Has Stern changed their flipper alignment out of the factory?

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OMG I so hope this is true. There is nobody I enjoy watching play more than NES. It would be such a pleasure to see him on the streams now that so many tournaments have high quality broadcasts going.

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I guess I’m thinking in terms of the player’s perspective, albeit not from a pinball point of view. Competitive video gamers can get very, VERY uppity if elements of chance are present. But these people rarely, if ever, care about the viewers. They go for strictly what will allow them to play at their best, even if said “best” goes for hours at a time.

Ever played Hearthstone? :wink:

I noticed that I actually enjoy both concepts: Being in total control and knowing that I just have to improve. But also learning to cope with situations caused by games that have random elements included. Pinball is a special kind of beast because you never completely know if a drain was caused purely by bad luck or if you could have prevented it somehow.

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[quote=“kressenstein, post:42, topic:2391, full:true”]Ever played Hearthstone? :wink:

I noticed that I actually enjoy both concepts: Being in total control and knowing that I just have to improve. But also learning to cope with situations caused by games that have random elements included. Pinball is a special kind of beast because you never completely know if a drain was caused purely by bad luck or if you could have prevented it somehow.
[/quote]

I don’t play Hearthstone, but I am familiar enough with it (mainly by watching the extensive coverage Extra Credits did). I am also very aware that collectible card games can get very competitive and there are tournaments that bring in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people.

I should point out that I like when a game has elements of chance, as long as there is strategy behind it too. I’d reckon different people have different tolerances of how much chance can affect the outcome of a match. I noticed this most prominently with Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, a kart racer made by people who had been making arcade driving games for a decade. Their goal was to make an alternative for people who did not like Mario Kart’s item system, one where the influence of items was minimal and highly defensive and where, ideally, the most skilled driver would always win. The release of this game created a split among kart racing fans, though it seems that the people who couldn’t stand the luck factor in Mario Kart games was a minority.

I played both and was pretty good at both, but I had more fun playing Mario Kart. When I got into 1st place in SASRT, in most cases no one else could come close, and my lead grew and grew. This was very boring for me to play. Mario Kart, however, has what I call a “Sword of Damocles” mechanic, the infamous Blue Shell. That is, even if you’re in the lead, you aren’t safe. (For clarification, in Greek legend, Damocles was a servant of King Dionysius who asked Dionysius how it felt to be a king. Dionysius let him sit on the throne under the condition that a sword held by a thin thread hung down over his head, to illustrate that a leader is in constant life-threatening danger.)

But I know that for some people, they love the feel of a runaway victory with nothing that can stop them. You can see it quite well from the YouTube comments for Extra Credits’s Blue Shell video. (There aren’t quite as many recently as when the video was new though.) And to some, every match is a test of skill, and they feel the person with more skill should win every time. These people would be low on luck tolerance. In hindsight, they’re probably quite a small but vocal minority, considering that even in chess, the better player doesn’t always win (but they’d probably argue just as voraciously that chess is an inherently unfair game).

But yeah, I don’t let getting unlucky bother me, and I don’t let losing bother me. It’s why I can continue to enjoy pinball. I can’t imagine any of these people getting any enjoyment out of pinball, which inherently has some element of chance, even if said chance was derived out of Brownian motion. They’d only enjoy it if they knew the ball’s exact trajectory after every flip, nudge, and slap, which, to me, would be about as boring as being in the lead in SASRT.