From: lfs@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu (Lyman F Sheats Jr.)
Subject: Re: Auto-plungers
Organization: College of Computer Science, Northeastern University
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 20:47:07 GMT

blowfish@carina.unm.edu (rON.) writes:

>Auto-plungers suck big fat hairy rocks.

You know rON, I pretty much have to agree with you.  Auto-plungers do suck
big fat hairy rocks.  They tend to break more often than the regular spring
plungers found on games like um, (help me with some recent games here) --
TAF, Black Rose, or Cue Ball Wizard.  But one of the things I really like
about the auto-plungers is their ability to launch balls during multiball.

I played Black Knight (yes, the original Black Knight) over the weekend
for the first time (yes, the first time) with a couple of people who were
about as old as I am now when the game first came out.  The game has a
feture called "Bonus Ball," or something like that.  It's a mode at the
end of the game where you constantly get served pinballs in the plunger
area to launch, and can have three balls on the table at once for a fixed
time period.  My explanation is a little on the lame side as I am very
tired, but I hope everyone gets the idea.  If you launch all three balls,
one at a time, as soon as you lose a ball, it gets kicked back out into
the plunger area for you to manually launch again.  If ever a game needed
an auto-plunger, this one was it.

Then I thought about auto-plungers a little bit more, and discovered the
only ones I really didn't like were the ones that would occasionally (or
very frequently) drain your ball on you.  No, I'm not going to talk about
HSII or Fish Tales again, so everyone can relax :-).

In fact, the only games I thought had "dumb" auto-plungers were Super Mario
Brothers by Gottlieb/Premier and Dr. Who by Bally.  The SMB auto-plunger is
really aggravating, since there are potentially three places to launch the
ball: into the right kickout hole, down the green ramp, or all the way around
to the upper left flipper.  It's real hard to hit the "skill shot" you want
with an auto-plunger that doesn't allow the player to vary the force on the
ball.  So I used to vary the force of the ball by kicking the machine just
prior to ball launch to dampen the effect on the ball by the plunger.  A kick
to the machine isn't really a great way to make the shot you want from the
plunger.  Why would I want the ball to go anywhere but all the way up to the
upper left flipper?  Well, when playing SMB in NJ, the right kickout hole
would always award SUPER (a tournament mode de-randomization), so you start
your ball with a nice big drop target in the UP position between your flippers
and the kicker lit.  Theoretically, the only place you can lose the ball at
this point is down the right side.  A nice way to start a ball.

Dr. Who's auto-plunger is pretty much useless in terms of a skill shot,
unless I'm completely clueless and am missing something.  I wouldn't be
surprised if this is the case, as I've only had a chance to play the game
ten times or so to date and am far from knowing all of the features of the
game.  BTW, I *REALLY* like Dr. Who (and I don't follow the show and don't
consider myself a "fan," for what it's worth).

But one thing both SMB and Dr. Who do is use the auto-plunger to launch
balls during multiball.  It's kind of nice from a design point of view,
as you don't have to allocate/waste playfield space to store locked balls
(as non auto-plunger games like TAF (the swamp), Black Rose (the lagoon),
and Cue Ball Wizard (the ramp) do).  So I guess what I'm saying is that
the only time I'm going to complain about auto-plungers is when they drain
the ball without players ever getting a chance to touch the launched ball
with a flipper, or, if, God forbid, a game like Bad Cats (with no *real*
skill shot, no multiball, and therefore no use for an auto-plunger) comes
out with an auto-plunger.

What I'd really like to see, though, is a game with an auto-plunger that
also has the multiball "Bonus Ball" mode, but not at the end of the game,
rather, as an award that can be collected from some playfield feature during
the course of a game, on any ball (1, 2, ..., n).  A mode that just keeps
serving balls onto the table for a fixed time period and you try to score
as much as possible during that time period, a mode where every switch is
maybe worth a fixed point value.  A mode where novice players get as much
"play" out of the feature as wizards, a mode where wizards may not want to
trap all of the balls beacuse it wouldn't matter if you lose one, a mode
where you may want to trap all of the balls, since when the timer expires
and you return to normal "single ball" play, you may have more than one
ball on the table.

I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm rambling, but I really enjoyed playing for
the first time a game as half as old as I that could have possibly been better
if it had an auto-plunger.  Now that auto-plungers are here, and apparently
here to stay, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing their usefulness increase.

--
Lyman F. Sheats Jr.
lfs@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu