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Silver Ball Century ep. 74 - Summer 1995 - Gigapoints

This episode: Johnny Mnemonic, WHO dunnit, Mach 2, Apollo 13, Jack-Bot. Next episode: Pinball Magic, Waterworld, Congo, Mario Andretti, Attack from Mars.

1995 is the peak of pinball score inflation. We saw some of this last episode, with three different players submitting high scores over a billion.

Score inflation gets even more extreme with Jack*Bot, third in the Pin-Bot series, where Pin-Bot and his loving wife The Machine start a space casino together.

The Machine: Bride of Pin-Bot had the first billion-point shot in pinball, and it was such an imbalanced way to score that it puts you on a separate "Billionaire's Club" leaderboard. Now Jack*Bot is going to make billion-point scores commonplace.

You might also earn a billion points in WHO dunnit, the pinball machine with an original noir murder mystery theme, and you might gamble every one of those points away on a roulette spin that can double your score or set it to zero.

Spanish pinball is back and bringing us another ruleset that makes us ask "¿Qué?", with Mach 2, or if we let the backglass tell us the title of the machine, Mach 2.0 Two.

Speaking of giga, have you heard of this guy who can hold 80 gigabytes in his head? Johnny Mnemonic is the second in the trilogy of "pinball games based on movies where Keanu Reeves plays a character named Jonathan". I think the pinball game is a better way to experience the 90s cyberpunk aesthetic, long-distance phone calls and all, than the actual movie was. I'm looking forward to playing some SNARF, which is my favorite video mode and one of espie's least favorite.

And finally, speaking of long distances, we're going to the moon. Apollo 13 is Sega's movie-tie-in pinball machine of the summer, and it features the completely ludicrously excessive 13-ball multiball.

Silver Ball Century goes live at 8:30pm (that's tonight as I write this) on November 10, on twitch.tv/arborelia.

Tables in this episode

#pinball #silver ball century