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  1. M

    How did your love for pinball begin?

    One of the toy pinballs I had in my childhood was actually an unpowered flipper machine! It was basically a big plastic tabletop bagatelle that had a stand to tilt it at an angle, but it had two big manually-operated flippers at the bottom. I forget exactly how one operated them. Of course...
  2. M

    Upright or Lying down?

    Our first 360 Slim died lying down (with a system error; I forget the number, but it had to do with graphics hardware failure). But I have no evidence that there was any connection between the death and the position of the box. It wasn't sitting on a live, hot piece of equipment, or anything...
  3. M

    Visual Pinball / Pinmame

    ...of course, there are open-source projects that do better than that. But it takes discipline and an explicit focus on making the product easy to install.
  4. M

    Visual Pinball / Pinmame

    The installation problem is a common issue with open-source software. OSS hackers work on stuff that annoys or interests them, and there's little incentive for them to improve or even maintain an experience that you only have to go through once. I think there may even be a deep cognitive...
  5. M

    Americans are stupid. Why?

    We played too much Gorgar and took him as a role model.
  6. M

    Pinball designer style trademarks

    I recall a number of subtle references to The Addams Family in Twilight Zone (both have a "GREED" mode, for instance), but I've forgotten most of them. Barry Oursler seems to like wide-open spaces lined with target banks (Gorgar, Pin*Bot, Doctor Who). He consciously designed Doctor Who as a...
  7. M

    Pinball designer style trademarks

    I was even convinced that the main female voice in Cirqus Voltaire was the same actress as the friendly genie in TotAN, but as far as I can tell from the credits, it's not.
  8. M

    Another eternity until DLC 1 is released.

    There's been no announced date for XBox DLC. There has been one announced for PS3 DLC, three weeks from now. There's a popular hypothesis that Farsight is intentionally holding up PS3 DLC because of a Microsoft requirement that nobody who plays ball with them can release content on a competing...
  9. M

    Favorite Rudy line?

    My daughter (age 5) likes to quote "It's lunchtime! Get yourself a hot dawg!" but she doesn't actually let me play Funhouse in her presence, because Rudy freaks her out too much.
  10. M

    DLC Schedule For The Next Six Months

    I actually like Firepower a lot; when I was playing PHoF:W a lot, the simplicity of it meant it gave me a lot of practice at basic skills. It's almost the minimal nontrivial multiball pinball. There's no real goal other than multiball, and once you get multiball there's nothing to it but...
  11. M

    How did your love for pinball begin?

    ...Oh, yeah, and before PBHoF, I'd gotten briefly addicted to the free sim of Royal Flush for classic Mac OS, a port of the Broderbund PC game that had been released by its author when the commercial project died. That gave me a hankering for realistic sims of real tables that PBHoF and PA...
  12. M

    How did your love for pinball begin?

    I'd been vaguely interested in pinball in my childhood but hadn't spent much time trying to play it, unless you counted plastic toy bagatelle games and Atari 2600 Video Pinball, neither of which bore much resemblance to the real thing. I got hooked in the course of typical graduate-student...
  13. M

    How did your love for pinball begin?

    Unfortunately, the machines at the Canobie arcade are now in a terrible state of disrepair. I was just there a few weeks ago, and the situation hadn't changed from last summer: the only one I could find that was really playable was their Lord of the Rings, and even that had a droopy flipper...
  14. M

    What are your most-wanted tables?

    Concerning polls and such: Based on what they've released so far, I strongly suspect Farsight is gauging potential interest by the IPDB rankings. Look at the top 10 solid-state machines on IPDB, and you'll see that the only one of the ten that Farsight hasn't either announced as a release, or...
  15. M

    Bug Typo On Apron Decals

    I went to IPDB and checked whether the typo is on the original table (it's not).
  16. M

    DLC Release Date

    We can only hope...
  17. M

    DLC Release Date

    The thing I wonder is why, if this were true, Farsight would now be giving definite dates for PS3 DLC but not for XBox DLC.
  18. M

    Those who think PHOF is bad - take a look at this!

    In my youth I spent way too much time playing Video Pinball on the Atari 2600, a game that bore very little resemblance to actual pinball: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Videopinball_2600.png There was no slope at the bottom of the screen, so the ball would spend a lot of time just bouncing...
  19. M

    Official Twilight Zone News

    This is interesting. Is there new information that indicates that this is actually the reason? Farsight's latest update just gave definite dates for the PS3 DLC releases, but not for the XBox 360, saying just "when we have a date we'll let you know". That suggests to me that the PS3 DLC is...
  20. M

    Official Twilight Zone News

    The problem is that, since Star Trek: TNG is only a stretch goal, there isn't the risk-free element to pledging that one has when pledging for the main goal. Everyone's credit card will be charged if the Twilight Zone goal is reached, whether Star Trek is funded or not. So people who are only...
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