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SIN RULESET VERSION 0.1 (CONTINUED) SIN MODE DESCRIPTIONS There are seven sins, each with four levels of difficulty. Each level of difficulty must be completed successfully before the next higher difficulty can be attempted. Greed The Greed sin involves hitting the Greed standup targets a certain number of times within a time limit. All Greed targets light at the start of the sin. Hitting a Greed target scores and unlights it. Level I Goal: Hit 4 different Greed targets within 60 seconds. Hitting a lit Greed target adds 6 seconds, up to a maximum of 60 seconds. Greed targets score 100K, 150K, 200K, 250K. Level II Goal: Hit 5 different Greed targets within 50 seconds. Hitting a lit Greed target adds 5 seconds, up to a maximum of 50...

OK, here we are with our first review! As you probably saw in the title, today's subject is Fairy Tower. Released in 2007 by LittleWing, Fairy Tower is supported for Windows XP, Vista & 7 or Mac OS 10.3.9 to 10.7.5. This table was slow going for me at first, but I really warmed to it once I gained some vague clue of what I was supposed to do. Now, here's the breakdown for each element of what, IMO, makes a video pin: Coding Integrity: As far as I can tell, there are no show-stopping or even major bugs in Fairy Tower. The only thing that might be a bug is that the flipper sounds disappear if too many other sounds are going on, but I'm not sure if that's deliberate or not. The game is a model of stability on my MacBook Pro—I don't...

As you can probably gather, this is the first post of The Pinball Apprentice, which will mainly focus on reviews of video pinball. I might also weigh in on newsworthy pinball events and occurrences, as well as just about anything else that may cross my mind. Hopefully, I'll manage at least 1 review/month, probably text-based, and we'll see where it goes from there. Reviewed materials will cover the whole range of video pinball, from Pinball for the Milton Bradley Microvision to Zen's latest and greatest. I will also take requests, but bear in mind that there are limits to what I have access to, so depending on how esoteric your request is, I may not get around to it for a while. I think that about covers the introduction, so have...

(The eye closing is the last animation on the DMD during Lost in the Zone before the total is calculated.) A few random observations and trivia on my pinball experiences in 2012, of no particular importance: I've managed exactly 1337 posts to end the year. This was not deliberate. Also 27 blog posts. For reasons known only to God (or maybe to Gord Lacey, if this forum has statistical features I'm not aware of), the blog post No Time for Tea has been viewed 8895 times, making it far and away the most popular post on Lost in the Zone. The post only contains congratulations to one of my fellow league players for scoring 8 billion on one ball on AFM. Either he has a lot of friends, or a lot of people are ending up here after a Google...

Feeling better today...although that could be simply because I slept for 15 hours last night, after several sleepness nights of coughing and struggling to breathe. But we seem to have had an invasion of martyrs while I was incapacitated, of which the following is an example. Sorry, you're going to have to follow the link, it would eat all of the 10,000-character limit and then some if I quoted it directly. The Olive Garden Analogy - my last post Now, this is at a least mildly entertaining rant and on some level has potentially valid points. But he completely overplayed the righteous indignation card, which led to predictable mockery further down the thread (read those posts, too, some of them are quite funny). But one response that...

As my first league game was cancelled I decided to venture out to play Pinball, I spent the afternoon playing Bram Stoker's Dracula, Attack from Mars, T2 and TZ. Of course the purpose of this blog post is boast about my TZ prowess. A few weeks ago now I managed #4 on the leaderboard after a good game and hitting LITZ, I didn't remain on there long until 'ASH' demoted me again. I've been trying for a few weeks to get back on there without much success. I only realised recently that Buy-in's don't disqualify you from the main leaderboard, so with this in mind, I gave it another go. The table is a 5 ball game, the replay score is set at around 360 million so it's not a great feat to get a free credit which can then be used for the extra...

So after somebody (who shall go nameless) decided to give me a severe cold for Christmas, and after eating way too much and drinking enough hot tea to cause a shortage in India, it's time for me to go to bed. I hope all of you had a very merry Christmas - hopefully in somewhat healthier condition than I'm in! - and best wishes as we prepare to enter the new year. But I managed a little bit of industriousness today: the wizard mode quiz in Gandalf Envy has answers posted now. EDIT 12/27/2012: And the sloth continues...this cold is really kicking my arse...my apologies to those forum members whose heads I've taken off in the last few days...hopefully I'll feel like a human being again soon...

I'm being told that I need to put the virtual pinball machine down and go act like I have a family or something since it's Christmas-time, so a bit less commentary and posting the next 2 days. Merry Christmas to all of you, even the ones I've disagreed with - although it sadly seems too late for Mark - and hopefully shutyertrap will have a feast of information for us shortly. Remember, if you celebrate Festivus instead: It's dinner first, then the Airing of Grievances, and only then the Feats of Strength. It causes unnecessary discord and strife when Uncle Bob is wrestled into the dining room table before dinner is cleared away. Also: Those of you who have noticed one of the wizard modes in the Gandalf Envy quiz doesn't seem to exist...

Just a little data to keep things in perspective. Updated May 31, 2013 Average price for 1 game on a real table, assuming you can find one in working order: $0.75 Average price for unlimited play of a TPA table: $2.50 Average price of unlimited play of a TPA table with its Pro Mode: $6.50 Price of 6 hours of real pinball at CP Pinball, when it's open: $15 Entry fee into one small local tournament: $20 Total spent on one competitive pinball league season: $60 Total I've spent on TPA (not including Kickstarters): $112 Entry fee into a major tournament (Pinburgh 2013): $150 + token costs Total I spent on my quest to reach Lost in the Zone on a real Twilight Zone: $300 Total I've spent on playing real pinball in the past year (not...

