After this showed up at pintasric I finally have had time to fully outline the scenario. I am not sure if this was truly intended or an accidental bug in the code
It was found during Eric stones game. He first collected all 4 judges(jackpots) in multiball. That starts final challenge. He played that out. After back to single ball he then played through every mode. That also starts final challenge. After he played that out unlike normal conditions where all modes would reset and start the cycle over again they stayed lit and final challenge was easy again for the next mode start. This plays out like this for the rest of the ball until he tilted during one of his maaaany final challenges.
Playing through with the glass off the end scenario of this bug is he drains in single ball play or tilts like he did. If this was ball 1 or 2 final challenge will still be lit at the start of the next ball but will not stay lit after ending. The modes will then actually reset.
If you do it in reverse and play out all the modes first and then complete the judges in multi ball it does. It keep final challenge lit. You would then have to go back around again and complete the modes again to enter this state
Bug or not I am not fully convinced either way. Should this unfortunately be thrown into a banned list for higher caliber events? I’d hate to cross another game into that territory.
This was on L-7 ROM revision. Not sure if it changes on any other revisions.
One thing I never realized is final challenge from multiball is a 6 ball challenge. If started from modes it’s only 4 ball.
This has been a known bug for quite some time which is why I was surprised to see you had it at Pintastic. It may not be in the L1 code and may have been introduced when the Deadworld stuff was ripped out of that ROM (I never investigated that thoroughly so couldn’t say for sure). Problem is, even if the bug is not in L1, there are so many other bugs in that code that it’s not worth running in a tournament (never mind the fact that you have to run it with the Deadworld mod for it to work properly.)
Considering how difficult it is to trigger, I’d still consider using this game in tournaments. If anyone gets so far in the game that they’ve triggered this bug, I think they’ve earned the win…
I was a bit fearful about looking into this one. As debugging stuff deep in a game can be daunting. But it was actually easy to find. And when I understood the game rules in more detail I called it already.
When Ultimate Challange is started as multiball victory laps it should not clear the modes progression on termination. When started as the wizard mode it should. This is controlled by a flag that is set when started by the multiball. And tested in the UC end procedure. But by mistake it is not cleared here. The clear command is in the false condition code path (whoops).
The flag is cleared at start-of-ball. So it will not carry. But, as the UC lit condition will carry, on a new ball you will get one last shot at it before the party is over.
Apart from giving the Deadworld mech logic an overhaul and making the physical lock a menu option, what else needs to be fixed on this game (with reference to L-7)?
I think Safe Cracker should actually work like Move Your Car (in CFTBL) instead of pretending it does but only giving the same value over and over.
See also this small Safe Cracker bug from the rulesheet:
There’s also something weird about this mode. If you hit it during the opening animation, your score will be 8M. If you wait just a little bit, when it starts counting down, the value will be over 8M, like it started at 9M or something. Weird.
The bonus multiplier applying to mode points is massively overpowered, but I’ve never seen anyone take advantage of it in competition.
An option for a ball save at the beginning of Black Out would be nice. That mode is useless 90% of the time because it doesn’t have one.
IIRC, it takes a while after the game ends to actually show the scores if you have match enabled.
Even MORE importantly…
I would also suggest nerfing the wood-chopping strategy of looping the left ramp all day. Particularly on regular-sized flippers that are good and strong, you can just spam the left ramp for safe, growing points, with no cap. And I believe the ramp value carries b/w balls? I don’t recall.
Ideas:
Still reward skillful looping by allowing the value to grow, but similar to Police Force, have the value reset back down to base/starting value if you hit any other switch besides the ones on the ramp and the R inlanes.
In addition: reduce the L ramp growth value. Factory is 500K (+500K) per ramp, IIRC.
Ramp scoring is +500K without reset on same ball. Open ended (well effectively). I guess a hard setting could be timeout reset and a cap at 10M.
Looking into this I found L-1 very buggy. If you encounter this in competition because the owner like the physical locks (original concept) I suggest you suggest the game not used. Well, until the rev 8.0 that I plan on bringing to market is out.
I think this bug has been brought up before but there’s also a bug with Sniper. If you start Multiball during the second phase of that mode (with the guy falling from the tower), then you’ll be able to start Chain Features during Multiball. This has some very weird behavior, preventing you from scoring jackpots even though they can be lit. This was on the most recent code.
Didn’t see it mentioned above, if you turn ball save off it will cause JD to randomly award ball saves during normal game play. Pretty sure this is in L-7 but I can double check.
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