kontextmaschine:

So, more than 15 years before the hedgehog mascot made his debut, Sega was making Spanish pinball games under the name “SONIC”. That’s a cute little quirk.

SEGA actually made pinball games for a while in the ‘90s too, after it absorbed the pinball arm of Data East, which it had previously distributed abroad. The Japanese tables aren’t well respected by competitive players - though the playfields were often pretty interesting and they introduced some major technical breakthroughs, the tendency was to have poorly designed rulesets.

Sometimes this meant the “best” move was to ignore all the interesting stuff in favor of doing one boring thing with an unbalanced risk/reward ratio over and over; often it meant that scoring didn’t scale with difficulty of starting features, such that a player that completed numerous intricate maneuvers to start advanced modes would be outscored by someone that started a trivially easy mode and got a few lucky bounces.

This was during the golden age of arcades, though, you could make an argument that the extensive (if competitively worthless) novelty and the front-loaded scoring were reasonably aimed not at the narrow market of pinball theorycrafters but at the broader “children who like flashing lights”. Also helping to draw eyeballs, SEGA/Data East were pioneers in theming their games around big-name licensed properties.

Now, American manufacturers had done licensed tables for a while, and off-brand and ersatz themes were a tradition - Hollywood Heat was really Miami Vice, Black Belt was kinda Karate Kid, No Good Gofers and Teed Off were more or less a competition to pull off a better take on Caddyshack, F-14 Tomcat was Top Gun. The licensed Space Invaders was actually Alien, oddly enough.

(and the Spanish and Italian ones seemed to have the same relationship to IP as t-shirt manufacturers - SONIC [by then independent of SEGA] did a Star Wars that I’m not sure is any more legitimate than Turkish Star Wars)

But those had traditionally been mixed in with original properties or generic themes. Popular subjects were various sports, pool or casino gambling - which were the themes of “last man standing” manufacturer STERN’s last three non-licensed games, complete turds largely dumped on the European market in 2000.

Now that pinball’s in a renaissance new manufacturers are showing up but it’s not clear that’ll break the trend. Jersey Jack, the first people to actually deliver on their “let’s make a pinball game, gang!” mission (this usually goes the same way as “let’s make a retro JRPG, gang!”, there was an Arkh Project thing with a Big Lebowski table last year) are polishing a Hobbit table now, after making their debut in 2013 with, of all things, The Wizard of Oz.

I was going to say that the very newest underdog startup, Spooky Pinball, finally broke the trend with their America’s Most Haunted table. But on further investigation that’s not true - of all things, it’s based on an independent film that’s parodying basic cable “paranormal investigator” docu-reality shows, apparently playing up the fact that they’re a bunch of grown-ass adults running around playing Scooby Doo.

So.

• Twilight Zone
• The Simpsons: Pinball Party
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (a well-maintained one; the phaser guns and underplayfield habitrail traffic patterns decline to crisis rapidly if unchecked)
• X-Men
• No Good Gofers

thingsthatcannotsaveyou:

CLEAR & CONCISE BRANDING FOR YOUR INVALUABLE LOCAL BUSINESS CANNOT SAVE YOU

Yeah, that’s the new Pinball Hall of Fame on the Vegas Strip. I went to it at its old location, like an empty Marshall’s or something with a vinyl sign hung from the front. It came from the personal collection of a rich eccentric who also had the world’s largest pile of bowling balls.

Playing in the first pinball tournament in a year and there are several tables – Led Zeppelin, Infinity Quest, TMNT, Rick & Morty, Mandalorian – I have never seen before.

Missandrei as such a perfect “the point is that’s why playing savior to the downtrodden doesn’t work” character misunderstood as a lesser protagonist is the 2010s in a nutshell

I like that one of the reasons there is a Guns N’ Roses pinball table coming out in 2021 is Slash is just enthusiastic about the process of pinball table design (he apparently got quite involved in their ‘94 table, and cameoed in the '98 Viper Night Drivin)

kontextmaschine:

pinball is for unicorns

kontextmaschine:

A pinball table that had been operated on location in Alaska. When the plastic flippers and drop targets broke they were replaced by functioning hand carved wooden replicas.

The table is the 1979 Totem, themed after Northwest coastal woodcarving

(via pinball collector Ken Johnson)

One interesting pinball thing is in the last few decades a few warehouse super-arcades with over a hundred games have opened as rich collectors realize that for tax reasons it’s better to open up and run them at a loss as nonprofits

Twitch

not only do I appreciate how particular it is to even know to try that Spanish Eyes save, one of the commentators is the girl who drove me to get Badger

lost a pinball game, friends

pinball

New Elvira table licensed MST3K-ass B-movies like Manos for its modes, honestly curious what Colin Spacetwinks will think.

This Rosetta Stone is written on the backbox (the upright part, with the score display and a lit graphic) of DMD-era (“dot matrix display”, so 1991-mid 2010s) pinball machines

Hey yo where’s that “how to tell an artist lowkey has a vore thing” graphic?

So when I first moved to LA I lived in Los Feliz and I don’t know why but there was def. a 24 connection. Looking it up I don’t think it had sets at Prospect Studios, but maybe the LA location shots were based out of there?

Anyway, “drunk Kiefer Sutherland” was the neighborhood mascot, I was there once when he bought the bar a round at the Drawing Room. Across the street, when an episode aired Ye Rustic Inn would do a thing called “Jack Bauer Power Hour”, you put your money down and get a shot of beer each minute, a shot of whiskey every time he kills or tortures someone and some other things, some of the crew came out to witness the finished production that way

Also Mary Lynn Rajskub, the indie comic who played girl-in-the-van Chloe, had one-woman shows at the atheist church down the street, the “Center for Inquiry”. I remember the one about giving birth and becoming a mother was called “Mary Lynn Spreads Her Legs”

Popeye Saves The Earth, because in 1994 “Popeye environmentalism pinball” made sense, I guess

Funny thing about the new Jurassic Park table, the only likeness rights they got were Wayne Knight, so the narrative is hilariously Nedry-centric