Or more specifically, commentary on why bugs cannot always be fixed right away when they are first reported. But first we again have need of the obligatory... DISCLAIMER: I am not employed by FarSight, not representing FarSight, and nothing in this post should be construed as the Official OpinionTM of FarSight Studios or its development staff. All software bugs have six traits that together help determine when they get fixed: Severity - How much impact does this bug have on the software? Is it a minor aesthetic issue? A UI mistake but one with a workaround? Does it affect the player's score or does it make it impossible to continue? Does the software itself crash or freeze? Frequency - Does the bug occur all the time? Once every few...

Almost 5 years ago, I bowled a 206, and following that were games not even reaching 200. Today, I have news: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Score 8 1 X X X X 8 / X X 7 2 9 / 9 211 A new personal best!

NOTE: Posts marked with [NP] (as in "Not Pinball") are posts on subjects other than pinball. I've marked them in this way so that those uninterested in such tangents can skip past them. - SDC A few passing comments on software development that aren't really relevant to the main forum. Some minor drama took place when one of FarSight's developers commented on the relative civility of the forums here as opposed to the TPA Facebook page; after some further uproar (and a righteous ban of one Facebook invader), he posted this: Very well, FarSight would prefer not be characterized as incompetent, lazy and stupid; no big surprise there. But how did they come to accumulate such a well of pathological haters on their Facebook page? And why...

No, we're not saving Middle-Earth, slaying dragons, or even meeting dwarves. But we can be wizards, if only rarely. So it's time for a little light-hearted test of your wizardly knowledge. Below are 30 wizard modes, or in some cases, the feature that's activated from successfully completing the wizard mode. Can you name the tables they come from? Answers next week. Battle for Cybertron Battle for the Kingdom Casino Run Crime Wave Danger Room Encore End of Time Eternal Life Final Frontier Four Winds Multiball Grand Finale Hell Frozen Over Jericho King's Ransom Klendathu Lost in the Zone Monster Multiball Party Multiball Payback Time Pinball Wizard Portal Multiball Power Down Redline Mania Rule the Universe Sperm Attack Super Duper Mega...

Those readers paying attention to the forum know that controversy has re-erupted over FarSight's tuning process for the tables in TPA and its effects on the difficulty of the tables. I took a rather indifferent stance on the issue the first time it came up, since the tables were only moderately easier and still had some challenging parts, most notably reaching RBION's Atlantis and MM's Battle for the Kingdom wizard modes. Then Scared Stiff and especially Twilight Zone came out and were substantially easier than the real tables - in TZ's case, to the point where people completely unfamiliar with the table were reaching Lost in the Zone after just a few games. So I came up with a modest proposal, which I've been defending since along...

Pretty abysmal games this evening, with one exception early on...I've managed to successfully complete "Do or Die" on an Iron Man with Hard settings, and shattered my personal best six and a half times over, going from 12M to 78M! Do or Die requires that you complete the following on one ball: Light the 5 inserts in the center (Iron Man, War Machine, Iron Monger, Whiplash, and Drones). After the five tasks above are finished, shoot the center lane to start Do or Die. Do or Die is a hurry-up (the one here starts at 35M, some start at 50M) at the same center lane. Shoot it to collect the value. (For comparison, the replay score on this particular Iron Man wanders around 12M or so.) Best part: I had double scoring running when Do or Die...

OK, maybe not twenty thousand...maybe just one. At any rate, my local league's season is over. I ended up 9th out of 17 players, so smack in the middle. For my first experience with league play, I'll take it and run. :p Looking back, apparently I need to work on my emotional game: Whenever the first game went badly, the whole evening was shot. Conversely, a good first game usually (but not always) meant a successful outing. Playing after a full day of work may have had something to do with this; I'm not usually at my most stable in the early evening...

In the course of this weekend's tournament (of which more next post), I was introduced to the concept of PinGolf during its qualifying rounds. Essentially, there is a target score for each table on the "course", and your object is to reach that score in the fewest number of balls ("strokes"). If your game ends and you haven't beat the target score, you record your score and start a second game, counting the sum of the two scores until you reach the target score. While there seems to be many variations in the particular rules used, we played as follows: Each ball played counts 1 stroke. A played extra ball also counts 1 stroke. If you have to play a second game to reach the target score, you take a penalty stroke. (Which means if you...

Having been logged into the chat room without paying much (well, any) attention to it this evening, I missed the following question: "What are you going to do when TZ is old news on TPA?" Play ST:TNG, of course. Twilight Zone may be my favorite table, but I have access to 75 of them here. I know how to play other tables. Some of them I can even play well. :p

The observant may have noticed that the little green avatar on the forums has a much more human-sounding name now. This is primarily for three reasons: Some other forum users here have worked out my identity based on my association with CP Pinball and my tales of league play. Some of CP Pinball's patrons have in turn worked out who "Serenseven" was based on my obsession with Twilight Zone and my tales of league play. Since I've mentioned some of CP Pinball's patrons by name in my blog posts (although only to note their good play - their bad hair days will be kept under wraps!), it seemed unfair for me to continue to write under a pseudonym. Since I wasn't really trying to hide my identity in the first place, I've decided it's time to...

..you discover that Josh Henderson, the second-place finisher in the A Division at PAPA 15, is in the field. Thankfully I didn't have to play Josh head-to-head this weekend, although I did play his father Mark in one of the later rounds in the B Division. Josh eventually won the tournament, but not by as much as you might expect...the X-Men LE table used in the final game was for some reason exceptionally cruel to its players and the difference between first and second was a mere 300K points, 15.2M to 14.9M. Things also become interesting when more players showed up than were planned for. While the PinGolf format used in the initial qualifying rounds is fun (see previous post for more on PinGolf), it potentially involves playing two...