Reviews / Games / "Vector" / Reviews

Reviews

Review by: Anonymous Rating: Good idea - badly realized!

Bally's 1981 "VECTOR" is a rather "crippled" Pinball, to my opinion. It's a very attracting Machine with its double layered, mirrored Backglass (XENON-Style) and all those flashing Lights. But gameplay is kind of weired, as there are to much components arranged in to little space. There are three normal sized and one small Flipper on a two level Playfield. One Bumper (upper PF) which is very "enclosed" so it's rather a Slingshot then a Bumper. Furthermore there are 3 Drops (Bonus-X) and one Flipper located on the very small, upper PF. Due to the position of this Flipper, the size and the three(!) exits of the UPF, a controlled play here is almost impossible.
The mainfeature of "Vector" is to open the entry to a very long Ramp, located on the left side by dropping three targets - Defenders - in sequence (if sequence is missed, three more targets are raised) and then shoot thru the Ramp as fast as possible to get high scores and Extraball. As soon as the Ball enters the ramp, a very fast decreasing timer is started and stops when the Ball reaches the topmost right corner of the playfield. A six digit, double function (Speed/Bonus) Display, integrated in the lower PF indicates the 'speed' of your shot, which is, multiplied with 100 added to your score. The Ball is then locked in the lowest of three "Saucers" on the right side of the PF. A new Ball is served. Repeat this procedure twice and you start Multiball - in this game quite useless, as there is nothing special to gain during MB, nor is it real fun to play with three Balls on a very narrow PF. Well, the "Defenders" stay down, so the "Flip-O-Meter" is active as long as you keep at least two Balls in play. Basically a good idea, but considering that a) aiming is almost impossible, as the balls hinder eachother (to less space) and b) the "Flip-O-Meter" feature can be cheated - if one Ball has almost reached the Top, another Ball entering the Ramp resets the timer just the friction of a second before the first one stops it and creates an unbeatable speed - it is not working.
There is just one last feature to mention on the LPF. Four standup-targets "H-Y-P-E" to be shot in sequence advance the multiplier of the second Bonus system and, if there are Balls locked, realease them. The coolest thing on "VECTOR" is the way the outlanes are done, I suppose. A Ball leaving PF via outlines can easely be directed into a saucer by slightly nudging the machine and is then kicked into the game again. "Resume play" a quite well synthesized voice says. Speech on "VECTOR" is, frankly, quite impressive, as it contains the biggest vocabulary used in a Bally machine so far. A detail: the speech-ROMs contain even more words/phrases than those you can hear during gameplay. This gives the impression, that even more features were planned for the game, but weren't realized. A pitty they didn't put all those good ideas and the nice workout into a wide-body Pin, I'm sure it would have been a great succes - it wasn't the way it's done.
-Postet on: (GMT) Wed Jul 21 02:50:03 2004 #

Trackbacks
No Trackbacks so far