| | Fairly plain design on this older Williams table, livened up by exaggerated, semi-Cubistic (their elbows could cut glass) young adults romping on a beach.
Plinks and plunks are about the extent of the sound, and on this mechanical era table there are no modes or nothin' like that: just bumpers, and buttons, and lights, and you just have to hit the right ones repeatedly. Which is all find and dandy with me.
One oddity is the top lights/lanes: they spell out "SPECIAL," except that the top only actually has five lanes, so the "A" and "L" are located separately lower down on the table.
There's a target in the middle of the table, but fairly high up, so you have a lot of open space, and with the lower rebounders wound as tight as they were on the table we played, the ball can really get zipping around. Oh that reminds me, when the lower rebounders are hit, there's a pretty nifty electrical blue spark. There are two bonus side traps (circular depressions) located at just the right spots.
The table we played had some pretty severe wiring problems, of a kind I haven't seen before. If you hit the Start button with no credits in the machine, it would give you a free game, but start out at 900 points, and stick there clicking until you smacked the table around. Dropping the ball down "P" would light "C," the right of the three bumpers only lit up once in a blue moon, holding the flipper buttons down made pretty lound electrical buzzing sounds (kind of fun, except that you had a feeling that somewhere a fuse was about to blow), and often when starting a game, you'd start with 60000 or 70000 points (on the five-digit mechanical scoring reels).
So that was a shame, but we had fun with the table anyway, because it's very fast for an older style table, and well-balanced. The only part that didn't work so well for me was the "I" in SPECIAL--it's located in the upper right, just under where the ball shoots into the table off the launcher, and man, I couldn't even come close to hitting it. The bumpers seemed not inclined at all to hit the ball anywhere close to it. My friend got it once, on a rebound from his launch, but for the whole rest of the time we played, we never got near it. |
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