I’m currently in love with Medieval Madness. I’ve played it in person several times – most recently at the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park – but I’ve also been playing a virtual version of it that’s available through The Pinball Arcade on the PS4.
It’s unusual in that its skill shots are very easy to make, but progressing requires a LOT of them. It’s not uncommon to trigger multiball three or four times a game, but racking up enough combos to unlock the final battle mode is still hard. It’s particularly hard to clear the trolls since when they pop-up in the play field they make it much more likely that a shot will ricochet back between the flippers.
My favorites were both Williams machines; Pin-bot and Getaway: High Speed 2. I could make both of those machines sing. On Getaway I played for almost 20 minutes on one ball and earned a free game for cracking the high score. I never even got close on other machines.
I got pretty good at the Funhouse machine that a guy put in our student lounge for free play. It was more complicated than it first appeared and fun even with a talking dummy insulting you the whole game.
There used to be a game called Rodeo. It had one big row of 15 targets at the top and two smaller rows of 5 targets each along the side. the center of the table was almost completely empty, so playing was something like sniping. Put all 25 targets down twice on the same turn, and then every subsequent knocked down target on the top row during that turn was a free game.
If you were good, you could play away half the day and sell the remaining games for a buck or two (the max was 99 free games) to the next person wanting to play. It’s the only pinball game I actually made money on.
I don’t remember that one, but it reminds me of a couple of others; El Dorado (remade with a space theme as Target Alpha - I think it has another name, in its “Special is worth an Extra Ball, for locations where giving out replays is illegal”), that has a row of 10 drop targets along the top and 5 near the right side, and 2001, that has two rows of 10 targets down each side.
I had two favorites back in the day; Sing Along and Captain Fantastic. Of the more recent ones, I would probably choose Star Trek: The Next Generation - if the shuttlecraft work, and especially if it has the hidden Poker With Riker mode. (The last time I was at the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, its STTNG’s shuttlecraft weren’t working, which made a couple of the modes much harder.)
Oh, another good one! It’s also available virtually.
When my kids were little the kiddie barbershop had a Star Wars table. I liked racking up free games to leave for whoever came next. The “Shoot the Death Star” jackpot was really satisfying.
My personal favourite was “The Machine: Bride of Pinbot” my arcade skills in general are adequate at best but I was pretty bloody good on that one. Multiple billion-point shots and games that stretched over an hour regularly. Loved that game. Fond memories, holding the ball on the flipper while I take a long slow glug of beer and a drag on a ciggy…ah, happy times.
I was really good at Star Wars as well, along with World Cup Soccer. Racked up free games left & right, until one day the balls started behaving erratically or did not enter play at all.
I think the management got tired of handing out all those free games and fixed the machines so they wouldnt do that anymore.
The one I played the most was Theatre of Magic. The arcade had other machines, but they were either a lot harder to play or cost more. It’s definitely the closest I’ve ever come to actually completing a table.
Thanks to Wiki, I now know of The Pinball Arcade. I see purchases on a couple different platforms in my future.
When I was a teen, my family used to go to a local pizza place with a pinball. My siblings and I liked it so much, my parents bought it. It was Comet, by Williams. I LOVE that game. It’s still in my mom’s house, which she rents out for weekends. The game gets a ton of use, which I love.
We also had one that we loved to play that was at the Columbus airport of all places. Swords of Fury, also by Williams. Remembering this just led me to find a video for that one to send my sister. “LION MAN! LION MAN! AAHAHAHAAA!”
I used to play a lot of virtual pinball, until somebody made a change to either PinMAME or Visual Pinball that caused most of my machines to stop working properly. For example, Big Bang Bar suddenly had balls get stuck in the habitrails because the exit holes were too small, or in the wrong place, and it would make the most annoying sound known to man or beast when it happened.
Also, Stern changed the way they updated game ROMs, so the PinMAME developers announced that any games with ROMs that could be updated through downloads would not be made, starting with Family Guy.
While I (like most people) have played plenty of them, I only really know one of them. When we all the siblings in my family were young our parents got us a pinball machine for Christmas one year. I assume it was the only one they could find because I’m sure my mom wasn’t thrilled with Big Betty’sTruck Stop.
It was fun having one in the house. I went from just playing at restaurants and trying to keep the ball in play to actually learning that there’s a lot more to it. This one has a whole game behind it, certain targets you have to hit in order, words you have to spell out, levels you have to keep advancing to. There’s a lot more to it than just keep the ball from falling between the flippers.
And, of course, I think my name is still on the high score list from when I changed it so you get 10 balls instead of 3 when no one was looking and then changed it back. My brother and I used to spend hours upon hours playing that game, our high scores had been neck and neck in the 3 million range and one day he finds mine in the 30 million range. HA.
Gottlieb Jumping Jack. I played that one maybe a thousand times. Going for the ten dropdown targets honed by flipping skills and made most other machines a lot easier. The one I played could handle just a little bit of shake without tilting. This was one of the last great old style machines, purely mechanical. I wasn’t thrilled with the machines that followed, they had lots of features but didn’t seem as challenging. Maybe I just got too good at playing to make it challenging, but the games from the 60s up to the mid 70s were the ones I liked the most.
Another favorite was a not-so-successful cross between pinball and video games that came out in the early 1980s, Hyperball, which shot out an endless stream of pinballs and your job was to hit various targets. I can imagine that this thing broke down regularly.
