[EDIT: So apparently there's a 10,000 character limit on blog posts. Only I would be so long-winded as to find it. But my journey with TZ takes a while to do it justice, so I've split it into two parts and disabled commenting on this part. If you want to comment, please do so on Part II. Thanks! -S7]
I played pinball off and on in college and shortly thereafter, but had moved on for lack of places to play, and my experience with video pinball was limited to the Space Cadet table that comes with Windows - not exactly a quality simulation. Hence I've gone from practically zero pinball for the last eight years (because I didn't know I had any options) to a veritable glut of pinball in 2012. I was reading a Wired game review of the 3DS version of the Williams Collection, and thought "Man, I'd love to play FunHouse and Whirlwind again, I wonder if they had a 360 version?" Turns out Amazon did - for only $29! - and it had Medieval Madness as well! Instantly hooked.
Then I started reading about this new game called The Pinball Arcade, coming out in February for iOS/Android, and later for my 360. And it was going to have Theatre of Magic, one of the tables I played in college and one of my favorites! So I waited for the 360 release, and waited, and got my hopes up, and got my hopes dashed, and then it released. It was a glorious day.
Around this time (April), I thought "there must be a few tables near me, probably beat to hell and barely functional, but there". So I looked...and found CP Pinball, which has 70 tables about 30 miles away from where I live...and had been there for several years. So I went. TZ! FunHouse! TOM! Not one but two TAFs! ST:TNG! MM! AFM! All on free play! (After paying $15 for 6 hours to get in, which is quite the deal.) I walked up to the TOM, pressed Start, and prepared to rock its world. I knew real pinball was going to be a little harder than TPA, but I had 5.1B on the TPA version at the time, so surely I could at least manage the 480M replay score, right? Only a tenth of what I did on the virtual side?
The game may have lasted 3 minutes; I'm not sure. The score was a touch north of 120M. I sucked.
Well, this was certainly unexpected. But those outlanes do look a touch wide, and maybe this one's just set up steep or something. I'll play something else and get my self-esteem back.
Ripley's: 6M. Medieval Madness: 5M. Monster Bash: 8M. (There's no ball saver on CP's Monster Bash!) Don't even ask about TAF and TZ. Can we get a little less suck out of the DMD?!
OK, this is obviously not going according to plan. But I stuck with it (after all, I had paid for 6 hours), and by the end of the evening I might have been able to hit 300M on the Theatre if I really concentrated.
I returned the next weekend, after having played a lot of TPA that week thinking it might help. I don't think it did. But I came to terms with the fact that my skills were dead and gone, and that I'd have to enjoy pinball as a complete novice again. At about that time, part of my skill started creeping back. As in, I should take a second to aim for that Bony Beast ramp instead of assuming I can just loop it forever like I used to on Scared Stiff. That the sides of the machine are not just a place for my hands to rest between flips. And that just because live catching doesn't work in TPA does not mean that I shouldn't try it now. (You should have seen the first few attempts. Hilarious. They still can be at times.)
I soldiered on, occasionally putting together a decent game in the midst of a veritable wake of disasters. Then FarSight announced the kickstarter for TZ. There's a TZ at CP Pinball, an evil cruel bastard of a table, sitting off in one corner across the room from the new AC/DC everyone else was playing. So I decided that day that my mission was to see Lost in the Zone in the flesh again before I saw it on TPA.
Anyone who has played a TZ knows that it is not forgiving to the novice. Actually it's not forgiving to anyone, but that's another story. I drained...and drained...and cursed...and drained some more. Fifty million was an exceptional game in that first night, against a replay score of 161M and the fourth high score of 650M.
I have discovered what I believe is all possible ways to drain on TZ, including such gems as slot machine kickout --> right flipper --> Greed target above left flipper --> right slingshot --> bumpers --> left outlane, all in under 1.5 seconds. I've seen the bridge diverter twist the rail it sits on and throw the ball SDTM. I've been rejected by both ramps more times than I can count. I have "earned" a score of 4.8M, which is the lowest possible score without tilting, without actually trying for that (1M for plunge, 100K for slot machine kickout, 500K for bonus, times 3 balls).
I also, in the process of contending with this pinnacle of pinball evil, slowly but surely improved my game.
I learned that you do not shoot the Clock Millions target when it's flashing if the clock is only at 2:00. I learned that the time to nudge is the instant you think the ball might be remotely entertaining the possibility of a trip to the outlanes, not when it's already there. And I learned that the only rational thing to do with that @#$%!-ing Powerball is to get it off the playfield as soon as humanly possible. Oh yeah, and I might have rediscovered the post transfer at some point.
The occasional 50M game became the occasional 150M game, then the occasional 250M game. A thwacking noise! On a real TZ! Glorious! Granted, most games were still <100M (and a lot of my games still are), but there was progress. Same with the door panels: Six lit at the end of a game became eight, then ten. The fifteenth in one game is the "?" door handle, Lost in the Zone.
Jackpots became commonplace, to the probable annoyance of other patrons (TZ's played at high volume at CP Pinball!). I began to nudge for control and not just out of desperation. The left ramp - right ramp - piano 3-way combo began to take shape. I was surprised and annoyed when I didn't make the Camera shot now. High scores hit 435M, then 494M. Door panel record stood at 12. This was after 12 sessions of playing mostly TZ, or about 55 to 60 hours.
