Silver Ball Century ep. 53 - Mid-1988 - LIONMAN!
The most iconic kind of pinball callout is the kind that's delivered extremely emphatically, in a way that will carry even in a noisy arcade. I think LIONMAN!!! - sorry, got distracted for a moment. I think that's one of the attention-grabbing things about Swords of Fury, on top of the beautiful playfield and CHALLENGE ME! - and the music and everything. GO FOR THE TUNNEL!
Which leads to the question: who is the Lionman? Is it the player character? Is it the creature who demands that you challenge him? Is it Algar from Williams' unsuccessful 1980 machine, Algar, finally being given a voice? The machine's theme seems to be "a bunch of generic '80s fantasy things are happening", and I suppose that's enough.
This episode also contains the incredible Banzai Run. Last episode we talked about the concept of the ball "escaping" the playfield in designed ways, and here we have a game whose gameplay continues vertically up into the backbox.
In a much more standard layout, we have the well-known and competitive Taxi, with an excellent recreation from VPin Workshop.
Silver Ball Century goes live on Thursday, March 12 at 8pm Eastern, on twitch.tv/arborelia.
Tables in this episode
- TX-Sector (Premier Gottlieb) - VPX by Balater
- Robo-War (Premier Gottlieb) - VPX by Versins77
- Banzai Run (Williams) - VPX by TastyWasps
- Swords of Fury (Williams) - VPX by Bord
- Torpedo Alley (Data East) - VPX by JPJ
- Taxi (Williams) - VPX by VPin Workshop