Table of the Week Club...Week 12: BRIDE OF PIN*BOT

As if sensing the very soon release of it's sibling, Bride of Pin*Bot becomes week 12's TotW. This is sure to bring out the "I hate/love this table" crowd, which should make for a lively forum discussion! Just remember, when it comes time for the TotM, there will be no extra balls to fall back on. Suspect sweaty palms will become a thing when it comes to nailing that billion point shot.

Speaking of TotM, we now have our 4 tables. To remind everyone, they are...

• White Water
• Theatre of Magic
• Black Knight 2000
• Bride of Pin*Bot

Tournament registration starts April 22nd. Tournament will be on April 25th. For our European friends, I will be starting the tourney 2-3 hours earlier than usual. Hope that helps. Don't worry, I'll be reminding everyone about all this once the date comes closer! In the meantime, she can speak. Oh no!!

Why?!?!?!

Shoot the shuttle ramp from the right flipper. From the left shoot the heartbeat ramp to get the ball to the right flipper and then shoot the shuttle ramp. It has a somewhat interesting layout, but is unfortunately a two shot game when the big wheel prizes are left at default.

Yeah, this game really is a one shotter and dependent on getting the billion point shot. I'd love to see the ability to remove the billion shot, I think it'd really open up the game a bit.

I personally really like this table. I find it very relaxing, I can go into a zen state of mind. When you get into a rhythm of shooting the heart ramp over and over, with the sounds and whatnot, it just feels good. It lulls you into thinking you can make it do exactly what you want.

And then the billion point shot happens.

Suddenly that heart ramp you couldn't miss on becomes the hardest thing in the world to hit while keeping two balls alive. Like, if I don't nail the heart ramp with that first ball on the left flipper, the 2nd ball is inevitably going to drain.

I'm not saying the table isn't lopsided or anything, because it totally is. I just find it satisfyingly so. I really would like to play BoP 2.0 someday, just to see if all the extras help or ruin that experience for me.

Alright, I know one thing for sure. If we're doing this in the tournament of the month it may be a good idea to disable the billion shot because it's pure luck and makes the game extremely unbalanced.

In fact, if I made a Pinball Dissected for this table, it would just be:

"Billion point shot. That's all."

Everything else besides possibly the unlimited millions from the center ramp is worth zilch, nothing, nada, nyet. May not be playing this table too much.

Good we don't have extra balls any more in the TOTM. That way it will be a lot shorter. My best game must have lasted 2,5 hrs, haven't played it a lot since then.

That's so funny. I just played this yesterday thinking, "I really like this table and it's been a while." I went through and played a game on a few tables purposely picking out ones I don't regularly play(Cactus Canyon, Black Rose, BoP, Tee'd Off, and Diner are what I ended up playing). At first I closed my eyes, held the down arrow on the table selection menu, and when I opened them I was going to play whatever table came up. It was Harley, so I just picked out a couple tables.

Have all goals. High score of 2,279,000,000 or something. After getting the billion shot a couple times it loses some of its thrill. These games can be long. I bet this is one of those tables that is really impressive in person.

Captain B. Zarre said:

Alright, I know one thing for sure. If we're doing this in the tournament of the month it may be a good idea to disable the billion shot because it's pure luck and makes the game extremely unbalanced.

In fact, if I made a Pinball Dissected for this table, it would just be:

"Billion point shot. That's all."

Everything else besides possibly the unlimited millions from the center ramp is worth zilch, nothing, nada, nyet. May not be playing this table too much.

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There's no Pro Mode for this. How are we able to do this?

Pinballwiz45b said:

There's no Pro Mode for this. How are we able to do this?

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Fingers crossed for tournament difficulty mode in the next few weeks?

My best score is about 13B. But that's only because it was 2am and I needed to get some sleep. (Can't leave games paused; my daughter uses my PC for homework/Minecraft.)

How about for BoP everyone is required to time out the Billion shot if it's lit?

However I do think that the following should be allowed:

BoP is indeed a really cool table in the wild. I played it so much in the 90s. It doesn't translate that great into TPA with the infinite extraballs, but it's a nostalgia trip for sure!

