Platinum Collection: "Bingo! Turn The Odds In Your Favor!" (Digitally Remastered) [2005]

This presentation is brought to you by Tiffany Designs—the "LJN" of home video releases.

If you ever wanted to know everything there is about Bingo, from its brief history to its gameplay, then you're looking at a remastered DVD from casino gaming expert David Wilhite who will walk you through the game! Now, yes, we have previously reviewed his presentation of Poker: How to Play (1996) on VHS, and being that we called Tiffany Designs as the "LJN" of video production companies, the quality of this hasn't changed. If anything, this was a little bit better (that, on its own, doesn't say much).




The presentation starts with an advertisement from casinocity.com. You are then shown the DVD menu with the options to play the movie or view the chapters. Upon playing the presentation, Wilhite talks a little history of the game, being that it's a direct descendant of lottery. It may interest you to know that the game was originally called Beano until the game inventor's friend got a winning card and mistakingly yelled, "Bingo!" Very cool. After that brief history lecture, Wilhite talks and introduces the game.

Having already a taste of the less-than-impressive editing and shots made by this production company, lowering your expectations is a must when watching this. Why? Timing of the cuts, uneven audio levels and odd choices for transitions are when you've got a video project done by Tiffany Designs. Don't be surprised if you think this looks worse than the average YouTube video blog, and looking at this again, it actually is.





What made this more enjoyable than the Poker: How To Play was Wilhite presented this game at the now-defunct Showboat Hotel & Casino. Majority of the shots were at their Bingo Room and while there were clips of gameplay in action, we didn't see a full playthrough itself and the strategies needed as the game progresses. Like the quality expected from this company, the shots were long in the tooth making the viewer(s) wish they would see something more than just zooming in and out of the bingo room.



Wilhite then presents the nicknames of the marked Bingo cards' patterns such as "four corners," "baby blocks," and so forth. Wilhite presented so many of them, we couldn't keep up and made us wonder if some of the patterns shown were made up, like "the hot dog." One pattern David called was "Order in the Court," but even those who aren't into court drama shows would know that the "hammer" a judge uses is called a gavel. Anyway, we thought that was also too long a presentation and gradually lost our attention after presenting the first six patterns.

Like always, this presentation ended abruptly yet continues with some "bonus" clips at the end, only to wrap it up in the most abrupt way as usual.

We were not able to see if this company is still in business, and being that this ended with credits, with Johnny Jay as the editor for this film, we want to know the level of experience that these crew members have. Perhaps it's because your's truly has twenty years of video production experience and has learned nearly every "nook and cranny" there is, as we have never seen anything so mediocre. Why such a harsh statement? This was the same company claiming they've sold thousands of copies teaching all there is about casino games. We took that at face value, and now having watched and reviewed them so far, we found such marketing scheme to be an outright lie. We need further proof and investigation to secure such a statement where thousands of people rushed to purchase something like this; We've seen, and reviewed, better ones on this website (did the employees of Tiffany Designs purchase those thousand copies themselves?).

Our critique may or may not be too painful a punch in the stomach, but check these screenshots of the DVD menu:




In case you didn't see, choosing the chapter menu does not have a BACK button. This forced us to either choose a chapter from the menu or press the [DISC] MENU button on our DVD player to play the entire presentation from the beginning. We sound like jerks ready to hurl more criticisms at such terrible quality video this company has created and produced, claiming they've sold thousands of copies, but screenshots shown above speak for themselves. No one has to agree with us, but this is it; It's that bad.

Despite being a remaster of their VHS release, this DVD was encoded in MPG2 - Native D3D9 DXVA VLD Decoder in a 4:3 aspect ratio (720x480). The frame rate is 29.97i. The audio was encoded in AC3 with a sample rate of 48000 Hz.

Unless you like collecting casino-related DVDs, good or bad, there isn't much you're missing out. If you like and find humor in poorly-done presentations from the nineties, similar to how cheesy amateur horror movies were done back then, then go ahead and check this out. Other than that, there are many other resources that do a better job teaching you how to play Bingo.

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he managed a personal blog made back in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming (software development) and video production, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, playing old video/DOS games, digital video archiving, and listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

👤 About me ✉ Contact me