The website is one idea. I’m out of other ideas at the moment. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has this problem with rule changes etc. I’ve heard and seen some complaints regarding this (also positive words, of course, regarding updates).
In a perfect world the games would be released, with a complete, balanced set of rules. But that’s not gonna happen, I guess. Having this information in a structured way on a website (rather than reading “read me”-files, forum-threads etc.) could help a lot of people in pinball? Even the manufacturers perhaps? However, I would have to limit the scope of this, a lot, if I would do it myself. I have plenty of other programming projects going.
Well, I don’t learn the games while playing Tournament matches really. I won’t try to discover new strategies in a tournament match. I just play it safe.
Tournament mode changes a lot, on some games. A simple example is Attack from Mars: I would never ever shoot the saucer on purpose in Tournament mode. It’s a waste of …shots… since I’m not going for Rule the Universe and there are not many points to be had. If it happens (it has happened in Tournament mode for me) by chance, fine, but that’s not what I’m going for. Other games are more complex, and some are just the same. To me, that is.
If it helps, I’ve been trying to cut down to the key points of patches while also discussing the changes they may include. If I don’t get to some update, it’s likely a bugfix/minor change patch and won’t impact play heavily.
Which requires testing from all types of players. Some who play multiball better, some who are flow players, some who can find exploits etc. Think of the pre code as beta. I think code before it finished is ok.
We are speaking of different things. I thought you meant tournament mode or competition install which changes settings in the game. In attack from Mars the 3rd reward is always Strobe, never multiball etc. Iron Maiden install changes so the skill shots are disabled and the modes always start the same.
So you mean as a style of play which yes is different. Playing for a tournament and playing for fun are different approaches which I agree with. There’s lots of videos on YouTube of people getting to wizard modes so the information is there.
Would you be interested in maintaining a part of a website (“Pin City”) with a section for code updates etc.? I would code it and you and I could discuss what features/functions would be needed. It feels like something I could do i 3-4 days of work. There will be …other things… on the site as well.
First of all, there are formats that are easier to read than txt-files. Also, if someone else (perhaps me sometimes?) could do summaries/observations like the “META OBSERVATIONS” that @ScoutPilgrim had on his blog.
One problem is that I have no idea when a new ROM is out and when to even look for the “read me”-files and see if it’s 1) worth contacting the operator to tell them to update the ROMs 2) play the new ROMs
Yes, when I say “Tournament mode” no extra balls is implied. Yep! Tournament play vs. for fun/GC-chasing is a completely (on most games) different story to me.
There’s probably no lack of pinball-videos on youtube these days. I watched a lot of videos from https://pinballvideos.com/ (great site!) last year. I did not play pinball at all, more or less, between 2008-2018 so there was a lot of games to discover. I still haven’t played games like Metallica, X-Men and …more… Btw. my favourite games from this period 2008-2018 are, by far: Iron Maiden and Deadpool.
If we’re talking old-skool I’d prefer HTML-formatted files. At least. And I guess I prefer old schoold. But even something like Rich text formats would be better. It doesn’t make that much difference to a txt-file though.
Btw. I’m confident that at least one thing has been missing in the Deadpool “read me”-files: an extra ball that was removed between two ROM-versions. I couldn’t find a note on that anywhere (it takes time to keep up, yes! )
It’s a great page, great work indeed. However, I would like to track when the main page is updated, somehow. I don’t know if it’s possible. There’s an RSS-feed:
…but it’s for the entire thread, I think. Which means I would get a lot of posts in my feed that I might not be interested in reading. I really try to keep the “notifications” (in life) to a minimum, to be able to manage them. If it’s possible to just track the first post I would like to do that.
Thanks for the help for managing the ROM-circus out there! Now we’re getting somewhere.
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