EldarOfSuburbia said:

Fingers crossed for tournament difficulty mode in the next few weeks?

My best score is about 13B. But that's only because it was 2am and I needed to get some sleep. (Can't leave games paused; my daughter uses my PC for homework/Minecraft.)

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Bride of Pin*Bot isn't a really good tournament game anyway. It didn't make it into the top 8.

shutyertrap said:

I personally really like this table. I find it very relaxing,

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Me too... Another favorite from back in the day IRL.

Another nostalgic game for me, just a very cool table all around. Billion shot very satisfying, but also very score tilted that way. Once I was able to hit that Bil shot on some regular basis have not played BOP very much recently. Will be interesting to see how it goes with no extra balls and two and out. Theme and appearance A plus. Cheers

A perfect-condition BoP in a Kmart was the closest machine to me for about a year back in 1995/6 and I played tons of it. I love the real thing as it is, but with better rules and a reason to shoot all the shots it might've been an all-time classic. I don't know anything about the BoP 2.0 thing that Dutch Pinball (?) made, but hopefully they gave it completely new rules along with their color DMD.

I actually played it in a medium-size regional tournament in Baltimore, and the rule there was to discount the billion shot by simply chopping off the billion (and higher) digit from a score. This method does shift the luck factor to getting the 50M award, but I suppose it's a good method because the ratio 1B/50M = 20 is much greater than 50M/10M = 5. I can't remember how I scored or if anyone scored a billion without the billion shot.

Is this the easiest TPA table? With easiest defined as longest median game. I think this or Scared Stiff must be the easiest tables to "go infinite" on, but SS has the game-killing bug that chops down its median time. Probably a few people who played in previous tourneys here could go for a few hours even without EBs. This is the only table that I flat-out quit during my high score game, on ball 1 with max EBs. (That high score is 11B/#88 and I got tired of playing after I figured out that I'd got the limit of billion shots. I didn't know about the Backdoor Billion until I read the table forum here after that game. I'm going to see what vikingerik said about the time needed to reach the top 10.)

I had the pleasure of playing the BoP 2.0 kit once at the Dutch Pinball Open. It wasn't long enough to see everything but I sure left with a very good impression. They changed quite a lot, ranging from making the skillshot more interesting to going from 2-ball MB to 3 in different stages, and offcourse the addition of a videogame mode. All this with very nice, polished color DMD graphics. I think looking here: http://www.pinballnews.com/learn/dutchpinball/ gives a nice taste of it. I haven't found a comprehensive rulesheet though, although I did only a quick and dirty search for it.
As far as this being the easiest: I think that BoP has less tolerance in terms of accuracy, and if you miss the ramps or loops, a drain is more imminent than on Scared Stiff. Scared Stiff is indeed the more buggy. I had my fair share of Crates that wouldn't open anymore.....

One of the few tables on here where I get to say, I'll just be playing for points, because it was the first table where I got every goal. Haven't played it in a while, so I want to see if I can make it past 2B

Since folks probably haven't looked at the Bride table forum in a while, I'll bring this out here that I posted a while back. Found an interesting way to abuse this table.



You can nudge the ball from the Heartbeat ramp into the plunger. Nudge leftwards just as the ball is coming off the left wall of the oscillating pathway. That gives a free skill shot and bumps its multiplier. It's easy to get control coming out of the bumpers (just dead pass) and do it again. By the time the multiplier hits 100x, that's 20M per skill shot, or even missing it for the next bucket still gives 10M. 250x multiplier means 50M skill shots!

Best, you can even do this all during multiball with a ball locked, so you have a backup ball in case you drain. Unfortunately, multiball does not double the skill shot points, but does double the other assorted spare change from the bumpers and heartbeat ramp.

And unfortunately, the fun ends eventually. The skill shot multiplier rolls over to 0 after 255x. Still, this scores quite a bit faster than spinning the wheel in hope of the 50M result after the billion shots are exhausted.

Do we want to consider banning this exploit for the tourney? Even without extra balls, I can go hours between drains doing this forever...