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TPA can't do this. There is only one launch button. TPA can only "press launch" on the ROM in one way. TPA can't activate troll bombs separately from the plunger launch. Also, TPA doesn't know when the start of a ball is. It only knows that the ROM wanted to fire the trough eject kicker...

The lock is always turned off during explorations. But yes, that does help to start an exploration if you would rather do that than time travel. Although I think that's not good strategy in Timeshock. Just take the lock whenever it's lit. You want to play Time Machine Frenzy a lot, it's...

I was away and busy all weekend, and tonight too, so thanks for the mention invitro but I won't make it into this one.

No, it's TPA that has the nudging all wrong. Timeshock gets it right.

That was normal for the early DMD games. Terminator 2 (besides the video mode), Checkpoint, Gilligan's Island, Party Zone, and maybe even Getaway are like that. Having a DMD didn't automatically make the games deeper. It took a while to explore the new medium. Same as when solid-state games...

Neither is necessary. To get the trip to Atlantis, you just need 7 letters total, you can do it on more than one cycle and more than one ball. With one ball, you're thinking of the ROM bug that awards the Perfect Tour bonus repeatedly (which doesn't have anything to do with Atlantis or any...

I don't. I play with a PC keyboard, which can only do full-strength nudges. But I think this is an advantage more often than not. I want the predictability and power of a full-strength nudge more often than I want the finer control of an analog nudge. There are only a few exceptions where...

The short answer is, yes, we just play longer. We don't have any miracle methods to score a billion while you score 250M. We just drain less and get more extra balls, until the latter exceeds the former, and then the game lasts infinitely long. We do the same things you do, just for longer...

This isn't true. I have a full-time day job, and travel somewhere most weekends (why I haven't joined in the TotM for forever). But I can still make time for long games of TPA when I want. This also isn't true, broadly speaking. There's only maybe ten players here that routinely go infinite...

Not mentioned enough: Atlantis in Ripley's. In terms of gameplay, this might be the best and most interesting of them all. It gets short shrift in TPA because you can't really play it for fear of lost-ball and ROM-crashing bugs, and you don't really need to because doubled continent tours...

Yup, Monsters of Rock is the best. The audio package stands above any other as well. Which does matter, even if sometimes we pretend we're above that. That satisfying visceral WHACK on hitting every monster and the "MONSTERS OF ROCK!" scream make for a bigger thrill than anything in pinball...

We know. See the "Physics engine discussion" thread in the general forum. We've seen the code that literally predefines these artificial catches. On PS3, only tables from Xenon onwards have that, but for platforms that get code updates, that behavior is now on all the tables.

gordonabrown, what board games do you play? I'm an avid board gamer too, but Safecracker is super disappointing in this area because it's not really a board game at all, it's just completely random, you make no decisions and affect nothing.

Sounds good to me. I agree the big decision is what technical environment to base it on. You're actually dealing with two different ideas here: the score data, and the methodology. I think you really want two documents. CSV or a proper Excel/OpenOffice sheet is the right way to present the...

This is correct. You can alter a ball path in open space on a real table, and the reason why is these subtle dynamics of table flex and ball spin. TPA doesn't remotely attempt to simulate any of that, though. It treats a nudge in open space as if you somehow physically poked the ball...

The margins on this table are extremely slim. You're at 6300 and top sixty is 7700. That's only a couple good/lucky balls. The one key I found is to make sure you're not aiming at the center wall (where the special targets are), aim off to the sides so the ball can go upwards into the...

Your comparable is Safecracker. Check out the hate for that one around here. Unique doesn't mean interesting or fun. It's even bad if the uniqueness raises expectations that go unmet. Banzai Run's backbox game is very repetitive, it's the exact same sequence of stop-and-go shots every time...

Pro Pinball did this nineteen years ago. Timeshock allows airballs. BRUSA can even have them jump onto a ramp habitrail.

I don't want more features from Farsight. They'd be as canned and crudely implemented as the live catches. And we wouldn't see them on any old tables for the same reason we never saw physics 3.0 other than the catches, that all the shooting angles would need to be retuned. For example, doing...

That's not true. The EB is available every single game in TPA, at least if you reset the ROM between games. I've never seen it fail to appear on the right path. It is only once per game, though.