Pinball dfw

Replacement playfield for Dr Who

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:47:11 +0000

Here it is, no mylar or raised/dropped inserts. Some very slight insert wear and that’s being picky about it. It should clean up very nicely. I will use pretty much everything from the currently populated Dr Who playfield as it has all already been cleaned.

View full post on NMD’s Pinball Blog

Cleaning, chapter one – stripping down the playfield

2009 UK Pinball Show & EPC Report

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:08:05 +0000

Martin Ayub has been busying away at Pinball News HQ getting the 2009 UK Pinball Show & European Pinball Championship report written up. Sadly Martin wasn’t able to compete in the EPC during the show as he had to organise it! Quite how he finds the time to remember half of what goes on I never know!
Click the pic for the 2009 report, great stuff Martin

Cheers

Nick
The Pinball Blog

View full post on The Pinball Blog

Cracked 6 Billion on WCS today!

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 04:22:45 +0000

Just finished a very long game than ended with me getting the newest HSTD, Just a touch over 6Billion which beat my previous high score of 4.5billion and you need 2.5bill+ to get your name in. I had several good games in a row but each game ended around 1 billion, on the score breaking game i lost my first ball at 1 billion but still had 2 extra balls, 1 from the second TV mode and collected one from the striker award. I started multi-ball about 6 times on the way and milked the victory laps pretty hard and then snatched another extra ball after lighting it when i got to Washington. I eventually got to the World Cup Final and beat Germany 7-5. I used a new tactic all together and only focused on the right flipper, id plunge a ball, take a shot @ goal, plunge a ball, take a shot @ goal etc etc. It gets very stressful if you miss too many in a row and Germany get even or in front! I never noticed how much the light show throws you off during the world cup final either, the lights go from fully on to completely off and then half the playfield will be lit and half not etc, these cycles all happen pretty quickly and it kind of stuns you. After i beat Germany i tried not to get in the zone that “ah Ive done it, Ive beaten the game” and lose focus, instead i kept trying to re-light multi-ball and milk more victory laps and the 250mill for beating Germany.

I have also been practising and trying to stop making what i call “nothing shots”, shots with no purpose and shots being made just for the sake of hitting the ball. I have been trying to control the ball a lot more and having a target for each shot. I have always kind of done this but still made “nothing shots” which usually led to me getting a bad bounce and a drain.

Just quickly i had a good game on shadow today and got 3 shots away from winning the final battle, damn its intense..

Anyway i didn’t mean on writing this much but just got carried away =) I love both of these games!

Cya/s [I'm assuming at least 1 person reads these posts lol]

Neil

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Pinball design – part 2: The distance from the start button

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:06:35 +0000

While designing features for a pinball machine you have to think of the big picture at all times. Two things you have to consider are: How hard is the feature you are creating while you are playing it? And: How hard is the feature to get to?

This is what I mean by “distance from the start button”. How long it takes someone to get to the feature after they push the start button and start the game.

This is all about the pacing of the game. You want the game to be deep but you do not want there to be long stretches of “work” to artificially deepen the game. You want the game to be action packed but you can’t let all the action get too bunched up. You have to design the game so that the pace of the game is good. You have to place the different features at good distances from the start button.

The pacing of the game is very important. Where it is most noticeable is in how hard the various multiballs in the game are to achieve, or how far they are from the start button. The closest one is for the Novices, another one further away as a challenge for the beginning players and a stepping stone for the intermediate players, another to give the intermediate players a challenge, and lastly one really far from the start button for the experts.

A great example of this is in the recent Spider-Man pinball machine. Spider-Man has Doc Ock which is only two shots to start. Further out is Black Suit, then Battle Royal, and finally Super Hero is really far from the start button. Well done Lyman.

View full post on My Pinball Blog

R.I.P. Pinball ?

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 03:22:08 +0000

On this very day, exactly 10 years ago, Williams abruptly terminated it’s pinball division. As it was the only remaining mayor player in the pinball business at the time, this move actually meant that over 90 percent of pinball market suddenly ceased to exist.

Many people declared this day as “The day that pinball died?”

Do I agree with them?
Unfortunately I must say that I do.

Although that new machines still get made by STERN, with every new pinball announced I keep asking myself: “Where’s the progress?”. Every new machine could as well be built in 1995 and no one could tell a difference. We all know what happened with the technology in the last 10 years an nothing of that reflects in any of the new pinball machines. Here’s some stuff that could be well used in new pinball machines, but it’s not:

LCD displays; the only step forward here in the last 20 years was pinball 2000 platform. Instead of hi res graphics that could work as both, backglass and display , there is a 128×32 4 color dmd.
Tiny, gsm like displays could even be integrated into playfield itself, instead of archaic lamps.
Connectivity; new machines could easily be connected to the internet where global scoreboards could be published.
Machines could notify operators about earnings or problems with machine via gsm or email.
Operators could mark machines with location data, that would be published online, so the players could easily found the desired machines.
Entire online community could be built around machines, where players could communicate with operators or each others.
Lasers; just remember with happened to the pc mice in a last couple of years. I’m sure laser motion sensors would be quite useful in pinballs
Moore’s law; Imagine the cpu/memory capacity could be put in machines these days. What sort of games or self diagnostic tools could be built with that.
New materials; I’m not sure about this one, but i bet, that there’s tons of new stuff that could be used

So. I guess Now I just have to wait until some STERN guy stumbles upon this blog and convince his boss to invest into Pinball 3000.

Until then I’ll just play with with we got, although it’s build on 15 years old technology.

View full post on JJ’s Pinball Blog

Won two beers this morning =)

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:56:07 +0000

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No related posts.

2009 UK Pinball Show & EPC Report

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:01:14 +0000

Cheers

Nick
The Pinball Blog

View full post on The Pinball Blog

2009 UK Pinball Show & EPC Report

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:50:09 +0000

Cheers

Nick
The Pinball Blog

View full post on The Pinball Blog

2009 UK Pinball Show & EPC Report

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:55:50 +0000

Cheers

Nick
The Pinball Blog

View full post on The Pinball Blog

With a little help from my friends

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:05:55 +0000

It’s been a busy November. So busy, that I don’t think I played a single game of pinball in the previous month.

But finally, this weekend I found some time to get back to my White water. A couple a friends jumped in and together we finished the first part of cleaning. We cleaned bottom playfield and all the basic parts that I left on the machine. Here’s how the action looked like:

And a couple of hours later, the result was playfield, all clean and shiny. Here are some pictures:

This concludes the first chapter of the celaning story. I will continue with the ramps, and all the bits that I will be putting back to the machine. I hope that I will be able to find some time to continue before the end of the year, but it looks pretty grim for now.

View full post on JJ’s Pinball Blog

Home for the hollidays