arborelia

Silver Ball Century ep. 72 - Early 1995 - All The Girls Wanna Play Baywatch

In this episode: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Shaq Attaq, Baywatch, Stargate, Dirty Harry

We're entering 1995, a huge year for pinball.

The game I particularly want to talk about from this episode is Baywatch. The week that I fell in love with pinball, in 2022, Baywatch was one of the games I had access to on free play for the whole week, alongside Swords of Fury, Metallica, Jack*Bot, Star Wars 2017, and Game of Thrones.

And I hated it.

I found the game too over-the-top and flashy and unclear about what it wanted me to do. I was already struggling to understand pinball rules, and on Baywatch, everything blinked all the time and the loudest noises didn't seem to correlate with progress in the game. And the theme isn't even interesting to me.

I still think it has those problems, but since then, I've gotten to play it a lot more, and I've realized the game is really fun. It's got one of the aspects I appreciate in a pinball design, where it wants you to interact with the whole table, where every successful shot can be progress. And learning to shoot the right shots amid distractions has been an important pinball skill.

I'm looking forward to playing it this week on Silver Ball Century. I also feel like I should mention Dirty Harry, whose skill shot is stupid but the rest of the game is a solid and satisfying 90s ruleset, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the other Sega game in this episode, which simply has zero chill and fits well into the Halloween season.

We go live on Thursday, October 22, at 8:30 pm, on twitch.tv/arborelia.

Tables in this episode

#pinball #silver ball century