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I believe this is actually expected behavior. You're supposed to lose credit for the locks when you drain. There's just no way for the machine to physically get the balls out of there except waiting for you to lock another so it can release one. It behaves this way on the PC version for me too.

Yeah, AFM and Scared Stiff, in that order. Everybody grasps AFM right away, bang on that saucer. Scared Stiff is the next nice easy gateway into more complexity, getting the idea of making shots to start features. If you think the license might grab them, Harley-Davidson. Its flaws aren't...

Wanted to share this and this is as good a place as any. Playing Twilight Zone. Battle the Power. Ball hops out of the Powerfield without triggering the exit sensor (this happens occasionally on both the real table and TPA.) Flippers are dead because the game thinks the ball is still on the...

None really on TPA, but much more on real machines. Anything with an upper flipper and upper ramp/loop. I can smoothly slide the upper ramp shots on Addams or STTNG or Getaway or NGG all day when nothing is lit there, but light up a jackpot and I'll brick it at least three-quarters of the...

You can do that whole river letters sequence during Whirlpool Challenge more simply by just holding one ball on the left flipper all the way through. You just have to set up the inlane light using the right flipper while the ball is in the whirlpool. Then of course just hold the right flipper...

Goin Nuts feels like it was someone's pet project, that knew the table existed only as a prototype and wanted to get it into mass production. And a hook to sell Gottlieb HOF - "here's a lost Gottlieb table you never heard of." Agreed that it's included in TPA certainly only because it already...

Getaway is an awesome choice. I'm predicting it will be the next machine to surge in value once TPA does it, like STTNG did. It's got the same ingredients: an early DMD slightly overlooked on the list of greats, but once everybody plays it again on TPA, they'll remember how awesome and intense...

I remember Psycho Pinball having some pretty nice table design and deep rules for its time, but was crippled by some nearly unplayable flipper physics. The sea-themed table was the worst, with several shots at angles the flippers literally could not shoot except by random rebounds off something...

You DON'T want to finish RTU faster. You want RTU to last as long as you can, for more Martians and more pounding on that drop target for Lap increases. Those are the ways to circumvent the 10B limit for RTU, setting up extra points for later collection. Don't worry about failing RTU, that...

I'm the one with the 800 billion, which was 15 RTU. No cheats, just TPA's predictable easy physics. AFM has no dangerous outlane drains, and slap saves are very easy at least on the PC with keyboard controls. It's all about long ball times without draining. AFM scores inflate exponentially...

TSPP's wizard mode actually isn't all that lengthy in the number of shots to reach it. 7 TV modes, 10 Ottos, 5 Itchys, 6 hurryups, 5 Daredevils, 5 Couch SJs. Not really much more than RTU or BFTK, especially since you can continue to do all of them during any and all multiballs. Of course the...

Monster Bash and Cactus Canyon are actually the similar pair, and distinct from AFM/MM. They all have the basic principle of completing each shot three times to qualify for something, but AFM/MM don't do anything with each individual shot (just give a generic hurryup), while MB and CC start...

There's no secret whatsoever to El Dorado, just get the EB again on every ball. Score is entirely a function of how many times you get that EB without the bad luck of a drain first. I surprised myself on that game too - ball 3 started with only 3M, but I just never missed getting the EB for...

Champion Pub always got me this way. The ruleset captures the flavor amazingly well, with the training and the fighting and the other old-timey side stuff like the spitting video mode. Except for multiball - when all of a sudden you leap out of the boxing world and into a totally standard...

I would be really interested in seeing that, actually. I don't think I like Ripley's enough to play it for 34B worth of points anyway. I can play Ripley's well enough, getting to 6-8 continent tours and 2-3 Atlantis in one game, but that only scores a billion or so. With the limited EBs...

TZ and STTNG are the most fun out of those, but also the most popular so a top 1k leaderboard score will take some skill and effort. CV and NGG might be fairly easy pickings. CV you can pretty much just bash the Ringmaster and do fine, NGG you have to know what you're doing with the golf...

Centaur makes pretty much no sense. A motorcycle cyborg is weird enough to start with, but then what exactly are you doing anyway? You're not fighting or shooting or attacking him. And who is the Queen and what does her chamber have to do with anything? And not in TPA, but I was always...

But they don't. Beyond the threshold of going infinite, skill doesn't matter. Roughly the top hundred players are good enough to play Bride of Pinbot indefinitely. The top hundred scores then have nothing to do with skill among those players, but merely whoever decides they're willing and...

Funhouse doesn't require the mirror EB on every ball. The Gangway extra ball is also repeatable. So as long as you get both the mirror and the Gangway done every two balls, you still go infinite. I agree with preferring limits on EBs, so that top scores actually reflect skill beyond the...

The fundamental misconception from the original post is that pinball flippers are bats or clubs for whacking and slamming the ball around. They're not. They are your hands inside the game. They can grab, clutch, hold, throw, tip, deflect, and do any number of more sophisticated maneuvers.