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Cirqus Voltaire already had a vertical playfield. What's so hard about it?

The secret for Ultimate Challenge is the smart punches. Get as many as you can. Take that from every skill shot. You should have 10-12 for the wizard mode, so you can beat just the first three boxers normally then the last two entirely by spamming smart punches.

Blackwater 100 is actually a license. And Olympic Games would be crushed fast by the IOC even if it wasn't licensed originally.

Ignore the haters switch3flip, you're right. They did fix HRC's right orbit along with ToM's. But each of these fixed shots (also AFM's right ramp) still feels wrong. The timing window is too tight for each of them, because it still wasn't really tuned correctly in its own right but just had...

It's not a hologram. It's just a monitor reflecting off the playfield glass. In 3D rendering terms, it's just a surface within the cabinet to draw textures on. It'd be the same as the DMD being inside Cirqus Voltaire's cabinet or the little display at High Roller Casino's slot ramp. Pinball...

Depends on what you'd consider "right", but just getting the visuals functional isn't all that complicated. In 3d rendering terms, the display is just one surface showing short low-res video clips. For RFM, implementing the whole Pinball 2000 hardware platform is the challenge. Cirqus...

I got my start on this one, on the TI-99 computer. https://youtu.be/oZHNrp70Uz0?t=2m19s Like everything else about that computer, it's got a weird streak. It's a bizarre mutant somewhere between pinball and Breakout, but it occupied six-year-old me for countless hours.

I only ever bought seasons 1, 2, and 4. The bug reports on Getaway made me hold off on season 5 long enough that I mostly lost interest in the whole thing. When Tarek reports that he can go infinite on things like Getaway and No Fear and Judge Dredd, then I know I could do it too, and may as...

Farsight won't ever say that. They'll just keep giving the same "coming soon coming soon coming soon we promise really" that we've heard from them forever. And they really do mean it, all this stuff in the pipeline they honestly do want to get done. They're not trying to break promises or...

If you're playing a real EM machine where the flippers are strong and fast, that machine has been reconditioned and the flippers rebuilt. Nobody here under the age of 50 has played an EM when it was new to really experience and judge the speed.

Yes and no, in two distinct areas. What works is that EMs don't have ramps and scoops and kickouts, so you don't get the railroaded ball behavior. You're shooting bumpers and other kickers that add sorely-needed randomness, and usually shooting on-the-fly rather than from a set catch or...

Is it just a game where much of the mode scoring gets awarded as bonus, like Addams and TZ?

An electromechanical table can be emulated. You could have software keep track of every relay and stepper motor and everything, and trigger them according to playfield switch inputs. It's just a lot more work and little real benefit over rewriting the rules in a programming language.

I haven't played any TPA in months, don't even have SPA, and I don't even know what Brunswick Bowling is. Whatever's going on has nothing to do with me. Presumably somebody messing around using my name.

Farsight can replace voices if they want. TPA doesn't play sound by emulating a machine's sound ROM, for performance reasons, because that's computationally expensive. Farsight records audio clips and TPA plays them back natively on each device. It's quite doable to replace a voice that way.

How about the original Pinball Construction Set itself? It's pretty easy to find online. http://www.myabandonware.com/game/pinball-construction-set-1sk That will play the DOS version right in a browser, or download to play through Dosbox. Although the Apple II version looks better (more...

I was at Modern Pinball a few weeks ago and Black Hole was out of order, good to hear it's up again. And yes, TPA doesn't do Black Hole justice at all. The sheer SIZE of the thing is a major part of its original appeal, which gets completely lost on a pocket size phone screen.

It wasn't. The pinball machine was released in December 1995, the movie in December 1996. Just a coincidence that similar projects used similar names at similar times. Both were independently inspired by old sci-fi flicks, of course. Back on topic, yes, AFM is just about the best beginner...

This was fixed in a patch about a year ago, along with several other shots like AFM's right ramp and TOM's right orbit. All these shots have a possible railroad now, although that railroad is a very small and difficult timing window.

High Speed was amazing for its time but hasn't aged well. The multiball-jackpot sequence was a huge thrill in 1986 but is now routine on hundreds of tables since. When it came out for TPA, everybody was like "this is what were so excited for?" TPA's implementation doesn't reflect the machine...