360 - Bug TotAN Bug Round-up, XBLA edition

Use this thread to post write-ups of any bugs you encounter while playing Tales of the Arabian Nights on Xbox LIVE Arcade.



Plunged a ball, let it drain straight down the middle, "ball locked" animation played on dot matrix display, accompanied by "ball locked" sound sample, before end of ball bonus was calculated.

Bummer, after further play it seems like all of the bugs from other versions that have been reported in this subforum remain unfixed in this version as well. The magnet behavior seems reversed. When hearing the title of a tale the ball often holds dead still instead of wiggling around the captive princess bottle. But then when you strike the genie with two balls locked it flops around all over the place instead of dropping straight into the sinkhole, making it usually take several tries to get genie multiball started. Annoying.

There are also a lot of bugs around the ball lock itself. Namely you get a lot of different false positives on the DMD/sounds saying balls are locked when they aren't. You can also trick the DMD by hammering through the buttons to end the current game, immediately start a new one, and plunge the first ball. Sometimes it will keep playing the table attract/intro animation and sound even after you have begun to play the ball. At one point I was even able to get two balls into play. When the first one drained the flippers went dead and the second one made its way to the bottom as well.

At least the "Free Play." glitch in the latest iOS version isn't there. It may be possible to get that ball lock thing to happen on a real table. I remember something like that happening when I played a real TOTAN.

Beelzebozo said:

The magnet behavior seems reversed. When hearing the title of a tale the ball often holds dead still instead of wiggling around the captive princess bottle. But then when you strike the genie with two balls locked it flops around all over the place instead of dropping straight into the sinkhole, making it usually take several tries to get genie multiball started. Annoying.

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This happens in the real game as well. I own one and thought my magnet was having issues at first. I have never noticed a pattern as far as when it occurs or not, but yesterday I did notice an odd option in the operator menus regarding this magnet. Not sure what it was called, my wife is sleeping so I don't want to kick the game on to check. But yeah, the flopping around action is faithful to the real game.

Also, the TOTAN software overall isn't exactly polished. It's not as rough as Catcus Canyon, but it does feel fairly half-baked. The shooting stars as well as the skill shot are great ideas, but are very wonky in execution. Later software updates tried to help with some of their issues (like saving your ball if it hits the outlane rollover AFTER the shooting star is deployed. ie. the shooting star knocks the ball into the drain!)

I had a couple of weird ones on TOTAN tonight, ball actually got stuck in 2 places by the genie, one ON the magnet and one just under the Genie, never saw that one happen before. I couldn't tilt it out of the ball drop magnet. It also doesn't register a skillshot if you launch it too quickly.

I contacted J-Pop and this was his reply concerning the ball flopping around the magnet: "the real TOTAN has a small dimple on the magnet core to stop the jiggling...". It looks like an even more pronounced dimple on TPA. I looked at my real TOTAN and I do see that the center is a different piece, but seems to be filled in...

Plunger strength is very inconsistent and where's the sound when the ball falls out of the big genie earring before starting the fireball? It's gone!

ball got stuck on the genie magnet a few times, so i had to call the attendant, which set the ball loose

I shot a skill shot in the right hole, but the ball didn't hit the target, so the skill shot animation was still playing after the ball launched. I think this can happen on a real table, though. The skill shot targets on the real table are one of the strangest skill shots I have seen, just looking at them makes me wonder if the ball would sometimes miss the target (and that does appear to be the case).

Brian Clark said:

I shot a skill shot in the right hole, but the ball didn't hit the target, so the skill shot animation was still playing after the ball launched. I think this can happen on a real table, though. The skill shot targets on the real table are one of the strangest skill shots I have seen, just looking at them makes me wonder if the ball would sometimes miss the target (and that does appear to be the case).

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It can. Potential weirdness includes bouncing off one skill shot target to hit another (which one registers depends on which one is correct and how hard each was hit), the skill shot being "missed" even though the correct target was hit, and in extreme cases (a table with an overly strong plunger), hitting the skill shot, having it counted, and then bouncing back into the plunger lane.

Spelling HAREM didn't start multiball for me. It gave me the standard goal I was shooting for, but multiball didn't start. I even shot an extra ball around the harem loop to make sure, it just started spelling at "H" again.