clyde

Pinball Club

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I kinda want to do Bob's Burgers. I don't know how to play it, but it seemed interesting.

Consensus is so difficult.

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I think Bob's Burgers is really crowded. That with the small playing field makes it really fast.

I liked the Family Guy one, lots of ramp and lane action going on.

 

Anyway,

 

Moon Knight 

Tales of the Arabian Nights

 

I'm ok with either one of them, Moon Knight looks interesting.

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Damn these missions are tough. One of them even disables your flippers.

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This table cracks me up every time I find out he's got another moon-vehicle. Get to the moon-cab, we need to makes some moon-cash so I can buy an outboard moon-motor for my moon-boat.

Also, Khonshu's guilt-trips are hilarious to me.

vPrsue3.jpg

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Damn these missions are tough. One of them even disables your flippers.

 

I just encountered the Morpheus mission. The deadly psyonic energy that Morpheus has to release in order to serve the same purpose as dreaming... will paralyze your flipper if it reaches one of them. Interestingly, the flippers can be paralyzed distinct from each other, so you can release your paralyzed flipper by making shots with the one that is still active (I think).

 

Right now I'm trying to figure out the deal with the orbs, the newborn-baby ranking, and the day-trading. This table is such a strange, jumbled collection of narratives. I find myself giggling about the design decisions that I assume have something to do with the reference material which I am entirely unfamiliar with. Does Moon Knight accidentally hit Khonshu a lot with his moon-crossbow while routing punks? The animation where Moon Knight puts the moon-crossbow back in its proper moon-spot makes me think that Moon Knight keeps a tidy moon-headquarters (though it is in need of a face-lift).

 

BTW My current highscore is around 15,000,000 and Cm0nster is at 53,000,000.

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I haven't figured out the day-trading thing. I have no time to keep an eye on that screen. I have no idea what you mean with newborn-baby ranking. There's so much different kind of mechanics in this table. I once reached a subtable via the moon, but have no idea what to do to reach that again.

I figured out most missions, except for the midnight guy.

 

btw, hitting Khonshu during the moon-crossbow thingy gives you 1M points. So always shoot him.

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So for day trading you have to hit the lit targets and the hole in the middle is where you get cashed in. I'm not sure how you switch from buying to selling. The moon subtable is started by doing the left orbit when the moon is lit below it, and that brings up the moon. The next time it brings you behind the table and around so you can hit the ball with that upper right flipper into the moon. For midnight you have to first hit midnight, and then the lit ramp, then midnight and then the lit ramp etc etc.

I just beat all of the modes for the first time and spelled moon night. The wizard mode starts over and over again, but I didn't make it past the first part. There are lit ramps and the hole in the middle stays lit, but I could't continuously hit it fast enough. I couldn't get past that, and died trying, but I got my highest score today. I love this table, it is so kooky, how can I not repeat everything he says? also, how is it possible to have a relationship with Marlene when we hear voices that guide our behavior? Does he go on dates with us? awkward.
vQXfarB.jpg?1

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After a quite a few games of not even going over 3M I finally had a good run. Managed to complete 2 missions: midnight and the punchy guy. Failed the mission with the smoke twice, shooting through it isn't enough and I can't hit the lanes fast enough. I upgraded two thingies, which only gives more points and more orbs to enable the mission,

 

Anyway, I did manage to beat Clyde's highscore:

BX44w1P.png

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tdIP2tA.jpg

 

This was defeating Midnight, The Black Spectre, and Bushman.

I hate Whirlybird multi-ball. I prefer how Sorcerer's Lair does multi-ball, where the challenge is to lock all three balls rather than juggle them all perpetually. Whirlybird multi-ball can easily outlast its welcome. There is still a lot I don't know about this table even though I watched Cm0nster play tons of it yesterday. I lit extraball in the left outlane somehow and I have no idea how. I still don't completely understand how to start the main modes. Is it just shooting it up the Mission ramp enough times? Or do you have to activate it by hitting Crawley and the right-orbit? I'm not sure, but that's the type of thing I'm trying to pay attention to. I'm also starting to notice which letters of "MoonKnight" are blinking during the non-main missions so I can get an idea of what I need to do when I'm just missing a few letters.

