bumping an old thread coz this is INSANE!!
there was a big national pinball tournament over the weekend, and the clip below is the guy who won it
https://www.twitch.tv/iepinball/clip/BashfulBoringNigiriPartyTime-v_ILUfGFR4LXSzJ6
basically, Player 2 already had an extremely significant lead, so Player 4 really had to play a stellar ball just to catch up. The uphill battle to get close was intimidating enough as is.
Then that bonus clutch... @_@
@Moon finally found the video of the coolest pinball cabinet I've ever seen. separate boards for attic, foyer, and basement.
Went to an antique store in Decatur Illinois and they had some or good mid century pinball tables. I really want a good table from the 80s or 90s but I know that I’m never going to do the upkeep on one.
Those are some interesting games! Butterfly is from the Spanish manufacturer Segasa/Sonic (no relation). They were really ahead of the curve in terms of playfield layouts, their game Mars Trek from 1977 is particularly noteworthy. Unfortunately they had MDF cabinets that tend to fall apart.
Doodle Bug is another cool one—love the “Pointy People” style! Notable for the “doodle” feature where a magnet pulses a ball up and down beneath the playfield when you hit certain targets. Also shows up on Williams’ Solar Fire and Bally’s Fireball II.
Speaking of Pointy People, I have a backglass of Jerry Kelley’s Capersville art in my apartment right now, it’s a stylish masterpiece. In terms of games, I have a 1980 Stern Flight 2000 in my apartment and a 1988 Williams Taxi that lives with my parents.
I love the dual loop tables like Taxi. Getting in the rhythm and hitting those loops over and over is so satisfying. I briefly had Cyclone in the early 2000s but somebody offered me double what I payed for it and I sold it after about 6 months. I got it at an auction for an arcade that went out of business for 300. It seemed like fortune at the time.
Taxi is a brilliant game, even after thousands of plays, there is nothing quite like starting the three hurry-up shots (express lane jackpot, passenger jackpot, airport rides million) and seeing if you can hit all of them for a huge payoff before they expire.
I’m a little surprised there isn’t more of a pinball community on here, there are a lot of interesting gameplay and design decisions that the average IC listener would be very interested in. The best games have multiple valid scoring strategies and press your luck mechanics that really draw you in for more. The barrier to entry is relatively high, but once you learn a few flipper skills and begin to understand the visual language of pinball (and how that can vary by manufacturer/era), it becomes a lot easier to hop on something new and still have a decent game.
The modern Stern stuff is fun, but anybody new to pinball should ideally begin with games from the late 70’s to the late 80’s where the ruleset can be boiled down to “shoot flashing lights” or “shoot this to light the spinner, shoot the spinner”. The deep rulesets and visual language of Sterns are pretty terrible and it never feels good to lose to a worse player that happens to own the game and understand all of the scoring quirks that you don’t see as a location player.
My two pinball items!
Yeah I’m generally not a fan of Sterns recent output. Hard to tell what you’re supposed to shoot, and it feels like every slight mistake flows straight down the outlanes.
Jersey Jack and CGC have been doin ok though. The Ritchie brothers’ Elton John and Pulp Fiction are both stellar. Elton John has some of that patented Steve Ritchie flow, and Pulp Fiction feels like if Indiana Jones was an EM table. Pat Lawlor’s Toy Story 4 is a bit busy but fun as well.
