Addiction or just a goal? You decide.

August 3, 2008 · Filed Under Entertainment 

Earlier this year I wrote about being introduced to the Pinball Hall of Fame. Anybody who I’ve spoken with in the months since then has heard me talk about the place. I can’t seem to get enough of the place. I want to go there all the time.

For the first few months we went there, I was more than happy to spend my quarters playing a wide variety of pins. Funhouse, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Pinbot, Street Fighter, The Simpsons, Popeye and several others. Then Chris asked me to play a game with her. Creature From the Black Lagoon. It took 2 or 3 games for me to catch on to what the object was and what caused the jackpots to happen, but by then I was hooked. I loved this game. Since finding Creature, I’ve played remarkably very few other machines.

I managed to get my name on the high score chart on a couple games. I currently hold the #1 spot on Popeye though I’ve only played it half a dozen times. Star Trek, Funhouse, Star Wars and a Creature, too. But, it’s been roughly 2 months of actively trying to reach the highest score on the machine and I have yet to do it. A week or so back I was in the middle of a game and after hitting the jackpot I was able to trigger a super jackpot. After collecting the super jackpot, something else happened that, at the time, I wasn’t sure what it was. A couple nights later I did some research online to try and find out what the heck I had done. What I found at the IPDB (Internet Pinball DataBase) was pretty interesting. As it turns out, I have been going about collecting the jackpots all wrong. Without boring you with details on how to do it, there’s a way to set a multiplier to 2x, 3x, 4x and on some tables 5x. If you do this first, then collect the jackpot, your jackpot is subject to the multiplier, too. So what would have been a 50 million jackpot and then a 100 million super jackpot become 250 and 500 million. Obviously the multipliers are a huge, huge benefit.

Another thing I gleaned from my research is that the table I’m playing on is probably one of the hardest possible tables. To give you an example, to advance the multiplier, you need to shoot the ball up a ramp and have it do a total of 8 loops around a bowl. on an “easy” machine, each shot up the ramp would get you 7-10 loops. On the machine I play on, each shot nets 1-3 loops. It may not sound like a big deal, but you’ll have to take my word for it, it is. There are other elements that add to this tables difficulty, but you get the idea.

The high score on the machine I play on is just a touch over 1 billion points. Prior to reading about the multiplier, my highest score was somewhere around 450 million. Last week I broke that with a 587 million score. Today I broke that with a 770 million score. I had a couple other strong games today in the 400 and 500 million range. It was a good day of pinball. But not good enough.

I’m coming for you, Creature. Your top spot will be mine!

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