I had two great narrative moments in my last play-session. At one point I failed to catch the van that kidnapped Marlene and MoonKnight's response to her successfully being kidnapped was "It's just a scratch." They must not be that close. The other moment was when I seemed to go into the crossbow mode while taking taxi-fares. I imagined that MoonKnight was just driving a cab around the city with his gianormous moon-crossbow and saw some punks on the street that needed to be routed along the way. That crossbow animation still cracks me up. He hangs it back up with such care. It's like "I know you want to get back to pinball, but hold on a second, I just got this moon-crossbow and I want to hang it properly."

 

Also the newborn-baby ranking can be seen at the bottom of the dot-matrix at various points in time when you ball is flying around the playfield. I had the advantage of being able to look around while someone else was playing.

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We had fun recording ourselves playing MoonKnight today.


Cm0nster plays while I talk in this one:

 

I play as Cm0nster talks in this one:

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I went ahead and bought the Season 1 pack mere minutes before it dropped off the sale, so I'll take a shot at this tonight.

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FFS. I had a really good Ball 1 run. Completed 3 missions, score of 16+M. Ball 2 was maybe 30 seconds max. Ball 3 I almost had mission 4 (the voting mission) but I lost my ball in the last hit. I didn't even beat my highscore.

 

btw, have you listened to the things Moon Knight says? It's really idiotic. Things like "I wear white so they see me coming", or "Is my tie straight".

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I just bought so much stock when it was low and I lost my ball before I could sell it.

 

btw, have you listened to the things Moon Knight says? It's really idiotic. Things like "I wear white so they see me coming", or "Is my tie straight".

 

That's like 90% of the table's appeal for me. "Someone has to do it, the fun stuff." I think he is referring to bagging some bad guys.

Why would he need to get to the crime-scene before the cops do anyway?

 

I noticed a few things on my 15mil game. The main-mode ramp DOES light after you collect enough blue orbs; I saw it in the dot-matrix. Also, if you can get that car burning by reaching the crime-scene before the cops do, you can shoot the left ramp to set your ball on fire for double points. The double points seem to apply to everything. I shot Khonshu with a flaming ball during the crossbow mission and got 2mil.

 

One game later:
dPNQZ7P.jpg

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Took just a couple of shots at it tonight and got 9,199,460.

 

What are your initial impressions of the table?

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Sorry for the brief post last night, I was exhausted.

 

It's the first time I've played Pinball on a computer since the space cadet game that came with Windows. I ended up spending a lot of time fighting with mechanical stuff like views and buttons, and still didn't find one I liked. I felt like I was a quarter second slow hitting the flippers at some critical stages, and the ball would get lost in the color scheme on the field occasionally. This is also the first time I've played a Pinball table that couldn't be a physical machine in real life. I thought that the extra CG stuff would be off putting, but I actually found it quite enjoyable. I managed to complete one mission on my run, and this game does a better job than any of the physical games I've played of letting you know your mission status and what ramps to hit when.

 

I definitely will play some more, if nothing else I'm going to try playing once on each view type to see if I can find one that works a little better for me.

 

Edit: Oh, are you getting those score pictures just by hitting the Steam screenshot button and cropping, or is there a built in way to post that?

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I screenshot> snip tool> upload to imgur

Your flipper delay could be a latency problem. Also if you are using a controller, the triggers have some give to them (I use shoulder-buttons on the controller because they seem to be binary and immediate).

I detailed the way to change your pre-rendered frames setting in Nvidia to reduce latency earlier in the thread... Just a moment, I'll find it

Here it is...

Your timing-difficultly might be a latency-issue. I don't know if this would be worth your effort, but some people have a lot of success reducing the "pre-rendered frames" in their graphics card settings. On Nvidia cards, you go into the Nvidia control-panel ->3d Settings ->manage 3d settings -> Select Pinball FX2 in the programs drop-down -> Then set "Maximum pre-rendered frames" to a lower setting if your shots are late and a higher setting if they are early. I have mine set to "1".

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I'm running ATI, and using a keyboard.

