different US & European difficulty settings

[wilbers]

Just found the manual for Getaway : High Speed II

https://www.arcade-museum.com/manuals-pinball/G/Getaway_HSII_OPS.pdf


Page 1-20 has the various difficulty settings that can be set by the operator. What is the logic in having US/Canada/France slightly easier than German/European?


Also noticed there is a consolation ball option for a really terrible score.

 

[Citizen]

The difficulty changes were most likely requested by the European distributors. WMS usually complied with changes that foreign distributors asked for. Germans and Italians liked extra challenging pins.

 

[Jeff Strong]

They also gave us the good ol “italian bottom”.

This is an interesting read I cam across for anyone interested in pinball history:

https://www.aussiearcade.com/archive/index.php/t-56610.html

 

[jaredmorgs]

They also gave us Blitzen Flippers.

The Euro market's demand for shorter play times meant shortening the Flippers just that teeny bit.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

 

[kinggo]

IMHO, it was more about greedy operators than anything else. Like the fact that price per game was higher than in USA wasn't enough......
And now when the pinball is almost dead in Croatia and finding a machine in decent working state is a plot for a next MI movie, they are all set to 5 balls for 5kn ( ~0.8 $).

 

[wilbers]

For things like extra ball percent, and multi-ball percent have Farsight and Zen picked which other settings they want to implement from that table and use the % in a particular column, or have they 'mixed and matched' a bit? Also (not having played this table in TPA) have they made the same or different choices for settings (such as the default US medium?).


There is certainly a lot more to some of these tables than first appears. Secret mania (I discovered it existed yesterday, same google search that found this manual) lives up to its name and isn't mentioned in the manual.