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04/23/2004: I <3 Sims Pinball.

God dammit, I’m obsessed with this game. Over at Pogo, scroll to the bottom, look to the right and give “The Sims Pinball” a whirl. What I assumed would be a three-minute amusement has turned into weeks of frustration and multiballs.

As with many of the games on that site, there’s a supposed progressive jackpot just waiting for me. Sims Pinball’s jackpot is rapidly approaching the 5,000 dollar mark, and in the words of my Pogo-loving aunt who I see about once a year, usually after someone dies, “that means it’s about to hit.” So whatever moments I have to spare are divvied equally between Stupid Sims Pinball and throwing darts at a picture of Michael Fishman because I forgot who he is.

The game is decent enough. It’s got all the usual pinball suspects, but I’d be lying if I said I’d be playing it this much without the jackpot dreams. My favorite part are the crude Sims girls standing beside the machine, because video games are universally improved with the addition of monstrously ugly women. Good way to kill time if anyone’s got minutes to murder.

First! Woo-hoo! That game looks exactly like the Space Cadet game that has come with every computer that I’ve ever owned.

I guess this makes the 2nd Simulated pinball machine done or related to Maxis. Go Llamas!!

So wait, do you get $5000 REAL dollars if you win this thing? Or like, $5000 "Sims" dollars, or $5000 in credit good only at online gaming sites? Or what??

That was fun! This should waste some time while I am at work. It is hard to find things to do on the net 8 hours a day.

isnt michael fishman dj from roseanne?
why did every tv show in the 80s have a character named dj?? i lived in the 80s and i never knew a dj, all though i did know a boy named John Paul who went by PJ… i wonder now if he was dyslexic…. nah probably just white trash

Rats! This particular format never seems to work on this here iMac. Ah, well. I still have Sonic Spinball for Genesis.

So why _are_ there two (admittedly ugly) decorative ladies by the side of the table when everybody knows only chicks and outrageously fey girly-men play The Sims?

So it seems that the pinball table, other than the fact that it’s got SIMS deco, is set up identically to the one that comes with Windows NT.

I don’t know about only fey girly-men playing the Sims. When I lived in Rez I swear everyone computer on the floor had the Sims on it (then again, we all got it free off the Rez computer network) and there’d be like groups of people playing all at the same time, trying to see who could get their children taken away by social services first.

I don’t know…..I love The Sims. Maybe its just the fascination of being about to screw up someone elses life and not have any consequences. I know when I first got it I was addicted. Pretty much everyone I knew that I showed ended up the same way.

The Sims Online kind of crashed and burned, didn’t it? I haven’t heard anything about it.

While I was quite heavily into the first couple of versions of Sim City "back in tha dayz", I tried The Sims once around 1999 or whenever it first came out but never really got into it, though my sister loves it.

For excitement, I prefer Flight Simulator! < --(sarcasm; the way I play that, I cross oceans in real time in subsonic airliners, usually flying from London Heathrow to Montreal Dorval/Pierre Elliot Trudeau, which is a 6½ hour flight, though one time I flew from Tokyo Haneda to Vancouver International, which took me over 14 hours. It's tedious flying in real time, but I do other things while the plane is in the air.)

Also, I’m a fan of the similarly-exciting Train Simulator, but that’s only because I’m a guy who believes that trains should always run on time!

By the way, that’s the slowest pinball game I’ve ever tried… even the default Windows pinball is more exciting.

This is really trivial, but I saw a little sidebar in hot-shit Entertainment Weekly around two years ago that had a blurb about Michael Fishman. Apparently he doesn’t give a hoot about acting because he’s married with child. Finally! Some fuckin’ answers!

Ok I acknowledge that this is off topic, but I need this question answered for it has been driving me insane all day.

When I was young, before the saterday morning cartoons would come on; there was this art show with some captain type guy who would draw boats anyone remeber this?

Omg, it must just be coincidence but I’ve been playing 3D pinball for windows, the Space Cadet one on and off all night. Never played it before. All the deju vu I experience makes me feel like I’m on the Truman Show, seriously. I’m weirded out.

What the… you’re right! The layout really is exactly the same as windows pinball!

Wait, wait… I just noticed something. The Windows pinball game was made by Maxis! Seriously… load it up and look at the bottom right of the machine, by the ball.

The layout’s the same as the default Windows pinball, but the physics for the Sims Online Pinball game are screwy compared to those in the other game; it’s aggravatingly difficult to get the ball up the ramp, and, when the ball goes in the "finger" wherein you hear the kissing noise, it shoots out directly towards the gap between the two flippers in such a way that it’s bloody difficult to hit the ball without bumping the table. The Windows pinball game is as smooth as silk to play, and, it’s the best pinball simulation I’ve ever tried, not that it has all that much competition in terms of what I’ve played, though both Devil’s Crush on the Turbographx-16 and Crüe Ball on the Sega Genesis were decent for their day.

Matt, don’t you live in NY? And isn’t there some law against winning prizes on the internet in NY? If I remember correctly, I was all obsessed with the iwon thing when that came out and then I read the fine print and it said I couldn’t win anything because I’m in NY. They want us to play lotto.

Dude..I still got my membership card. It’s made of this trippy material…3D, but not…woah..

And his thing was more 3D drawing, like piles of boxes and tubes and spit like that…

My high school art teacher used to show us Secret City tapes. One day, our assignment was to do the Time Table thing and draw as many of them as we could on our paper. I got bored after doing ten and made the following twenty different from each other, adding bulldozer tracks, radar dishes, feet, and other little accoutrement as I felt were needed. got an "A" for having a different result.

Glad someone posted about the drawing show. I was going nuts trying to remember the name. He used to draw massive dr. suessesque landscapes. All I ever learned to draw from it was a worm. All the other stuff I drew looked like it was done with a broken spyrograph.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2004 at 8:18 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.