Any Pinballl Junkies Out There, What's your favorite???

[bentlyman]

Any other Pinball Junkies out there???? What's you favorite of all time???

Right now I think the Best out there is the new <font color="green"> Simpsons </font color> machine. Its incredible if you like the show and plays real well too.

Favorite "old" machine is <font color="red">Fireball</font color>(20 . years old or more) Used to have a large spinning disk right above the flippers. Really tough to play similar to Whirlwind of 10 years back.

Adams Family was good, and Gone Fishin sticks out in my mind for some reason. There are a million other to name but I would like to hear if anyone else has a favoite/least favorite.

Toughest pinball of all time: <font color="purple">Jokerz! </font color>(about 15 years old). Spent more money on that bugger trying to get free games than i did on any onther

Good Luck on the machines /forums/images/icons/laugh.gif ,

Bently

[Vehn]

I used to play pinball excessively 8-10 years ago. The best and really the only well made machines were the Midway games from the early and mid 90s. Addam's Family (a classic), Twilight Zone (maybe the best ever), just about any Midway game from that time period was excellent with a few just medicore. My favorite though was Attack from Mars, deceptively simple and wide open, but great design and a great pace to the game. YOU RULE THE UNIVERSE /forums/images/icons/wink.gif

Coincidently, pinball, like poker, is one of those hobbys that essentially costs you nothing once you get good at it. Too bad the industry (and indeed the arcade industry as well) essentially fell apart.

[MMMMMM]

Favorite Pinball: Black Knight

Favorite Arcade Video Games:

Ms. Pac-Man (standard game, got a high score around 278,000, the Slow-down boards are even tougher than the boards that don't change so you can't eat the monsters; when you get thru a board or two of Slow-down PLUS you can't eat the monsters (on same board) you are really good. By the way let's see how many boards it takes to get there if I can recall: 2 Orange, 3 Blue, 3 Red, 3 Blue (First Junior lol, I won't note the other Juniors), 4 Pink (on 4th Pink Board monsters no longer change color when you eat an energizer but they still reverse direction), 4 Orange, 4 Red and I think the 1st or 4th screen of that Red is the first Slow-Down board where you run slower than any monster. There is a board before that where they stop reversing direction when you hit an energizer and this comes after the board where they stop changing color. It's been years so memory might be off a bit).

Curiously I didn't like Pac-Man itself nearly as much as it was too predictable.

Q-Bert (solved the strategy and could play for hours on one quarter), Arkanoid (got to the end), Hippodrome (when you can beat Charry and Steeve most of the time I think that's pretty good. Loved the roar of the crowd in the Coliseum.).

Least favorite Arcade Video Games: Defender, and Missile Command (I sucked at both).

[HDPM]

Have not played in a long time. I always liked Williams machines. Liked Pin Bot, Black Knight, High Speed, Grand Lizard or something was another. Older machines like Fireball were good. Liked Playboy. Some good backglass art on that one. Liked Space Invaders pinball too. Liked a bunch of them I can't recall off the top of my head in the '70's. Hated Nine Ball. I think that was a Stern machine and I thought it was impossible. Pinball was cool and is almost dead now.

[scalf]

/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif snow queen from 1970's...a gr8 machine...gl /forums/images/icons/cool.gif

[Porcupine]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
Have not played in a long time. I always liked Williams machines.

[/ QUOTE ]

Same here.

I liked the Williams machines right after the ones you mentioned. I think "Fire!" was my favorite - see it at Fire! (http://www.homegametables.com/pinball_v01.htm).

[TJSWAN]

I liked the challenge to get the three ball round going and when you ran the red light to start it you had about four
seconds before all **** broke lose.
By the way bentlyman, where did you come from?? You sure make me think PBS comedy everytime I see your pic or read some of your posts /forums/images/icons/wink.gif /forums/images/icons/grin.gif .

Keep up the fun posts. Tim

[bentlyman]

I agree that High Speed and Black Knight(forgot about that until you mentioned it) were phenomenal machines. Twilight Zone was good too but i did not see it much. I think it used a special white ball during multiball play that had crazy action--that was cool.

My feeling is that Williams has made the best machines in the last 20 years, Midway comes close, and Data East machines are almost not worth playing. Gottlieb machines from before 1980 I remember being excellent but can't remember any offhand.

A machine from 20 years that I forgot: Cyclone.

Interesting point made above comparing poker to pinball. I wholly agree.

A shame that Playstation/Sega/XBOX/Nintendo have put the industry where it is today, but its still sputterin. Hang in there, pinball. /forums/images/icons/smirk.gif

[Vehn]

If I remember right, Williams and Midway were/are the same company but two different teams (of pinball designers).

[Roy Munson]

One of my favorite Williams machines from the mid 70's was
Skylab. It was one of the first machines that I played that was a 3 ball game with bonus points earned during play. From the beginning it was one of the easiest machines to earn multiple credits.
All previous machines were 5 ball games with no bonus points after the ball drained.

