1.60.
A small line involving orange slices.
€2.40.
Nothing on screen suggested that the fruit required atmospheric supervision.
Then one base spin stopped without anything particularly special.
Lightning took over.
No Scatter formation had summoned it.
No meter filled.
The machine simply decided the weather had changed.
Four symbols appeared.
I chose top right.
Nothing.
The entire feature vanished.
That was how the corner became guilty.
Back on the reels, I continued at €0.80.
Top right could remain wherever failed lightning picks went.
I had fruit to inspect.
The Wild appeared on reel three.
It was a round electric symbol, already much more modern than everything around it.
Then it expanded.
The whole third reel became Wild.
Four positions of electricity running vertically through a field of bells and fruit.
One line of red sevens crossed it.
Another lower line used it with BARs.
€7.20.
That was better.
The game had just put an electrical column through a fruit display and somehow improved the shelf life.
Next spin, the reel was normal again.
A blueberry occupied one of the positions where the Wild had been.
No scorch marks.
No smoke.
Blueberry intact.
Apparently the lightning in 40 Hot Lightning was highly selective about produce.
The balance stayed around €95 for a while.
Cherries paid €1.60.
A seven line returned €4.80.
One of the Scatter symbols appeared twice and disappeared without further discussion.
Another spin brought a Wild on reel two.
Full reel.
Nothing reached it.
Four Wild positions.
Forty paylines.
Not one useful route.
The electricity stood there from top to bottom surrounded by unrelated fruit.
€0.00.
That seemed harder to achieve than the win.
A whole reel had become capable of substituting for almost anything, and reels one, three, four and five had collectively arranged themselves so badly that nobody wanted assistance.
The Wild vanished.
A bell returned.
The bell looked much more confident than an object invented before domestic electricity should have looked.
I stayed at €0.80.
There was no reason to change.
The fruit did not appear impressed by stake size.
Around €88, the first Scatter payment arrived.
Three matching Scatter symbols landed.
They paid on their own.
Not a feature.
Just money.
A little burst of colour, then back to oranges and BARs.
The balance recovered enough to keep the session comfortably alive.
A few spins later, three of the other red-and-gold Scatter symbols appeared across the positions where they were allowed to land.
That one paid too.
The fruit machine had two kinds of Scatter and neither had any intention of giving me Free Spins.
This was an old-school arrangement.
Sometimes three special symbols simply gave you money and sent you back to the plums.
No expedition.
No twelve-stage bonus map.
No character explaining a collection meter.
Three objects arrived.
Cash.
Cherries resumed.
I could respect that.
The top-right corner remained unforgiven.
The balance fell through €84.
Then €81.
A Wild expanded on reel four.
This time it connected.
BAR symbols found it across one line.
A bell route used it on another.
€5.60.
Useful.
The electricity disappeared.
I began noticing how strange the Wild really was beside the rest of the symbols.
Everything else belonged to the physical vocabulary of an ancient fruit machine.
Bell.
Fruit.
BAR.
Seven.
Then one circular symbol arrived apparently powered by a reactor and replaced an entire reel with lightning.
It was like installing a particle accelerator in a greengrocer and keeping the handwritten price tags.
I reached €76.80.
No second Lightning Bonus.
Top right had plenty of time to think about what it had done.
A pair of sevens paid.
Nothing.
Cherries.
Nothing.
A full expanded Wild on reel two appeared beside symbols that could not organize themselves into anything.
Nothing again.
The machine had forty lines and occasionally used all of them to demonstrate the loneliness of electricity.
Then, at €72.80, the screen changed.
Lightning.
Again.
The fruit disappeared behind the feature.
Four choices.
Same problem.
I did not touch top right.
That position had already been struck from the map.
Bottom left.
No hesitation.
I picked it.
MINOR.
25x the bet.
€20.00.
There.
The weather had been perfectly capable of containing money.
Just not where I had first put my finger.
The feature ended.
Balance: €92.80.
Back came the reels.
Cherries.
Plums.
BAR.
Bell.
The machine had restored an ordinary fruit display immediately after handing me twenty euros from a thundercloud.
I now had a dangerous amount of evidence supporting a completely useless theory.
Bottom left: good.
Top right: barren electrical wasteland.
There were still two untouched positions.
I did not need a third Lightning Bonus.
I absolutely would have tested one.
That was the problem.
I continued at €0.80.
A line of orange slices paid €2.40.
Then nothing.
A Wild on reel three expanded and helped three red sevens connect.
€6.40.
That brought the balance close enough to the starting point for the whole session to become irritatingly mathematical without actually becoming exciting.
€96.
€94.
€97.
Fruit.
Lightning Wild.
Fruit again.
A four-of-a-kind bell line nudged me upward.
Two dead spins took it back.
The red seven was still the best normal symbol to see.
Five of them would have been excellent.
The machine preferred distributing them like witnesses who had been told not to sit together.
Two here.
One over there.
A Wild between them on the wrong line.
The blueberries were even less ambitious.
They appeared in clusters large enough to look organized and then failed to use any of the forty routes across the screen.
I reached €98.40.
One good spin from home.
The next spin landed a Wild on reel four.
Expanded.
Red seven on reel one.
Another on two.
Wrong symbol on three.
The Wild stood on four.
The fifth reel delivered a seven.
Three sevens separated by the exact piece of fruit-machine incompetence needed to prevent the whole thing from becoming useful.
€0.00.
The full Wild reel had arrived one position too late to repair the damage.
I continued.
€97.60.
A small cherry win.
€98.40.
Nothing.
€97.60.
BARs.
€99.20.
That was close enough to become dangerous.
I was eighty cents below the starting balance.
One spin.
If it did nothing, I would be €1.60 down.
If it paid, the fruit might finally erase the entire thunderstorm.
I pressed.
The reels stopped.
Plum.
Bell.
Blueberries.
Wild on reel three.
It expanded.
The entire middle column became electric.
Reel one had cherries.
Reel two had orange slices.
Reel four had a BAR.
Reel five had a red seven.
A Wild capable of being almost anything had been placed in the exact centre of four different conversations.
No line.
€0.00.
I stopped at €98.40.
The final screen was magnificent in a very specific way.
Four positions of glowing Wild lightning filled reel three.
On either side sat cherries, oranges, a bell, a BAR, blueberries and one red seven.
Forty paylines.
An entire electrical column.
Nobody agreed on anything.
The machine had survived two thunderstorms, paid me MINOR from the bottom-left corner and finished €1.60 ahead of my first failed pick.
Top right remained untouched after that.
I still blamed it.
Dega Baby made me feel every decimal of pain.