[Continued in Part II...remember, you can't post comments here, only in Part II.]
I played pinball off and on in college and shortly thereafter, but had moved on for lack of places to play, and my experience with video pinball was limited to the Space Cadet table that comes with Windows - not exactly a quality simulation. Hence I've gone from practically zero pinball for the last eight years (because I didn't know I had any options) to a veritable glut of pinball in 2012. I was reading a Wired game review of the 3DS version of the Williams Collection, and thought "Man, I'd love to play FunHouse and Whirlwind again, I wonder if they had a 360 version?" Turns out Amazon did - for only $29! - and it had Medieval Madness as well! Instantly hooked.
Then I started reading about this new game called The Pinball Arcade, coming out in February for iOS/Android, and later for my 360. And it was going to have Theatre of Magic, one of the tables I played in college and one of my favorites! So I waited for the 360 release, and waited, and got my hopes up, and got my hopes dashed, and then it released. It was a glorious day.
Around this time (April), I thought "there must be a few tables near me, probably beat to hell and barely functional, but there". So I looked...and found CP Pinball, which has 70 tables about 30 miles away from where I live...and had been there for several years. So I went. TZ! FunHouse! TOM! Not one but two TAFs! ST:TNG! MM! AFM! All on free play! (After paying $15 for 6 hours to get in, which is quite the deal.) I walked up to the TOM, pressed Start, and prepared to rock its world. I knew real pinball was going to be a little harder than TPA, but I had 5.1B on the TPA version at the time, so surely I could at least manage the 480M replay score, right? Only a tenth of what I did on the virtual side?
The game may have lasted 3 minutes; I'm not sure. The score was a touch north of 120M. I sucked.
Well, this was certainly unexpected. But those outlanes do look a touch wide, and maybe this one's just set up steep or something. I'll play something else and get my self-esteem back.
Ripley's: 6M. Medieval Madness: 5M. Monster Bash: 8M. (There's no ball saver on CP's Monster Bash!) Don't even ask about TAF and TZ. Can we get a little less suck out of the DMD?!
OK, this is obviously not going according to plan. But I stuck with it (after all, I had paid for 6 hours), and by the end of the evening I might have been able to hit 300M on the Theatre if I really concentrated.
I returned the next weekend, after having played a lot of TPA that week thinking it might help. I don't think it did. But I came to terms with the fact that my skills were dead and gone, and that I'd have to enjoy pinball as a complete novice again. At about that time, part of my skill started creeping back. As in, I should take a second to aim for that Bony Beast ramp instead of assuming I can just loop it forever like I used to on Scared Stiff. That the sides of the machine are not just a place for my hands to rest between flips. And that just because live catching doesn't work in TPA does not mean that I shouldn't try it now. (You should have seen the first few attempts. Hilarious. They still can be at times.)
I soldiered on, occasionally putting together a decent game in the midst of a veritable wake of disasters. Then FarSight announced the kickstarter for TZ. There's a TZ at CP Pinball, an evil cruel bastard of a table, sitting off in one corner across the room from the new AC/DC everyone else was playing. So I decided that day that my mission was to see Lost in the Zone in the flesh again before I saw it on TPA.
Anyone who has played a TZ knows that it is not forgiving to the novice. Actually it's not forgiving to anyone, but that's another story. I drained...and drained...and cursed...and drained some more. Fifty million was an exceptional game in that first night, against a replay score of 161M and the fourth high score of 650M.
I have discovered what I believe is all possible ways to drain on TZ, including such gems as slot machine kickout --> right flipper --> Greed target above left flipper --> right slingshot --> bumpers --> left outlane, all in under 1.5 seconds. I've seen the bridge diverter twist the rail it sits on and throw the ball SDTM. I've been rejected by both ramps more times than I can count. I have "earned" a score of 4.8M, which is the lowest possible score without tilting, without actually trying for that (1M for plunge, 100K for slot machine kickout, 500K for bonus, times 3 balls).
I also, in the process of contending with this pinnacle of pinball evil, slowly but surely improved my game.
I learned that you do not shoot the Clock Millions target when it's flashing if the clock is only at 2:00. I learned that the time to nudge is the instant you think the ball might be remotely entertaining the possibility of a trip to the outlanes, not when it's already there. And I learned that the only rational thing to do with that @#$%!-ing Powerball is to get it off the playfield as soon as humanly possible. Oh yeah, and I might have rediscovered the post transfer at some point.
The occasional 50M game became the occasional 150M game, then the occasional 250M game. A thwacking noise! On a real TZ! Glorious! Granted, most games were still <100M (and a lot of my games still are), but there was progress. Same with the door panels: Six lit at the end of a game became eight, then ten. The fifteenth in one game is the "?" door handle, Lost in the Zone.
Jackpots became commonplace, to the probable annoyance of other patrons (TZ's played at high volume at CP Pinball!). I began to nudge for control and not just out of desperation. The left ramp - right ramp - piano 3-way combo began to take shape. I was surprised and annoyed when I didn't make the Camera shot now. High scores hit 435M, then 494M. Door panel record stood at 12. This was after 12 sessions of playing mostly TZ, or about 55 to 60 hours.
[Continued in Part II...remember, you can't post comments here, only in Part II.]
