It makes me happy these days to see older games both being in arcades and getting coverage like this :) For anybody interested, the 4 Million prize on the wheel lights up if you manage to light 3 letters within 18 seconds. Collecting letters can give decent points depending on the wheel value (each letter is worth whatever is currently lit on the wheel x1k, so if the 50 is lit, then every letter is worth 50k), but shooting targets and orbits is a lot more erratic than shooting Big Bucks for a million each time, and predictability is what's important when playing for keeps.
I was just thinking about how I want a video by Bowen for every single pinball ever made. I hope he continues to enjoy playing and making these videos. They are the perfect combination of informative, relaxing, and entertaining.
To be fair, that's pretty much every pin from up to about the early 2000s compared to modern games. It's abundantly clear these days that manufacturers are catering far more to the die-hard collector crowd than to more casual, on-location players, and I fear it may lead to another crash in pinball as games become so obtuse and overly complex that newcomers end up getting frustrated and turned off of the hobby, especially given the typical price difference. I'd much rather drop 50 cents into an older game that's fun and simple to learn than a dollar into a modern game with ramps steeper than Mount Everest and a ruleset so cryptic you'd have better luck decoding a base64 string by hand.
Thank you for the tips on the pin. Played it yesterday at my area pinball museum. It really boosted score and finally found the shots I would always miss.
btw there's a 100% NOT ALLOWED way to get the full 3 million every time. if you hold the plunger in such that that second ball never hits the plunger lane switch, eventually the game will kick out the locked ball. you then can plunge to score the full 3M jackpot. This is inducing a ball search for a benefit, and is 100% forbidden by tournament rules rules. If the ball does hit the plunger switch, it's smart enough not to bother searching until you validate the playfield, but if it never hits it, then it will do the ball search. Great trick for arcade play, though. :)
26:38 - The first high score is 52,284,990. Second high score starts *directly* after that last zero in the first high score to date. Similar issue can be seen on Radical.
I had never even heard of this game before now. If you asked me "Hey, have you ever played that Game Show pin?", I'd assume you were talking about Wheel of Fortune.
I know what you mean about live catches on these games. I've never played this one, but the live catch action looks just like Radical from the same year.
The same issue happens on Radical - the game simply tries to display 2 high scores next to one another. This works fine if high score at each level is less than 10 million. If the high score exceeds this threshold, both high scores get merged on the display. Locating the digit separators on the display will allow you to read high scores correctly regardless of the limitation.
