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



arborelia
@arborelia

Volley is the Platonic ideal of pinball.

The rules are easy but playing it well is hard. Pinball Primer describes the rules and summarizes the strategy briefly:

Light banks of drop targets at the top lanes, then hit the drops for 5,000 each. Be sure to hit only one drop at a time because of slow EM scoring. Drop targets only reset after all 15 are hit.

Simple rules, lots of implications! You need to make skill shots to hit the lanes that make your drops worthwhile to hit. There is no reliable path to these lanes from the flippers, so you usually need to take risks to light more than one lane in a ball. If you hit unlit drops, they're gone until you reset all the drops.

Volley contains many opportunities for both luck and skill to dramatically change the outcome of a game. It's no wonder that the "Five Dollar Volley" event that traditionally ends every tournament at District 82 gets so much hype from their Twitch viewers.

To play Volley well, you need to remember that a Volley pinball machine is a mechanical machine. It's not a computer that's perfect at counting. Many things on this table score 5 of something, and clicking the score reel five times takes time, and it doesn't "buffer" anything while it's happening. You can learn more about this in the Technology Connections YouTube series on electromechanical pinball.



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