Am I missing anyone off my friends list who's playing this?
I may well have been defriended by a few BEEXers over time as I've hardly been on XBLA in the last 12-18 months and/or because you think I'm an obnoxious PC spod cunt.
If you have defriended me for either of the above reasons (or have never friended me at all) and are playing this excellent pinball game please could you add:
ChoppoTurnipas a friend for maximum leaderboard score sharage. (I've only put in a half-decent score on ToM up to now though.)
I'll send out requests to anyone posting in this thread who isn't on my list so if you see a request from ChoppoTurnip, that's me!
As for the Ripley's table, it should be noted that it was designed by Pat Lawlor, so its insanely complex ruleset makes total sense since he was responsible for some of the most complicated (and therefore rewarding) pinballs ever, including the epically brilliant Twilight Zone. (I owned a real Twilight Zone table for about three years and I can honestly say it took me a few months before I genuinely grasped all the nuances of the ruleset, but by christ it was satisfying to really master that table.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_LawlorTherefore, expect to be confused by Ripley's for a while - (I certainly was/am, but now I realise it's by Pat Lawlor I'm definitely going to stick at it) - but if it's anything like his other tables the genius of the design should start to show through pretty sharpish.
The loss of real pinballs to play over the years is a massive shame. When I first came to the IOM I'd say about 50% of the pubs here had one (a couple of pubs even had two), this has dwindled and dwindled over the years, and the last one sited in a pub disappeared about four or five years ago
Ultimately as far as the operators are concerned they're a pain in the arse. They need regular maintenance, they're prone to having bits break and thus getting turned off and not taking any money (there's no getting away from the physical nature of them), they take up loads of space and they're bastard noisy - so unless they're harvesting a pretty penny in the cashbox they make precious little commercial sense.
Also, they require some specialist knowledge to keep them running properly, I remember a pub here had a table that was 'losing' balls on a regular basis. The software in pinballs is suprisingly and ingeniously adaptive* so it works around stuff like this as best it can, but after a certain number of balls had got stuck in this one location the table simply went into 'ball search' mode and couldn't be played. The engineer who came out to it every other week would just release the balls from where they were stuck, turn the table back on, and call it 'fixed', until the balls got stuck again and the cycle repeated.
In the end I wrote a short description of exactly what the problem was (a weak solenoid and a cracked ball launch chute) and left it behind the bar for them to give to the engineer. And what did he do the next time he came out to the table? Release the stuck balls and turn it back on......
No wonder they were making fuck all money, but of course the operator just sees the bottom line and removes the table from service, rather than realising that if they ACTUALLY KEPT THE THE FUCKING THING WORKING PROPERLY it would have a fair chance to make some profit.
* For example, if a single switch or opto isn't triggered for a certain numbers of games, the software assumes that the switch is broken, flags it as inactive, logs an error for the operator maintenance mode, and will then attempt to work around it. A simple case might be a loop that has a rollover switch at the beginning, middle and end. If the ball triggers the three switches in order the software knows that a successful loop shot has been made. The switch in the middle might only be used for specific features, or to trigger some sort of 'halfway house' sound effect or animation.
If the middle switch in the loop ceases to function, the table will no longer know the status of the ball after the beginning switch is triggered - (did it get as far as the middle or not? the table doesn't know) - but if the beginning switch is triggered and this is followed by the end switch, the software will assume that a loop shot has been made, and award the loop shot, even though the middle switch in the loop never 'called in'.
If you're ever playing a real table and the software seems to 'catch up' sometimes with what you've done, chances are that a switch is out somewhere and the software is trying to extrapolate what's happened from the inputs it's received.
When I bought my ST:TNG table it was really badly shagged and had been dreadfully neglected, but what amazed me about it was how successfully the software was able to compensate for all the switches and optos that were broken and still provide a reasonable game.
Took me ages to restore that table to its former glory!
FINAL NOTE (I promise) - Good Twilight Zone tables now sell for around £8000. I wish I'd kept mine...... If you want a genuine appreciating asset, get a well liked pinball table and look after it.
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And yes, it's worth a watch.
