Everything got better when I became a green-haired 2D girl. I do fun and unusual things with video games and pinball.

cohost inspired me to do more. Thank you



I love the central idea here: you're the pinball, and you need to get out of the pinball table, by opening that door in the back, getting up onto the edges of the table, crossing a perilous bridge, and making it into the door.

The late '80s had pinball designers trying some wild things, where the margins of the playfield, the raised areas where usually a pinball shouldn't go unless something has gone very physically wrong, became expected parts of gameplay. "Blackwater 100" went so far as to put a flipper on the bottom apron, and that table might have been here in the ranking instead, if its VPX made any physical sense. But here's Bally's "Escape from the Lost World", which has dinosaurs but has nothing to do with the sequel to Jurassic Park (that's a different pinball table).

Don't worry too much about the scoring rules. There's a clear goal you're trying to accomplish that's more important than points.

During the pinball tournament I went to at Past Times Arcade, I found myself playing this machine a lot between tournament games, both because it was close to where they'd announce that the next round was starting and because I felt that I would be able to escape if I played Just One More Game.

This beautiful VPX recreation comes from Rajo Joey and Armyaviation. It provides the option of displaying the originally designed translucent bridge, which I hear didn't physically work very well in reality and was replaced by a solid metal one. We're free from those physical practicalities in virtual pinball, and we can see the machine as it was meant to look.

Of course, one cannot actually escape from pinball. The door in the back just feeds back into the right side of the table and the cycle of flipping and draining continues.

By the way, my livestream of this Best of VPX countdown is continuing soon, starting at 8pm Eastern (@042) tonight.


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