[Jimbo]

I am a little older so my pinball tastes go back to the 50's. My favorite is a 1952 model named Chinatown (http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/IPD/image.cgi?id=509&amp;if=509b.jpg)

I also enjoyed Fireball like you Bentlyman. Fireball (http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/IPD/image.cgi?id=852&amp;if=852a.jpg&amp;fm=table)

One more I really enjoyed was called Flying Carpet (http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/IPD/image.cgi?id=899&amp;if=899.jpg&amp;fm=table) I had an I Dream Of Genie thing going on back then! /forums/images/icons/smile.gif

The site I am linking to has thousands of pinball pics, very interesting.

[Porcupine]

A machine from 20 years that I forgot: Cyclone.

Thanks for bringing that one up. I can't believe and forgot Cyclone and the "Ferris Bonus".

[bentlyman]

Big thanks for those great links Jimbo, really brought back some memories. The playfield in Chinatown is very interesting. Never seen anything like it.

Yeah, I remember playing Sylab for hours on little investment too. Another good one that was easy was Capatain Fantastic with Elton John on the Backglass.

Real challenging one came to mind from the 80's is 8-Ball Deluxe. Tough pool oriented pinball.

[KJS]

I love pinball too. I once started a pinball league in Seattle. Great fun.

My all-time favorite game is Scared Stiff. I am partial to Williams for sure, also a big fan of Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars. Data East games stink, IMO.

My favorite old school games are Eight Ball Deluxe and Space Mission.

Oh, to find pinball in Thailand.

KJS

[nicky g]

We had a Twilight Zone machine in the bar at our college dorm in my first year at university; it was so effin cool. I had no idea it was considered a pinball classic; it's the only pinball machine i've ever played seriously but man did we play a lot of hours on it. As a side note, 2 of the 3 others who used to play it obsessively with me went seriously loopy, and I'm sure some people (particularly on this board) think the same of me. I wonder if the game had anything to do with it.

[HDPM]

Yeah, I remember 8 Ball Deluxe. You and KJS jogged my memory on that. Hard game. I liked it pretty well tho.

[offTopic]

Fond memories of High Speed, because that's the machine where I first learned to play a little - I'm sure there's terminology that I'm unaware of, but this was the game where I learned how to catch the ball on the flippers, pass it from flipper to flipper once it was caught, and made effective use of what we called backhanding (ie, catch on the right flipper, and send it up the right chute).

Favorites include (from the 80s-90s):
- Pin-Bot and The Machine: Bride of Pin-Bot
- Theater of Magic
- Black Hole (the one where you could send the ball below the playfield - I remember this being one of the hardest games to score points on)
- Addams Family (great fun, maybe my all-time favorite)
- Black Knight and Black Knight 2000
- EARTHSHAKER!!!
- Diner - "I'll have the Texas chili and fries..."
- Jurassic Park (not great gameplay, but it was easy to get games)
- Twilight Zone (with the Golden Earring music LOL)
- Jokerz - another toughie, IIRC.
- Caveman - that video game got pretty hairy at high levels!

[Sooga]

I don't consider myself a pinball aficionado by any means, but when I was in college we had only one working pinball machine in the lounge, and that was PinBot. I played that thing night and day. 'Pinbot digits activated... NOW I SEE YOU!' haha... what a great pinball game.

[Oski]

Addam's Family and Twilight Zone were the best...missed hours of class at Berkeley playing those games in the Student Union. My dad went out of his mind when I was 8 years old and he went to a store called FedCo (California) and bought Balley's Fireball for a new pool house. The layout was slightly updated from the one shown previously. Also, as an added attraction, it played 8 songs, including the U.S.C. Trojan march.

Pinball is a lost art...became buried in the avalanche of video games. Sort of like mathemeticians who learned to calculate on a sliderule.

[Ulysses]

Some of you may be interested in this:

California Extreme (http://www.caextreme.org)

Old article (http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82%257E1804%257E863025,00.html)
Another article (http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/09.05.02/videogames-0236.html)

[scalf]

/forums/images/icons/blush.gif hey, those slipstcks were ez to use, very convenient; and going to calculators was probably the start of the decline of western civilization...next to real pinball machines, which really required hitting targets in sequence, using the lean...lol...or slide if there; to avoid the dastardly drain, and something about college cutting classes all day to play on one quarter; those were the days..lol..gl /forums/images/icons/diamond.gif

[bentlyman]

imo pinball is a lot like life on earth in a few ways.

one thing is is that it is fun.

always try not to tilt but try to get as many good points a s u can.

good luck on the machines everyone.

i'm sure HE will appreciate us. HE has a history of showing us that HE is very generous towards all living things:0

aufwiedersehen:)