Virgin Bingo
You may remember, but this is not our first trip to Virgin Bingo. No, on our first visit to the site we were left feeling very underwhelmed to say the least. Now Virgin says that they have a new and improved offering with which to tempt us. Okay, seeing as how they are Virgin after all we guess they can have another chance to prove they know their stuff.
One thing is for sure; as soon as you enter their hall you know that Virgin is not alone. By this we mean that Virgin Bingo is operated in partnership with the very popular very large St. Minver. In fact, St. Minver may have been one of the driving forces behind Virgin’s redesign of their site. St. Minver operates in partnership with some of the biggest names in online Bingo and they would never be happy with a second class hall. This partnership has some pretty tempting perks as it brings the entire St. Minver network right to your front door. Their network comes complete with never ending Bingo and a whole lot of players.
Now that we’ve pointed out what makes partnering with St. Minver a good thing, we still have to look at the flip side of the coin. St. Minver runs a network of 90-ball Bingo halls. This means that all of the sites on the network are really more like portals to one central group of games. The games that you find a Virgin are the same as those you would find at any other St. Minver hall. We don’t mean to imply that they aren’t great games, but if a unique experience is what your after, then this is not going to be the way to go. We hear quite a bit from players who are tired of seeing the same exact thing over and over again, but as the popularity of the network attests there are still plenty of people who love the St. Minver style of fun. It’s entirely up to you; we just lay out the facts.
The look and feel of the Virgin hall does a nice job of reflecting their personality. The place is young and hip with fun graphics and engaging animations. Just as on other St. Minver sites, the software here is a non-downloading instant play platform. As the new player information was one of the areas to receive the biggest changes, we don’t think that you’ll have any trouble at all finding your way around here. You will be in and out of registration and on your way to the Bingo in a matter of minutes.
The actual gaming console at Virgin is very slick with all our favourite features integrated right in. You can even take advantage of the minigames during your Bingo if that’s what makes you happy. Having all the key pieces fitted into one central unit just makes for a better overall experience. The main reason for this fact is that when everything is in a single window it is all right there when you need it. You don’t have to arrange the windows on your screen and then keep clicking back and forth between them.
Registration is always evil no matter what it’s for and at Virgin they do their best to keep things as short as possible. It did take a while for our membership to finish processing, but it really wasn’t bad all the way around. Now that we’ve checked everything out and we’re all signed up there is nothing else left between us and our fun!
If you are a Mac user then you need to be aware that you are going to have to run Internet Explorer rather than Safari in order to get the games to work. While we are very happy to see that the software does load and run on a Mac, these kinds of hoops are hard to jump through. We wish that there was at least some very specific information posted about this issue. There are a lot of players out there who wouldn’t think to change their browser if they couldn’t get things working. They would just go to another hall.
The Mac issue is really a small thing, especially since they are supported by the site. There are still too many halls out there that only support Windows based systems. Overall this hall shows huge improvement over the first Virgin site, and this is a hall they can be proud of. Indeed they should be, because they finial have an offering that lives up to the Virgin name. Not only that, but they make it easy to have all the fun you can handle with their very low starting card prices of only 10p. There is no free play, but all new players’ accounts are credited with enough money for ten free games of Bingo depending on how they play it. Whether you have played in a St. Minver hall or not, they still offer one great game all the way around. Virgin Bingo is one that you need to see, even if it is only to see how far they have come. They are that much closer to proving to us that they can conquer this kingdom just as they have every where else. Virgin is not known for coming in second, and their online Bingo hall is not about to change that status any time soon.
