Word: rolled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...makers of Wizard, the Bally Company, have carried pinball over the threshold of a new age. In pinball's infancy, the game's mechanisms were exceedingly simple, even one dimensional. For most machines the surface was the only reality. A given bumper, a given roll-over had a certain, fixed value, and one's score was no more or less than the sum of those values. It was not long, however, before a second dimension was introduced, utterly transforming a phenomenon that had been purely linear: certain targets or combinations of targets were designed to change the schedule of reward...
Like nearly all of its predecessors, Wizard has a set of features, switched by a series of roll-overs, that mean the difference between assured victory and inevitable defeat: Thumper Bumper, Center Target, Double Bonus and Spinner. But to send a ball rolling over the roll-overs, at the upper right of the machine, is not enough to trigger the features--first, a set of flags associated with the roll-overs must themselves be triggered, by a set of targets spread across the surface of the machine...
...again be possible to construct a pinball machine with the relatively simple patterns we are familiar with--one bumper, regardless of sequence, predictably changing the value of another. In Wizard, only after the Thumper Bumper target is hit, or the Center Target target, are the appropriate flags flipped and roll-overs activated. And only then can the roll-overs activate their respective functions. The relationships of the many elements of the pinball surface have taken on an immeasurable new dimension here--the thumper bumper, the spinner on Wizard are features that are not once, but twice removed from the targets...
...both are up to her best. She screams and stomps her way through the old Martha and the Vandellas standard "Heat Wave," unleashing a wanton vitality that comes close to out-muscling the original version--no easy achievement. The same approach characterizes her earthy rendition of "Roll um Easy...
...little help, need more to modernize their tracks and equipment, Coleman says. However, he continues, some other forms of transportation need less. Barge companies, for instance, should start paying taxes for using federally maintained waterways, and truckers can afford to pay higher rates for the right to roll over the nation's subsidized highways...