Awesome interview with Tarek Oberdieck

[Fungi]

You know, that name you keep seeing in the #1 slots in TPA.

http://theballiswild.net/interview-with-tarek-oberdieck/

 

[Heretic]

nice find deary

 

[Dedpop]

(...) "A big exception is nudging : I can’t really relate to just tapping or pressing a button for nudging.
This works much more intuitively with physical pinball. Haveing said that, with “Timeshock!” I could prevent almost every ball from draining through the outlanes.
I didn’t pull this off with “Pinball Arcade” one single time. I just try to prevent middle drains.
As I said before, I could dust off my old pinball controller, invest hours and would get a lot of my old highscores back.
I lack a little bit of ambition to do this right now though".

 

[vikingerik]

Very cool. I corresponded with him on occasion back when we would compete on the Pro Pinball leaderboards. Whenever Timeshock Ultra gets finished for PC, we're going to have a titanic battle there again.

I agree with pretty much everything he says. I also never compete on real pinball, but do play it for fun. And I haven't really been interested in recent Stern machines either.

 

[Slam23]

Hi Viking,
I know a lot of people who were brought up with Williams/Bally that don't really like those new Sterns. I wonder if you got a chance to check out Jersey Jack's first machine, Wizard of Oz? I know a guy who has worked on the LCD display for it, and has one at home now (just a block from where I live). Although the license is not my taste really, I was impressed by how "high-quality" the machine felt in comparison with the Sterns, tough to say what really makes the difference, but I would say overall sturdiness and smoothness of play. This is also true for the Big Lebowksi prototype that is built with the Williams quality in mind and already plays like one in my opinion! (Dutch pride aside offcourse.... )

Anyway, to stay on-topic: great find Fungi! I read it with delight and it's really nice to get a face with the name! I actually thought -without meaning it as an insult btw- that Tarek could be somewhat of an alien because of his slightly Star-Trekkian name and otherworldly scores Funny thing is that Adrian Barritt of Pro Pinball whom I got to talk to at the DPO where he was invited by the Silver Castle guys who are making a Timeshock pinball for real, was aware of Tarek exploit's on Timeshock when it was originally made back in the '90's. His quote: "there was some German guy we got to know who put up incredible numbers on Timeshock". He probably forgot that Tarek did this to all the Pro Pinball machines AND was also a beta-tester for them....
[MENTION=4507]Dedpop[/MENTION]: I know exactly why you highlighted that part of the interview, I also fell over while reading that. So this guy is whipping all our behinds on all platforms, all the while having not that much of an ambition to do so......consider that for a moment! I seriously hope he underplayed that a bit, or I'll just go hide somewhere in a dark corner and be depressed.

 

[vikingerik]

Not that I'm trying to hijack Tarek's thread, but if you want a face with my name too, here

On Sterns, build quality isn't the problem. I've never felt they're any different than Williams there. But there's an emotional element in the Williams games that's missing from the Sterns. It feels like the Sterns are too tightly bound to rehashing the corporate manufactured licenses, that there's no room for creativity and revelry. Williams games go NUTS with excitement when hitting multiballs or super jackpots. Sterns are just like, ok yeah now shoot this. There are exceptions - "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" - but mostly the Stern games lack the same visceral feeling.

I don't know if that's Tarek's complaint, but it's mine. Funny that Timeshock itself is poor in that department too (besides the time travel sequence) but obviously I like that one.

I have played Wizard of Oz, a few dozen games. It looks fantastic, but I still haven't figured out anything about what's going on with the rule set. It's pretty but I can't find the meat of the gameplay.

 

[Dedpop]

Not that I'm trying to hijack Tarek's thread, but if you want a face with my name too, here

You're cute.

 

[Heretic]

lmao

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

I have played Wizard of Oz, a few dozen games. It looks fantastic, but I still haven't figured out anything about what's going on with the rule set. It's pretty but I can't find the meat of the gameplay.

It's one where reading the manual really, really, helps. There's a full flowchart of how all the modes merge together, and so on and so forth. It's very informative. Boy is there a lot going on with that table. Perhaps a bit too much imho.

 

[Slam23]

Not that I'm trying to hijack Tarek's thread, but if you want a face with my name too, here

On Sterns, build quality isn't the problem. I've never felt they're any different than Williams there. But there's an emotional element in the Williams games that's missing from the Sterns. It feels like the Sterns are too tightly bound to rehashing the corporate manufactured licenses, that there's no room for creativity and revelry. Williams games go NUTS with excitement when hitting multiballs or super jackpots. Sterns are just like, ok yeah now shoot this. There are exceptions - "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" - but mostly the Stern games lack the same visceral feeling.

I don't know if that's Tarek's complaint, but it's mine. Funny that Timeshock itself is poor in that department too (besides the time travel sequence) but obviously I like that one.

I have played Wizard of Oz, a few dozen games. It looks fantastic, but I still haven't figured out anything about what's going on with the rule set. It's pretty but I can't find the meat of the gameplay.

Loving the pic, I can imagine that the outfit does help to get great scores, do you scare your adversaries much?
And about WOZ: what EOS said, it's actually a very deep ruleset that maybe caters more to the home crowd owners than the casual player on location. My friend hasn't seen the endgame yet for example. Although technically he has, because he helped design the d@mn game offcourse, but not by playing it. That flowchart can be activated in-game on screen btw if you go into info mode as usual. The flow chart then displays progress for your particular game. It's quite thought through. The only thing that I have issues with is with the rollover targets in the playfield. They are used to activate progress for the characters and that just happens, you can't really shoot for those as if they were standup targets. This also gives some confusion in the beginning because the machine says you made progress but you don't know how you did that. Otherwise there a lot of fun innovations like the different flipper weak and inverse states. Or dark mode. Or the Rainbow and TOTO ball saving modes. Maybe the rotating house was a bit too much because it takes up quite some real estate on the playing field making it feel slightly crowded. Anyway, not my theme, but pretty impressive table nonetheless!