 

I generally have a pretty low latency setup, I bought a screen with that specifically in mind, but I'll screw around in the new (much less functional than the old version) ATI settings tray icon and see if there's anything in there of use.

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XS3M0c8.png

(Two villains + a fairly productive copter multiball.)

 

This table is both narratively and mechanically overwhelming! The taxi-driving, day-trading, politician-brawling vigilante possessed by an Egyptian god -- as portrayed by snarky banter and a table which changes modes with nearly every ramp you shoot -- almost feels like a spoof of both superheroes and pinball tables.

 

Knowing nothing of the lore, it's interesting what hints of characterization filters through to the pinball design. Marlene, known only through a kidnapping mission and a line about why Moon Knight wants to continue living. Frenchie, seemingly named after his ridiculous accent. The uncomfortable racial undertones of a violent black man wearing facepaint being named Bushman. The back-and-forth between Moon Knight and Khonshu works well as a backbone framing. The dialogue already feels denser than Sorcerer's Lair, often spending multiple lines of dialogue establishing new modes and characters, I wonder just how much is lost in the adaptation process, or if the original work also trades heavily in old archetypes and 90s irreverence. It feels like the dialogue assumes the player doesn't know anything about this world, so it needs to introduce everything, but all this never really forms a coherent picture in my mind.

 

Reading through these comments and the table guide (and watching Clyde and Chrissy's videos!) helped to make some sense of the table's chaos, but I'm still finding myself reacting to the current board layout more than making active plans. It also feels relatively tough to active the kickbacks. I'm having a lot of trouble hitting the crime scene even by accident, and like everything on the table you need to repeat the shot multiple times to have any effect. (Maybe activating kickbacks by manipulating the Crawly reward with the right orbit spinner might be easier? Oh man Crawly, what even is his deal? Got a Baker Street Irregular vibe from him, maybe.)

 

The stock market scene is a lot less complicated than it feels. The stock prices seem to go up until it hits the maximum, then down until it hits the minimum, then back up to the maximum, etc. No erratic fluctuation. So it doesn't seem too difficult to cradle the ball until the price drops to ~15, switch to buy mode, make a few ramp shots, cradle the ball again, wait for the price to get high, make some more shots. You also automatically sell everything when you hit the center hole, so I think a quick way to finish the mode with a profit is just to end it early when the price is near 100.

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50bXvLM.png

Got one villain and a multi-ball. Thankfully, the ball lock happens to be the ramp that I have the easiest time hitting, but I don't feel like I got a lot of score out of it despite it yelling "jackpot" over and over. I have a really tough time hitting to the far left for some of the villains, mainly because of the slight latency (or my lack of skill) causing the ball to roll off the end of the flipper. I checked my AMD settings, and I don't see anything like the Nvidia options you described, so I guess I'm just going to have to get used to it.

Edit: I should mention that, so far at least, I haven't looked at any table instructions. I'll probably take a quick look at the videos that Clyde posted tomorrow and maybe I'll be able to get up there and be competitive.

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I have no idea what happened, but I was doing the mission with that mace guy and a flaming ball when suddenly made a shot through a lane and a shit load of 2M points showed on the screen and I went from a shitty game of 5M points to 35M in seconds... and lost my last ball because I wasn't paying attention to it anymore.

I did improve my highscore, but wtf happened and how do I do this again:

ooEmFKE.png

 

If only I kept my ball I might have beating Clyde's score.

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I had a killer 15 million first ball where I got Bushman and Black Spectre, but then followed it up with a pretty lame second ball. Then on the third I manage to get Midnight, and ended up with my new top score.

SjgcEYE.png

I'm starting to enjoy the table a lot, but there's still a lot going on I don't understand. I don't really understand why Whirlybird multi-ball is available sometimes and not others, and I haven't figured out how to do the Taxi stuff either. I've started reading the table info in the game, but I'm not very fluent in the pinball language, so that's only of some use. I at least figured out how to reliably light my ball on fire.

Edit: Oof, just read through a walkthrough again, seems like a lot of those extra modes are activated just by hammering the same ramp or orbit over and over again. It really feels like there's too much to keep in my head for this table, but that might just be lack of practice.

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