Leagues

In the pinball league at Amsterdam Billiards in NYC, I was able to post a record of 6 wins and 3 losses, which was good for third place overall. I’m generally happy with that even though I wish I could have done better, of course. We played Big Buck Hunter and Twilight Zone.

The Big Buck Hunter machine is one of those games in which it is difficult to score well, but you don’t know how difficult this specific machine is until you start playing.  There is the titular “big buck,” that you need to hit to start multiball and get jackpots, that goes back and forth on a track diagonally, in the middle of the playfield. However, this particular buck seemed to only register hits consistently if you hit it on the front edge. Many players would get frustrated when they made a solid hit in the center of the target, only to receive no points. This not only added to the difficulty of the game, it required players to have good patience and to control their play. Let me clarify that the target was not broken at all, it was just difficult in that you had to make a more accurate shot to score. It made the game better for tournament or league play.

The Powerball!

The other machine, Twilight Zone, is already notorious for being a challenging game. All seasoned players know this going in, but this Twilight Zone had a special feature: A slot machine kick-out that would throw the ball in a semi-random direction. Sometimes the kick-out would behave well in that you could dead-flipper-pass the ball from right to left. Other times it would kick-out the ball almost straight down the middle causing the player to have to perform an emergency slap-save to stay alive. Or, it might launch the ball harshly to the right, toward the right slingshot or outlane, where chaos would soon follow. You as the player, could not depend on which of these events would happen. Most players chose to try a reflex shot (think of a batter trying to hit a curve ball) and deal with whatever happened next. Sometimes I tried to live catch the ball, with mixed results. I don’t think anyone made it to the Lost in the Zone wizard mode this season, because of that wild kick-out.

One of the reasons why Twilight Zone is (as of this date) my second favorite pinball game is the Powerball. The Powerball is a ceramic ball which is the same size as the other metallic balls, but it is lighter and moves much faster than normal. When you get the Powerball out of the gumball machine, all of the geometry of the game changes because now you have to account for the increased speed of the Powerball. I have a love/hate relationship with the Powerball because it makes an already difficult shot, the right loop/gumball shot, even harder to make. If you miss, your ball could be over before you realize it. However, making the gumball shot starts Powerball Mania which is a feature where you can earn hundreds of millions of points. The Powerball can instantly turn the tide of a match which is why you are never really out of the game if you can get the Powerball out.

Overall, it was another fantastic pinball season and I look forward to starting up again next season, which I believe will be in September.