All right, I think most of you here know I'm an insane pinball lover. And restorer... and scratch-builder when I'm not procrastinating and/or diverting all my attention to assembling a web community for a hentai franchise. All probably made abundantly clear when I wrote that fanfic in which the Black Cats find themselves unwillingly obligated to learn how to fix a machine.

That said, I figure if we have threads on everything from H recommendations to mainstream anime to cooking, I might as well make one to share this too. Now, admittedly, pinball is not a very share-able experience on an online community, considering how rare it is to see games in public these days. But I like to think it might still be interesting for some of you to see some behind-the-scenes and maybe share what experiences you've had.

And so - given the topics we all know and love on this forum - I'm going to start things off with these photos of a game I ran into at a convention last year. This is "Transporter: The Rescue," a relatively rare 1989 title created by Bally/Midway during a transitional period when they were being bought out by Williams Electronics. It runs on the beloved System 11 hardware/software platform....
...
...and it looks like something straight out of the Inyouchuu universe.

Click to Toggle Spoiler

100 years into the future, perhaps?

Maybe Mikoto's future descendants went to space and things went terribly wrong.

Anyhow, I figured I'd post potentially interesting stuff in here every now and then!

That is indeed a very cool monster design. Can kind of envision a classic foursome ending scene in Wai with Mikoto, Takeru, Sui, and Rinko, that his head reminds me of. Just picture that head in the center of the four of them in a tentacle pit... you know the rest.

I think it's very cool pinball is so easy to license, supposedly? Or that just so many series' get a custom pinball machine here and there. Even virtually now. I was seeing Tomb Raider had some not long ago.

I loved the spacey pinball game on Windows 95 back in the day.

Lots of grabby, slimy appendages in the art too. Look just back and left from the upper right flipper, that's just a group of proper straight-up TinkerBell tentacles right there!

I think license costs vary from one IP to the next. My understanding is that a full production game - R&D, licensing, design, and tooling - costs somewhere on the order of $1M per title. Serious business for some!
And then a few crazy homebrewers come around and build their own for just a few grand in parts...
Kinda forgot virtual pinball was a thing there, but yeah. Apparently Pinball FX3 has done a whole bunch of stuff, lots of their own licenses and even some remakes of real games. I ought to try it out sometime and see how well the feel matches up with the real thing.

Your tastes are commendable, fellow Space Cadet fan! Somebody did a remix of the music from that game a while ago too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me2xd7BCcmY
A lot of people don't realize the game that shipped with Windows was actually just a demo. The full game was part of the "Full Tilt" collection with two others, and added additional features including multiball.

I love pinball. I don't get to play it very often, but I love it.

(03-03-2026, 10:15 PM)Ellie Wrote: Your tastes are commendable, fellow Space Cadet fan! Somebody did a remix of the music from that game a while ago too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me2xd7BCcmY
A lot of people don't realize the game that shipped with Windows was actually just a demo. The full game was part of the "Full Tilt" collection with two others, and added additional features including multiball.

The Windows experience getting worse really did correlate with the loss of Space Cadet, huh. No room for it now that everything is full of AI stuff too. (AI is comically incapable of understanding pinball. I think the image generators only recently started to realize there are usually flippers.)

Anyway! Now this one below, I haven't personally played, but I just HAD to feature it here. This game, Gottlieb's 1992 "Operation Thunder," is themed around a military mission. I assume the story takes place in some sort of mountain range. However, for what reason I cannot fathom, the designers chose to depict it by filling up the playfield's idle space with plastic sculpted models of the rocky terrain.

And they made it all red.

Photo of the upper 1/3 of the game shown below. [photo credit from IPDB] Does this, or does this not, look like an Inyouchuu flesh cave!?

I have no idea if the game's actually fun to play. But given that it's a Gottlieb System 3, I don't exactly have high hopes, though if I see it at a show I'll have to check it out. That said, one of the audio designers is Dave Zabriskie, who went on to create the soundtrack to "Theatre of Magic"... so it probably at least sounds good.

I see it, it does look kind of like a meat cave.

Speaking of games with weird, cavelike surfaces, let me present the very, very odd "Orbitor 1."

Yes, that's right. It's not flat. It's a giant bowl-shaped moon sculpt, and it plays just as weirdly as it looks. Now, some of you may look at this and think "oh that's gotta be the coolest gameplay ever!"...

Well, I had the great misfortune of playing this game at a show once, and I will quickly dismiss it as the pinball equivalent of Shuu.

Yeah it does look kind of dumb. That reminds, next time I feel like drinking (very rare) or just want some hot dogs, I should see this one bar is still open. For a while they hosted the largest collection of antique pinball machines in the state. I should see if they're still open and the collection is still there. I don't drink very often and I only checked it out once because my coworker's band was playing there.

Do it! Honestly I've gone into lots of bars with the intent to play their pinball. And I don't even drink!

Even if it's harder to find games these days, they're still out there. You can actually use this service to find interesting stuff near you. They even have an app:
https://pinballmap.com/