(‘merica)

‘MERI… wait.

…

OGGY OGGY OGGY!

OI OI OI!

‘MERICA

‘Merica!

‘Merica.

So in Brooke Shields’ late ‘70s/early '80s “fuckable middle schooler” period (which I told you was a thing), she apparently made a movie that was the pinball version of The Wizard.

Alternately, in retrospect The Wizard was the NES version of Tilt.

Other pinballsploitation movies include Pinball Summer and, obviously, Tommy.

Wait, No Fear came out before Attack from Mars? I would not have guessed.

spacetwinks:

transmeme5atan replied to your post:the backstory on how the pinball table High Speed…

please tell us bc I’m legit too lazy to look it up instead of doing squats

steve ritchie, pinball table designer, lead the local police on a high speed chase where he was doing over 140 mph in a 1979 porsche 928

i have no idea why steve did this

He tells the story 51 minutes into this interview.

While we’re on the topic of pinball, the other day I had a chance to play an Avengers for the first time in a while, and got reminded why.

With the benefit of experience let me update my original assessment: this is the worst Stern game since Austin Powers.

(Like, that means worse than Transformers, Avatar, Stern Indiana Jones, NASCAR, and the ’02 Playboy. Worse than the Stern Rolling Stones, for chrissake.)

And the reason is that this thing must’ve been designed with no appreciation of like, geometry.

Geometry isn’t everything! A lot of people love both Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness despite the fact that they have basically the same shot layout and progression, the big difference is in the multiball rulesets. (Also off the top of my head, the catapult, moat/drawbridge, ramp design [but not routing], trolls vs. martian standups, and the Merlin saucer kicking out to the right orbit instead of the scoop ejecting down.)

Hell, Jack*Bot is the exact same table as Pin*Bot (sole exception being the left ramp lifting up to expose the Cashier standup, I think) only with a much much much better ruleset.

But Avengers. Oh man. Let me tick off the issues:

• The right few lights on the multiplier lanes are obscured by the Hawkeye ramp at the top right, and worse than that the lanes have absolutely no synergy with the pop bumpers beneath them, I have no idea how they expected people to be getting 6(!) rollovers in a ball.
• The inlane lights are obscured by the ramp returns from any reasonable stance, which is completely unnecessary and inexcusable.
• Almost all the major long shots are way too deep and narrow-mouthed to be reliably collected - the Iron Man orbit, the Black Widow ramp, the Captain America loop - and none of them are any more practical from a backhand shot.
• The one easily gettable shot is right flipper to left orbit and the Hawkeye ramp. But that’s terrible, because that’s the most absurdly important shot in the game - it locks balls for Loki multiball and it’s a safe return right back to the right flipper (and thus the only real safe shot to feed an inlane and thus light the locks). Having a game where good strategy is to shoot the same ramp to return to ramp over and over is terrible design, like Bad Cats or Data East Star Wars-level terrible.
• It’s not at all intuitive how the Hulk drop targets light multiball and it’s way too hard to get the collect saucer on purpose, which is terrible for a bash toy serving the “something even flailing newbies can get and enjoy” role, plus the ball gets stuck under the toy’s arms way more than is justifiable.

It’s like they just skipped straight from concept to final without working it in whitewood or something (which now that I think of it might’ve been possible if they were rushing to match up to the theatrical release, kinda like what happened with Phantom Menace).

Like, the two possible, possible excuses would be

1. it’s designed for a much shallower slope than Portland operators tend to use, kind of the opposite of how Stern Indy works better when it’s steep
2. it’s designed to challenge the highest tournament-level trap-and-aim sharpshooters, a counterpoint to how AC/DC, X-Men, Metallica, and Stern Trek got updates to favor Zen archery-style speed. Would certainly explain how they expect people to get to the Vs. 2-balls, which would require 4 shots to start a mode, however many to collect, then 4 to start again.

(in re:)

Nah it’s not that small breasts are inherently fucked up, it’s… okay.

A lot of classic pinball art, like comic books and airbushed vans, seems to come from artists without formal training, who just started doodling on lined notebook paper and kept going, without ever actually drawing from life or studying anatomy.

(Wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them also *were* comic book and airbushed van artists. Like, Christ.)

((Also not to say that drawing from life is always perfect - $20 says the faces on the Paragon backglass were based on the artist’s suburban ‘70s mom and dad))

And, like, there’s nothing fucked up about large breasts either (my particular thing is up higher - collarbones, shoulders, shoulderblades, but I appreciate a nice rack as much as anyone), but for something so beloved in pinball culture (that’s not even getting into the fanmade “alternate” backglasses and translites on pinside), they sure do get fucked up a lot - perfectly spherical, too high, no sense of gravity or mass even when they’re specifically depicted braless.

And in Cheetah’s case, it looks like someone started with larger breasts and then just reduced size linearily to go for a sleek cheetahlike look without factoring in, like, fabric tension or the thoracic wall or adipose tissue vs. glandular tissue. So you get these kind of uncanny valley breasts.

“Uncanny cleavage”. Okay, I impressed even myself with that one.

Like, look at these pictures of actual humans for comparison. This one is maybe the closest to justifying it, but that’s with padding and straps and retouching.

I mean not like I could do any better, my artistic medium is words.

