"Welcome to the Future."
Ahhh, Total Nuclear Annihilation. A lovely and somewhat rare pinball machine released in 2017 by Scott Danesi's Spooky Pinball, TNA is an attempt at bringing the early 1980s single-layer and targets and ricochet based pinball gameplay into current year, and given a thrumming synthwave soundtrack and aesthetic, and even the lower and flatter type of cabinet that was common back then. It has a big screen like modern games, but also in a nice throwback to the early solid state era, vacuum fluorescent display segmented score displays. The game also I believe uses standard filament lamps for general illumination on the playfield but super-bright LEDs for playfield inserts and for flashers. As an aside, if you yourself have a classic pinball machine, you should totally do this. The warm glow of the GI causes the flashers and inserts to really pop by comparison. I did.
Basically, the conceit is this. You are Scarlett, who looks like what people in the 1980s would have thought a secret agent would look like in the future. Your job is to bring about the titular Total Nuclear Annihilation by breaking into each of eight nuclear reactors and sabotaging them. Sounds easy, right? Well, it really isn't. The playfield might look simple and fairly empty, but the lack of ramp shots in favour of target banks, scoops, and a single very powerful pop bumper to the right hand side of the playfield, combined with the fact that all progression is strictly against the clock, make it a game where you have to really be on top of your ball control. The playfield itself is on two main parts. The outer part requires you to make target bank shots and also has a ball lock a la Bally's Centaur in which there is a lane with sequential drop targets back to back in it which must be dropped and then the ball shot in behind it to lock it as it re-raises. Thus in classic early solid state era, when the multiball activates rather than being nice and dropping the balls into play one at a time, you get all three thrown at you at once similar to Rollergames or Black Knight 2000. If you manage to hit enough targets in the right order, and against the countdown clock that ceaselessly ticks down in a segmented display mid playfield, you can unlock the inner playfield, which is painted to be all awash with Cherenkov radiation. Getting into the inner playfield gives you one flipper and a chamber in which all the walls are slingshots and also fires up a shaker motor in the cabinet. In the inner playfield you need to keep making shots to build up time to make the combo shot back in the outer playfield (letting the ball past the single inner playfield flipper returns it to the outer playfield - think Swords of Fury or Black Hole) and then hit the Big Red Button in the form of the single pop bumper to achieve Total Nuclear Annihilation and gain more points.
Then do it all again.
Needless to say, with each reactor the timers get shorter and shorter, and you have to chain more and more elaborate combo shots to advance matters. If you manage to sabotage all eight reactors, the game ends, and you get a huge bonus for each ball you had left though I think in multiplayer other players can continue to play their remaining balls, which makes multiplayer a bit of a game of chicken where you try to not progress into meltdown for the last reactor because that then makes it a gamble as to whether the other players can catch up with you even with the wizard bonus or not. If you don't, and you drain your last ball, the display tells you "You Failed" and that's it. The display and voiceovers have lots of shout outs to classic machines of the pre-DMD era as well and one easter egg has it suddenly shout "LIONMAN! LIONMAN!" from Swords of Fury.
TNA is a game that is more aimed at being on location than the collectors' market. Like the early solid state and System 11 games of the 1980s, it's not too deep in the ruleset and based more on trying to test the players' skill than give them a lengthy ruleset that they can chew through. It's not a machine that I'd want to keep for myself but if I did have one I would perhaps try to rent it out to a certain type of bar or arcade to have on location. The comparatively simple mechanical aspect of it means it's probably more resistant to having drunks pound on it than a modern Stern machine as well, and the competitive aspect and retrofuturism would make it more suited to such a place.
(IN24/3)