arborelia

Silver Ball Century ep. 66 - Early 1993 - Don't Touch the Door

In this episode: White Water, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Street Fighter II, Jurassic Park, The Twilight Zone. Next episode: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Tee'd Off, Indiana Jones, The Last Action Hero, Punchy the Clown, Judge Dredd.

'90s pinball is so fun. That's the main thing I can think of to say. I am looking forward to playing every one of these tables.

We start with White Water, known for having a high skill ceiling and being very competitive in tournaments, and follow it up with The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (I'm abbreviating it from now on), which is the opposite. Everything is nonsense on Rocky and Bullwinkle, including the scoring, and that just feels right. You don't "go deep" in Rocky and Bullwinkle so much as you make more random silly things happen. Instead of a wizard mode, it has Back in Time, a mode that scores considerably less than everything else. It can be a difficult goal that you achieve by playing all the modes. Or maybe you just get it awarded by the mystery saucer. Wow-ee!

The Twilight Zone remains one of the greatest and most ambitious pinball designs, because it's like you started with The Addams Family and added a lot more stuff. A gumball machine that can dispense a different kind of pinball! An upper playfield with magnet flippers! Modes that refer to other pinball games! You hardly even notice that the layout is a widebody because the left third of the machine is just where all the extra stuff is. There is so much going on, but somehow it's pretty balanced in terms of scoring. You can go very deep in The Zone, and it insists on a lot of skill to play it well, especially with how important the upper flipper cross-shots are.

The Twilight Zone is one where I have to choose not to use the beautifully rendered recreation by VPin Workshop, because my computer is just not fast enough. The existing version by ninuzzu is also great, and Kat used to play it a lot on her stream, which you might be familiar with from all the callouts about not touching the door.

Street Fighter II is the good kind of silly Gottlieb, and Jurassic Park is John Borg's second design after the wonderful (and a bit unbalanced) Star Wars. You can see how it influenced the modern Jurassic Park machine.

Silver Ball Century is on Tuesday this week, August 4, on twitch.tv/arborelia.

Tables in this episode

#pinball #silver ball century