Pinball table of the week: Sorcerer
This being the first of the famous “Pinball table of the week” posts, I thought it important to carefully choose a pinball table that captures everything that I love about pinball, and everything that makes pinball a unique, valid and complimentary companion to other kinds of gaming.
So I got on Wikipedia and typed in a few pinball tables I enjoy. Big, classic tables. They didn’t come up. I went to the Williams page, and none of the pinball tables mentioned in the article had an associated link, whereas all the video games Williams produced did. Wikipedia has failed me? Impossible. As a test, I typed in some of my favorite classic arcade video games. Every single one I typed in had an associated article.
Before we get on to discussing pinball game of the week, then, let me put a plea out to pinbally people: Please start writing articles about these great pinball games for Wikipedia? Not just for those of use who enjoy them to read up on them, but also for new fans and the simply idly curious to learn about them. Of course, there are many other pinball-related resources out there, but these tables deserve to be recognized in broad sites like Wikipedia just like arcade games do.
Now, before I move on to Sorcerer itself, I think I need to point something out, that kinda sucks: I don’t have the actual real physical manufactured table to play. Nor have I ever done so. Nor is it likely that any of my tables of the week will. Yes, it’s depressing, but all of my pinball pleasure comes from Visual Pinball / VPinMame, which is supported by an amazing community of these insane geniuses who craft 3D replicas of these things, complete with lots of reference photos pasted as textures over the model, and then port the solid state stuff in using vPinMame. The brains of the machine thinks it’s running a real physical table, but it’s running a simulation of that real table. Since I discovered Visual Pinball nearly two years ago, I’ve been hooked.
Table of the week: Sorcerer
The Eighties was a great decade for pinball, with tons of great tables released. The Seventies had seen a great deal of technological innovation, at the end of which something really special began to occur: tables began to talk. The advent of speech brought a whole new level of immersion to the experience, and never is that more evident than with 1985’s Sorcerer.
Ported to Visual Pinball with tremendous artistry by superhero PacDude, replete with flashing lights and tons of eye candy, Sorcerer instantly propelled itself into my all-time favorite list, and judging from the ratings score at the Internet Pinball Database, others think so too.
The player does a sort of battle against a taunting, supercilious Sorcerer, and playwise the game features all the staples of pinball at the time, including an eye-catching elevated bridge running across the top of the playfield from a ramp on the left to a holding area on the right where balls get racked up to trigger the completely frantic multiball.
The bulk of play, and of scoring, lies in attempting to hit a number of targets arrayed through the middle of the board to spell — you guessed it — S-O-R-C-E-R-E-R. There’s also a little nook with a triple drop-targets and an associated extra flipper — get all three drop targets before the timer runs out (about five seconds I think) and bonuses start to light up on the inlanes.
The table is actually quite straightforward, in terms of design and features. It’s also one of the hardest pinball games to play, at least for me. The ball will very, very often skip out down the outlanes while I sit and watch, powerless to intervene. Such is pinball. I’m pretty much the worst player in the world at pinball, but I would rank the difficulty of this one pretty high.
What really makes this table special is the pair of amazing, intimidating eyes just above and behind the playfield, which flash and light in response to the action going on, and the awesome voice which goes with it. The Sorcerer basically taunts you and mocks you the entire time, in this deep, booming voice, replete with zappy, thunderous sound effects. The whole package deal is tremendously memorable, and I often play the damned thing just to hear the zippy sound effects (also, this table, like other Williams tables of the era, uses sound effects that any fan of Eighties arcade games will recognize, like Joust).
How can anything be bad which, when your game ends with a particularly pitiful score, taunts you with “You are done, mortal!”
Is there a website that let players partake in video versions of old pinball games?? Sounds fun!
Dave
March 7th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
For the scoop on video emulation of pinball games, check out http://www.vpforums.com
March 8th, 2008 at 9:31 am