**Schnitte **, by the way, pinball machines are coming back to the U.S. from Germany and parts Europe by the container load.
Multiball play is great fun if you can master it.
The trick is to keep one ball near the flippers and use it to strike the free balls in the directions you want.
If you do it right, you can cannon balls from nearer the center of the table and get angles into difficult high scoring holes, pockets and targets that are alomost impossible to hit in normal single ball play.
If it’s a modern pinball, it might be the computer at work. It’s easier to hook a junkie if you make the first few hits easy and fun.
I notice an machine that’s been idle a long time will be more likely to give up a free play. (i.e. with the two digit random match)
Sometimes doing nothing is the best move of all.
[QUOTE=The Controvert]
If it’s a modern pinball, it might be the computer at work.
[QUOTE]
Data East started lower scoring with Lethal Weapon 3. If you passed the high score to date then targets scored 1/10 of their usual value. Also, turn on the game with the coin door open and the computer will tell you if the high score needs to be lowered or raised to encourage more play.
Match percentage can be adjusted. And like video poker games if no one wins in a while then it’s due (unlike real probablilty, computers have a law of programmed averages.)
I may have missed it but I don’t think I saw it above…
another use for the flippers buttons is to change the lights at the top of the playing surface. If, for example, you have 3 or 4 channels the ball can go through after you shoot it to the top with the plunger, you want to light up all the lights. You can alternate which channels are lit up (or more importantly NOT lit up) so that as the ball starts to go down a specific channel it will ultimately go down an unlit channel, thereby lighting it up.
I love pinball. I’d like to own one. Where do you go to buy an arcade quality pinball machine.
E3
(off to check his google-fu on locating reasonably priced pinball machines)
What’s amazing to me, is I’ve always pretty much sucked at pinball. I’m old enough to remember K-mart having a bank of 8 or 12 machines where kids and older kids mis-spending their youth would play for seemingly forever on a quarter. My achilles heel was always the ball that would come straight down the middle, very fast, and that was the end of that.
Fast forward to Windows, which has had a pinball game for quite a while. So, I launched that, thinking “Well, this is electronic, I should have no problem.” Wrong. They have recreated a pinball machine so well, that I suck at the electronic version precisely the same as a real machine. Hm.
I’ve noticed these things on the more recent machines. One I played a lot at a local pub would raise its replay score if you managed to get a replay on points. Presumably, once you hit the higher score on your next game, it would go still higher. Sadly, it looks like the days of playing all afternoon on a quarter (or more accurately nowadays, a dollar) are gone.
Most things on newer games could be adjusted, I would guess. I’m unsure exactly how, but I do know that on the old EM games, there were many adjustments that could be made in both the body and the backbox: free game scores, number of games that could be stored, match operation, tilt sensitivity, and so on. I would be very surprised if any/all of these functions, even if they are controlled by a computer in modern games, couldn’t be enabled, disabled, or overidden by the operator somehow.
Spoons
Proud owner of a 1975 Gottlieb EM with complete paperwork!
A good place to start is the newsgroup, REC.GAMES.PINBALL. Collectors are least likely to sell you a lemon, and usually will provide help, if they are local.
Depending on where you are, I would look here for places to buy:
- Cragislist (if you can handle fixing minor problems occasionally)
- Pinball Classifieds You will find (mostly) collectors here, with only a few vendors.
- Pinballsales.com New pins, good service, good prices.
- Local vending companies - you may pay a bit more, but can get a warranty sometimes.
Good luck! If you buy one, you WILL buy another. Guaranteed.
A vendor I know mentioned that he thought “percentaging” for high scores, etc., was one of the reasons pinball lost popularity in the 90’s…
Iggins, has good suggestions. Also try googling “auctions, pinball and your nearest large city.” Try SuperAuctions.com . eBay always has a selection.
Some magazines are:
ReplayMag.com has a large links page
GameRoomMagazine.com has a sample mag online
PlayMeter.com has an associations link page
All he had to do was to disable it. The permutations of the features adjustments is astronomical. Owner/Operators have a sad tendency to ignore the software adjustments. They only looked at the coins in and ignored ball time and features usage. Go to the Internet Pinball Database, look at the manual for a newer game and weep for all the features adjustments that are ignored.
The real pinball players may sneer at me, but there’s a pinball game for PS2 and gamecube (maybe Xbox too) that’s got the Bally name, and recreates around 8 real pinball machines of different vintages. I bought it new for $10, and I’ve seen it for $5 on sale, so it’s not a big investment. One of the interesting things is that at the beggining of a new game, you can have it tell you what sequences of events are needed to get certain large scores or free balls. Over time I was able to do better at the tables I was practicing on, just from timing my shots and knowing what the table rules were. The flippers and ball seemed to behave pretty realistically. IIRC, there was a way to nudge the table, but it was awkward, and I never figured out how to do it effectively (hey, that’s just like real life too!)
I played zillions of games of pinball as a teenager - this was in the late 70s and early 80s, when pinball was at its most popular and there were arcades all over the place.
Aside from all the excellent comments here, a lot of games had extra skill components like extra flippers on the sides of the table near the middle, or a flipper at the top of the table that you could use to control ball movement up there.
Multi-ball takes a tremendous amount of skill to do right. Guys that are really good at multi-ball play learn to juggle the three balls, trying to keep all of them from coming down the table at once. On some machines, you could shoot a ball into a trap target where it would be held for a couple of seconds. Other tables you can shoot a ball up a ramp to an upper level, and knowing that it will usually take several seconds to come back down, you can then shoot one of the other multi-balls into some other time-delaying area. This gives you the best chance of keeping them all in play for a long time.
Another skill is knowing how much force to use on the plunger that shoots the ball into the playing field. Good players can measure the force and actually aim the trajectory of the ball to put it in a strategically important part of the playing field. Some games have an extra bonus if you can launch the ball with precisely enough force to get it through one gate but not the second, so that it rolls back into a high-scoring target.
Savingballs that look like they are going almost straight down the center requires precision timing. If the ball can be touched even slightly by either flipper, fast, precise flipper timing can sometimes cause the ball to carom between the two flipper tips, bouncing it back out into the playing field.
Another skill is being able to aim the ball by letting it roll down the flipper to a precise location before flipping it. Variations on this include being able to trap the ball on the flipper for max precision, or letting the ball roll down the side ramp onto the flipper and shooting it while it`s in motion to get extra power on the ball (often needed to shoot it up a steep ramp).
And yet another one: Sometimes, for strategic reasons you might need the ball on your left or right flipper. If you trap it on the opposite flipper, you can sometimes give a rapid flick of the button, causing the flipper to stutter. This bounces the ball off the flipper. Do it well, and you can bounce it off the point of the side bumper and cause it to arc over onto the other flipper, where you trap it again and then aim and shoot. Other times when you need the ball on the opposite flipper and its coming down the side ramp, you can hold the flipper in the ùpposition and just let the ball ski right off the end of the flipper, across the center, and onto the other one. But you have to be able to judge the speed well - if its not going fast enough, itll just roll off the flipper and down the drain. Too fast, and it`ll go off the flipper and onto the opposite bumper, which might just launch it right down the side gutter.
The best pinball game I ever played was Addams Family It`s a great game. I have a friend who bought one - it cost him almost $4,000, and he has to maintain it regularly to keep it in good working order. But what a great game.