Thunderbirds Strategy

I’m about to put certain words together in a sentence that I never thought possible:

We are now using Thunderbirds in our league.

So… where are the points on this thing? All I really know is “hit the Mole captive ball a lot.”

All my condolences on behalf of Australia.

This game won’t stay long in your league, as ball time can be extremely long.

Backhand the right ramp all day. When you lock a ball, it comes back if you drain while attempting to lock the second, essentially, an extra ball.

Nothing else in the game seems to be doing anything of interest, but you get special points in my heart for hitting a palm tree with an air ball and getting stuckies from backhands (forehand, it’s just too easy).

The viable long term tournament strategy is to get enough stuckies for your TD to give up on it and include another quality game, such as tic tac toe, or playing hangman on the toilet doors with a sharpie.

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I’ll have to give backhanding the right ramp a try. I don’t think the flippers are particularly strong on this particular game so that might be a challenge.

In messing around, scores seem to jump in fits and spurts by banging on the captive ball, more so than other things. It feels like players who just flail around are going to have a bad time.

Among others.

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Exactly this - just keep doing it over and over until you lose the will to live.

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And to think I felt bad spending so much time discussing Bad Cats!

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It lasts a tournament?!

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Even if you only backhand the lock targets and post pass/forehand the lock ramp you’re set. You just get Multiball or set up Multiball and go to town. If you go into Multiball, be sure to relock one ball.

Also, anyone who shoots the center ramp enough to spell the word should immediately claim victory and argue with every TD for that honor. Blunderbirds are NO!

So, is that the longest spellout in history? Seems like it’s certainly the most boring

Only recently tied by Willy Wonka’s “Scrumdidilyumptious” (both 19 characters, assuming “International Rescue” doesn’t require the space between the two words).
But Wonka’s spelling marathon is for any combo, and not the bore of Thunderbird’s spelling snooze-fest.

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Zen Studios’ Captain America has “S-O-L-D-I-E-R S-A-V-I-O-R S-Y-M-B-O-L F-R-I-E-N-D”, which you spell with bumper hits, but digital machines don’t count, do they? :stuck_out_tongue:

Spoken like an engineer, lol

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By that logic, Tommy’s “OK”/“WOW”/“GOOD”/“SUPER”/“GENIUS” is 20 letters and wins. :slight_smile:

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Here it’s all in the same sequence, no spaces or awards after spelling out a word.

There is a known bug in some early build machines code that allows a repeated trapping and return of a ball locked on the right ramp. I would need the serial number to check for certain if this is a machine that left the factory affected by this issue.

One fast way to tell - does it have lane change with the right flipper? If not, it’s most likely the code with the issue.

This, and a few other small things, were fixed in the final code along with adding lane change.

I want to know when homepins next game is coming out.

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Our machine does not have a lane change, and seems to infinitely release the locked ball if you fail to lock another one, which frankly is all the time because of how hard it is to do the entire sequence again in 30 seconds.

I’ve spoken to the owner of the game and he claims there are no code updates to download. If he’s got one of the older games, what would we need to do to get up to date?

https://homepin.com/contact.html

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Nice pic! Can we get a top-down shot of the playfield and an overview of the rules?

When do they ship? Any going outside of China?