alt Hacker NewsAbout a decade ago I took my then little children to Seattle Pinball Museum for a day of tremendous fun for everyone. The machines were rated on 1-10 "grin factor" scale They had a machine there that wasn't your typical pinball, it was twice as wide and it shot a stream of balls from the center like a machine gun, in a continuous stream and you controlled the direction above with goals of hitting the targets that would light up. The balls would cascade down and get fed back into continuous loop.
This machine's "grin factor" was marked as 11 (naturally!!) and yeah, it was tremendous fun. It felt like I imagine it feels operating a seriously big machine gun! There was momentum of the heavy steel balls in the feeder so one couldn't swing it around willy nilly, so one had to really put some force into it. It was also really loud, and the feedback from the pusher vibrating through the handles was very visceral. Loved that machine!
Replies
I believe you are talking about Hyperball: https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?gid=3169
I've been fortunate enough to come across it a couple times, it's pretty cool.
Cool, sounds like pachinko game play, which gives that same sort of visceral “I’m doing something, albeit subject to the forces of nature” vibe. I didn’t get pachinko when I lived in Tokyo, it sort of gave off desperate gambling vibes, but once I actually stuck some yen in a machine and those balls started pissing out, I was hooked. Very fun! I won some dishwashing soap. ;)