Wired:
While The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” still stands up after four decades of radio play, the designers of the pinball machines that made Tommy so good have become an endangered species.
Only one company in the world, Illinois’ Stern Pinball, still designs and produces these electro-mechanical marvels, the lone holdout since industry behemoth Williams Electronics shuttered its pinball division in 1999. It may be a dying art, but the creative minds at Stern are nonetheless continuously creating new machines that can keep their industry moving forward and give them one more replay.
I still prefer pinball machines to video games. There’s something “retro-cool” about the mechanical action of the game play that you can’t get from computerized games.
I enjoyed pinball until I got annoyed at the fact that the ball would sometimes drop down the middle between the two paddles in such a way that it was impossible to hit. I’m fine with games requiring more skill than I have, but throwing something that is incapable of being hit at the player is a poor game mechanic, regardless of if we’re talking about pinball or an unblockable attack in a video game. If you’re going to do something like it, you need to make it a preventable occurrence, which many of the pinball machines I played on did not seem to do adequately.
I surprised the AC/DC jerks allowed this to made.
You needed to learn how to nudge.
Quite true, but nudging always felt like a form of cheating to me, albeit, one that is widely adopted and accepted.
That’d work only if the venue hosting the machine hadn’t tweaked the tilt mechanism for high sensitivity.
I learned to play pinball at my college’s student union building, and probably spent enough on games over my years there to buy a machine of my own. Still love playing these machines on the rare occasions I can find one, but I miss the older mechanical models that predate the more complex multilevel games of recent years.
Nudging is a completely legitimate part of the game. The tilt sensor is adjustable by the owner so they can set how much nudging is allowed.
When I was commuting to San Francisco toward the end of the dot com bubble in 2001 a friend brought me to the Presidio bowling alley because they had the South Park pinball machine. On that day I swore I would someday own one. I finally got one in excellent condition in 2007. It is fun to play and absolutely hilarious. When my niece and nephew come over they always make a beeline to the pinball machine.
Engaged in an interesting discussion about the current state of pinball, and homebrew virtual pinball systems on G+ with a bigtime aficionado.
Nudging is an essential part of the game, and designers make their decks with the assumption that skilled players will do it.
There are a lot of strategies advanced pinball players employ to keep balls in play, like bounce passes and hold passes, shaking and more.
If they have, fuck those bitches. I’ll play somewhere else.
No argument there.
Made a good comment several hours ago. It included links to two G+ posts with some good dialogue about the state of pinball & the virtual pinball community.
STILL awaiting moderation, I guess because of the links??