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Silver Ball Century ep. 69 - Early 1994 - Dog or No Dog

In this episode: The Who's Tommy, World Cup Soccer, World Challenge Soccer, Popeye Saves the Earth, Demolition Man

I've been looking forward to Bally's World Cup Soccer, which is such a formal thing to call it because everybody actually calls it Dog Soccer. It's such a satisfying game, between its rules, its mechs, the callouts featuring the iconic voice of Tim Kitzrow, and of course, the animations that feature Striker, the cartoon dog mascot of the 1994 World Cup.

A game that's kind of lacking in all of those, especially the dog mascot, is Gottlieb's World Challenge Soccer. You can feel the legally-distinctness of the theme. The playfield layout is the same as Car Hop (1990), a game I reasonably liked, but the game does different and less motivating things with it.

But before we get to this soccer showdown, we have The Who's Tommy, a Data East extravaganza based on the Broadway version of the musical that brought us "Pinball Wizard". Similar to Data East's other high-theme games like "The Last Action Hero", you experience disjointed scenes from this musical in pinball form, a show about child abuse, drugs, new age religion, and occasionally pinball. I hope we get far enough in the multiball to show off its really cool and on-theme gimmick.

Another game with a lot going on is Bally/Williams' Popeye Saves the Earth, which honestly I don't know why it doesn't make it into the canon of iconic '90s pinball games. It's weird but it's fun.

Demolition Man is a game where it's really satisfying to combo ramps, especially if you do it with its unique flipper controls that are on trigger buttons above the playfield. Unfortunately, my virtual pinball controller has nothing like that, so we're going to have to miss out on those bonus points.

Silver Ball Century goes live at 8:30pm Eastern, on Thursday, September 17, on twitch.tv/arborelia.

Tables in this episode

#pinball #silver ball century