Word: wizarded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WHAT STRAVINSKY'S Rite of Spring did for music, what Gutenberg did for journalism, what the internal combustion engine did for auto racing, Bally's Wizard has now done for pinball. Every so often an entire field of human endeavor is picked up, turned over, and shaken like a dusty carpet--and when the air clears we can say for certain that a part of our lives will never again be the same. And that is what is being said by the small, but ever increasing stream of visitors to the Underdog on Bow Street: visitors who, as often...
...seminal force of Le Sacre lies in Stravinsky's instructions to the ten French horns, playing triple-forte at the piece's climax, to aim their bells up in the air. That was a magnificent gesture, but--and the same is true of the bold, star-spangled nipples on Wizard--it was only a refinement. There is no revolution to be found here, only a bit of new polish on a dull surface...
...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...
...opening or closing a gate. There was a short-lived trend toward multiball games, with certain holes shooting a second or third ball into play while the first was still active. But these were no better than tail fins on a design moving steadily toward obsolescence. Until Bally created Wizard, the essentially two-dimensional character of pinball remained...
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...