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[img width=600 height=450]http://avoision.com/portnoy/images/2010/october/pinballExpo2010_42.jpg[/img]
After much thought and back-and-forth deliberation, I finally decided to put Williams' Taxi at the top of the list as my favorite pinball machine ever made. Created in 1988 by Mark Ritchie (Diner, Fish Tales, Sorcerer, Indiana Jones), Taxi is a classic 80's pin that is best known for being tight and difficult. In Taxi, you take on the role of a cab driver whose purpose is to take passengers to the airport. The passengers include a strange and nutty cast of characters that most people during the 80's would recognize: Mikel Gorbachev, Dracula, Santa Claus, Pin*bot (a famous character from an earlier Williams title), and Marylin Monroe (later renamed "Lola" due to issues with Ms. Monroe's estate.....). These passengers are "picked up" by shooting specific area of the playfield, by completing a bank of three drop targets, or via the Spinout skill shot at 25k. Once picked up, a timed jackpot is lit and collected upon shooting the right loop and settling the ball in the upper left saucer. If a player does not make the jackpot shot before the timer runs out, the shot can be reset by picking up Marylin/Lola from the center bank of drop targets. However, the difficulty of obtaining the jackpot is further increased, since all pickups are voided at that end of each ball unless you are able to light and collect a difficult "Carry Passengers" bonus.
Continue reading Banana's Pinball Top 10 - #1 Taxi
A new arcade/game store just opened up in my area, and needless to say, I've become a pretty frequent customer since its inception. The guys that own it are really nice and have been very helpful in introducing me to new games and systems. Along with several standup and sit-down machines, they keep a nice stock of pinball machines going (always ten at a time and they frequently swap them out). As a result, I've been bitten by the pinball bug and am working on saving toward my first machine. Luckily, there is a fairly strong pinball community in my area and I should benefit from knowing some of its members in my local search. Unlike video games, pinball is something you have to work to find locally, unless you have unlimited funds to blow. For my first machine, I though I might go with something more nostalgic to me. I was a big fan of the Williams machines of the late 80s/early 90s, such as Taxi, Cyclone, and Whirlwind, so I am going to start there, since those machines tend to be more affordable than the newer dot matrix models.
Continue reading The Pinball Bug
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