Just saw a Special Olympics “the revolution is inclusion” commercial and it infuriated me because one of the intercut bits is playing pinball in an arcade. And I recognize that arcade, it’s the one across Vermont from LA City College, and it’s got neon accents and mirrored ceilings that make it photogenic but that was the worst place I’ve ever played pinball, when I went there was a Ripley’s Believe It or Not with a wood screw drilled into the playfield because the ball tended to get stuck there and the bumper that should kick it out on ball search had been dead for years
See this is what I’m talking about when I say “American Pinball and Jersey Jack are competing for 2/3 of a company worth of market position as more premium than Bally”
The playfield’s a 90s Lawlor-alike like No Good Gofers or Whitewater, the video and callouts clearly reference how much it took from Roller Coaster Tycoon, they honestly shoulda cut corners and put it out for $1000 less
Now the *theme* is close to Woah Nellie, but that’s fine. No matter what the haters say, “drunk tits and objectification” are a classic pinball theme and a bunch of the scene’s spitfire figurines have told me so much in private. Now is the absolute wrong time to back off that.
(Bonus Fact: a fixture of our scene was a programmer on RCT pinball, and he was the most insufferable Drupal wokescold for a while so I started pushing back on him)
I love the way so much pre-90s pinball art clearly comes from this unlettered notebook paper-airbrushed van tradition where eventually they kinda got the tits right, but they definitely got the tits
Oh let’s spawn a different thread off this to point out pinball design
If you look at the bottom 1/3 of this table it looks fairly modern - outlanes, slingshots, flippers - but there are some important differences from the now-standard “Italian Bottom” design
The first thing - there are two different outlanes on each side, and which one it goes through matters, as there are two possibly lit feature lights on each lane. At the same time w/o wire lane guides which one it goes through is unclear until it does, but there are no flippers or activated features past the point of no return.
This reflects the higher importance in EM (“electromechanical”, thought of as one era of pinball based on its mechanics, followed by “solid state” and “DMD”) tables of bonus and other collect-on-drain features AND of “nudging”, manipulating the outcome by imparting force to the cabinet directly
Second, you see the slings, running diagonally separating the “dead” outlanes from the live space in the middle of the playfield? Notice that they’re a straight line, thick rubber bands. More modern slings are wedge-shaped so that when a ball contacts the diagonal edge an induction-powered “kicker” behind the rubber has more space to add force to the rebound.
Third, notice there are no inlanes - wireframe aisles delivering balls behind and under the slings to the flipper without extraneous horizontal momentum (but with spin). As a result there’s little possibility of aimed shots, and if you’ll notice there’s basically no long shots to target, and that the best/trickiest long shot there is (on either sides of the bumpers up to the top) just feeds it up high against gravity to get more points falling back down
I love the way so much pre-90s pinball art clearly comes from this unlettered notebook paper-airbrushed van tradition where eventually they kinda got the tits right, but they definitely got the tits
I love how this is a hipsterish nostalgic American proletarian leisure activity themed with another, completely different, hipsterish nostalgic American proletarian leisure activity.
Someone needs to make a pinball-themed pinball machine, so you can play a game of pinball while imagining playing a different game of pinball.
“Silverball turned out to be very ESPN-friendly, with sports-themed games based on baseball, football, college football, auto racing, horse racing, boxing, soccer, tennis, the Olympics, bowling, pool, fishing, and even dominoes (what, no curling?). This pattern of basing pinball games on other games reaches its existential peak in Super Score — a pinball-themed pinball game.”
Since they upgraded from 128x32 pixel dot matrix displays to full video in the last few years (under pressure from new manufacturers finally disrupting the monopoly Stern was left with after the late ‘90s crash) they’ve honestly not known what to do with all that space when they’re not playing a mode display or video clip or something; it’s too big to fill with score alone.
In the new Deadpool pinball table they fill it with a SEGA Model 32-style animation of Deadpool fighting off ninjas while he was trying to play the Deadpool pinball table
I love the way so much pre-90s pinball art clearly comes from this unlettered notebook paper-airbrushed van tradition where eventually they kinda got the tits right, but they definitely got the tits
The Spider-Man table originally came out pegged to one of the movie series (the Tobey Maguire one I think) with art to match and shitty video-capture on the LED screen
They rereleased it with new art and animation a few years ago and now it almost seems a shame they didn’t hold out for Spiderverse branding, though if you look at the backglass this Spidey’s wearing the original suit but underneath he’s black
Also the real change in the re-release is they improved the Doc Ock lock vuk so the ball doesn’t rebound back out on hard shots.
“Vuk” is the official terminology for a feature where the ball settles into a recessed saucer and then gets shot upwards by an induction coil-powered piston, usually into a wireform “habitrail”. It’s short for “vertical up-kicker”.
More than Stern’s short interchangeable table+video monitor “Pinball 2000” platform, Cactus Canyon is the treasure we lost when the last pinball boom crashed in the late ‘90s
These days it would probably be released as Red Dead Redemption but that’s OK
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
Anonymous asked: Are you excited for the new Black Knight pinball table?
Sword of Rage isn’t a Black Knight table, Black Knight tables feature a tight inner loop and the real action in getting to the upper playfield for a cross-field 3rd flipper shot.
(EDIT: haha, the picture I saw was with the upper PF removed. I guess that did let me appreciate enough the point in paragraph 3 tho)
They do put the mystery wheel at the center at least. BK and BK2K were really before the backglass animation mode-based era tho, I’m wondering how it’ll be implemented
It’d be the first solid fan-layout longshot table since Game of Thrones tho, that’s something. Deadpool is kinda a longshot table folded on itself though (and Avengers was the rough-draft prototype for that)
last I checked in I expected Munsters to be split interpretation of Monster Bash and Addams Family
honestly it feels more like Tales from the Crypt mixed with Indy 500, with the full-screen old TV clips like Batman ‘66
there’s a Grandpa Munster shot in the MM catapult location that advances D-R-A-G-U-L-A and makes you realize that “what are the boundaries of the Rob Zombie pinball rights” is a live question
Played the new Monster Bash remake table and it was too light (which matters for a table that’s known for jostle-ability)
Also when you rotate the rollover multiplier lights it leaves ghosts too long, maybe artifact of trying too hard to compensate for LED lights vs. old-school bulbs
Stern just released a Munsters back glass
which if you know how in-jokey pinball is you realize is the color scheme of Monster Bash with the uncle in the electric chair like Addams Family so HOOOOLY SHIT
The funny thing isn’t just that there’s a new Beatles pinball table in 2018/Luigi 6
It’s that it’s a layered throwback, it’s literally the playfield of the 1980 seapunk misandrist Seawitch plus the spinning disc of the 1972 breakthrough Fireball with a 5-mode early ‘90s ruleset
