SafeCracker high scores

Same old story.. busy with a lot of things, it's winter so I don't come much in my (at the moment still) unheated gameroom.

Last month we did move SafeCracker back into the house !
So I get to play that game again more often.
I have it now for about 5 years but never actually had a high score on it. Maybe once or twide I could enter my initials as far as I can remember.

So now I have a new goal - playing the game until I get my initials in the highscore (and maybe GC ??).

Reading RGP I find out I'm not the only one who has this problem.. the game is hard and challenging. It plays very fast but also needs to be tuned correctly. The ramp and cellar shot are quite difficult to make on my machine (only around 1 in 4 times it makes it, the other times the pinball rolls back down the ramp and almost drains) and these shots are crucial to get a high score.

I started first aiming to get a highscore on the Assault the Vault game.
Put a magic token it and start the multiball frenzy..
The trick to get a high score in this part of the game is to aim for the lower left set of drop targets, the cellar and the ramp. I don't bother shooting the pinball up towards the bumpers anymore..

In the past I usually got around 3 million points. Last week I finally got over 5 million using this strategy and could enter my initials. Great !
This weekend I played a few more games and got 7.8 and 7.9 million points. Excellent !

Next goal is to achieve a highscore during the regular game.
The wried thing about this is that first time I played a SafeCracker (somewhere in 2001 or 2002) at someone elses house, I immediately got an excellent score on it and could enter my name (had 5.5 million if my memory serves me right). All this without knowing what I did, how the rules were, ... that highscore even made me doubt if I would search for a Safecracker pinball machine to buy or not, as it seemed an easy game. (boy was I wrong, now I did learn its rules) Must've been beginners luck..
Anyway I'll first see if I can tweak the right flipper so the cellar and ramp shot can be made more consistant. Once it is, that GC score must become mine !

MM shop and rivets

Happy new year everyone.. been a while I've posted here.

Worked a bit further on my Black Hole, main playfield is now also completely clean and waxed. Almost time to search all the parts and start assembling it together.

But that has to wait (again) as for the moment I'm assembling a Medieval Madness machine. A friend bought one, but didn't have room at his place yet and had no experience at all at shopping a pinball machine.
So to help him out we brought the game into my gameroom and he came in the evenings to disassemble and clean the playfield. I gave some information on how to do it, what to watch for, .. while I worked on my own games (finally installed a Cliffy protector in my AFM !)

So the playfield was empty, cleaned, and this friend didn't have time anymore to work on it as he'll be moving into his appartment next week so the game has to be ready by monday.. sigh.. so it's up to me to assemble the playfield back together.
Not a funny job as temperatures in my unheated gameroom are only just above freezing..

It went quite well I have to say.. it did take me about an hour to first search all the parts together and have an idea where he put everything and in what order the last parts were removed :) Tip: if you shop a MM, measure the large black hexagon posts you remove.. seems there are a lot that are very similar in length but not exactly the same.. dno't just put them all together without noting which one went where..
Took me another half hour just to replace the bridge (you don't want to see the welding job done on the bridge that was installed in the machine).
Now I'm over halfway in assembling everything.

This Medieval Madness also gets a new plastic set. First time I had to remove rivets and put new ones in (was necessary to switch a flasher socket onto a new plastic).
Went quite smooth, was less difficult than I had thought.

Pinball photography

The article about pinball photography is online..

I hope a lot of people will learn from it.. it's a large article, there's a lot of information in it. Don't know how much everyone knows about photography and how creative they are when taking pictures.. but the article should be informative for everyone. Just read it (a few times), remember some things, take your photo camera and go out to your gameroom and try things.

Crane machine in France

Took these pictures on holiday - at least on our way to our holiday destination.
They're taken at a truck stop on the highway (autoroute) between Metz and Strassbough.



This crane machine was just standing outside next to a restaurant ?!?!?!
Why would anyone think it's a good idea to put an electronical vending machine outside, without any cover ??

As you can see it was even still filled with toy animals.
The glass had a lot of moisture on the inside.. I don't want to know how the stuffed toy animals smelled or how unhealthy they must be for children now ??

Pinball photography

Been busy the past evenings taking photographs of my pinball machines.

I bought a serious camera last year with the intention to make nice pictures for my website. Started to learn more about photography, and learn, and learn, and learn, .. and before I knew it I was more interested and invested more time in photography than in my pinball machines.

I always tried new things, but my goal - to make nice pictures of all my games and to upgrade my website with lots of cool, large photos, didn't happen..

I did start to work on a new article for my website about photography.. been thinking about it a long time, started some things in draft a few months ago, but now I'm serious working on it (which means I put a lot of hours every evening into it, writing things, testing it, taking photos until I know what I write is correct and I know what works and what doesn't work when taking pictures, and actually trying to take all the pictures required for the article.

Since a short while I'm also experimenting with 2 strobes, offcamera (yes, full strobist style of shooting) which also is a learning curve.. but it's fun. Only now I start to appreciate the potential of my camera :-)

I guess in about a week or 2 the article will go online.. watch this space :-)