In somewhat related news, the two most #seapunk #misandry-themed pinball tables.

In further related news, butts.

Cheetah: possibly the only pinball backglass to fuck up the breasts in a *small* direction.

Oh my *god* it is a terrible idea playing a pinball tournament at a location with a well-playing AfM, this is taking forever. Playfield needs to be roughed up or waxed to hell.

spacetwinks:

was the bram stoker’s dracula pinball table built specifically to try and tempt you to knock it into tilt status out of anger

Yes.

In real life with loose settings you can shake the mist ball loose with only 1-2 warnings, even after the live ball’s drained.

(In real life if you hit it slow enough with the live ball it can get caught by the magnet and both dangle as it drags and you have to wait for one to scrape off when it reaches the side)

spacetwinks:

what is it about pinball table artists that, regardless of theme or design, seem to always go “did i remember to put big boobs in here”

same thing that compels the backglass artists to go “better emphasize the nipples, someone might think she’s wearing a bra”, presumably

highway62:

Stood up all like tombstones.

Dixon CA 2014

you give to me ride!

Played the new Metallica pinball table. It’s solid! Like it as a table and it actually leaves me thinking well of the band. The cartoon-drippy, almost hot rod style of the art was a pleasant surprise.

Dork alert: mystery has given me Fuel, but it has not given me autofire or, really, anything I desire. (It mostly gives me 500,000 points.)

Got a chance to play the new Avengers pinball table the other night. This was a Pro model (cheaper and stripped down from the LE/Premium models, but more features than the distinct “The Pin” home models) at The Know in Portland.

First impression: reminds me of X-Men - the main dynamic is shots that, hit enough times, start a mode keyed to a particular Avenger, and you want to collect them all. Haven’t triggered all of them yet, but they seem like your basic “make this shot to start, keep making it to complete” modes.

A major difference, though, is that these shots are a *lot* narrower and harder to hit, and require 4 shots to start. I assume that’s hard-coded, as each shot has 4 lamps. (Also, compared to when X-Men showed up on location, the code seems much more polished, I wouldn’t expect nearly as much change on updates.)

There’s a few things that compensate for this difficulty. For one, if you soft-plunge and flip to an Avenger shot you’ll (I’m told) start the mode immediately, kind of like Sopranos. For two, modes don’t time out and remain active across balls. For three, there’s a pretty open lower playfield where missed shots can bounce fairly safely and probably advance something useful (Thor stand-ups, Hulk drop targets, S.H.I.E.L.D. standup mystery awards, or the Tesseract Cube)

For Hulk you need to drop 4 targets and then hit a saucer - it’s pretty shallow but there are some shots that serve it up perfectly. That starts a straight-up 4-ball multiball with a decently long save - I didn’t have time to take my eyes off the flippers to see if you could advance anything else while it was running - my guess is maybe the Loki and multiplier rollovers but nothing else. (Looking it up online, you can apparently make shots to complete Avengers during this mode, but I’m still not sure about starting them.)

The Tesseract Cube is basically the TotAN lamp. Spinning gives you points, spin it enough and you start a mode where… spinning gives you points. Meh, but the geometry of the table’s such that you can put some wicked spin on it pretty easy.

There’s a Loki multiball, LotR sword-style inlane/outlane rollovers light lamps, all 4 lights a lock at the orbits, 3 balls locked starts it. Haven’t discovered anything special here yet.

Finally, you get your multiplier from a standard “3 rollover lanes above a bumper triangle” setup in the back right of the playfield. But each lane has 2 lights (one per Avenger) - a skill shot plunge to the lit lane will give you both, but otherwise each rollover seems to only give you one (as long as they’re not both lit already). As usual they rotate with the flipper buttons, and all 6 will advance the multiplier. Bumpers and the multiplier lanes seem to get a lot of action on the multiball, so that works out.

I’ve just barely made it to a replay at 16,000,000 so far, but on reflection my scoring strategy (which I’m going to go out tonight to try) is to play a game of Avengers like a ball of Monster Bash - get shots 4 times to start features, and then hit the big green guy just left of centerfield for a multiball to complete them.

I like it a lot - when Stern was first left as the only manufacturer standing, they made some really iffy tables (maybe due to their attempts to cut costs and make pinball newbie-friendly). But between AC/DC, X-Men, and now Avengers, they really seem to be on a roll lately.


Things I don’t like:

The ball can get stuck under the arms of the Hulk toy without triggering him pretty easily. The arms are the first things to trip in a ball search, but for a mechanism that doesn’t really do much in gameplay that’s an annoying flaw, especially if you’re on the cube timer.

Ramp returns over the inlanes mean it’s pretty much impossible to see whether the Loki letters are lit there without craning forward - might be the “trickster” theme, but meh.

Also it’s tough to see if the 3 Avenger lights nearest the top-right corner on the multiplier rollover lanes are lit.

(congrats to Jersey Jack on Wizard of Oz)

1. The Fifth Element
   (Leeloo Dallas. Multiball.*)

2. Daft Punk

   (Around the World is obviously the “shoot the orbits” mode
    Extra Ball is obviously “One More Time”)

* Did You Know - “Multiball” is a Williams trademark, and other manufacturers have to license the term? That’s why Data East called it “Triball” or “3-ball”.

3) Evangelion: 3-ball Impact