Sonic Generations - Casino Night Pinball (Score: 999,999)

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• published: 06 Sep 2013
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Well, I finally pulled it off. I maxed out the score counter on Sonic Generations's Casino Night pinball table. As you can see from the video, it took about one hour and forty minutes to accomplish this. You don't really intend to watch it all, do you? That's the thing with me and pinball: Normally, I'm not very good at it, but on rare occasions, I go on a roll and can score massive amounts. Of course, local arcades have been dying out, and the ones that DO remain don't seem to have any pinball. So I don't really get to play much real pinball. Just video game pinball like this. Casino Night is actually a rather punishing table: Except for the steel chute (the actual term is "habitrail") on the far right that deposits Sonic back down to the right flipper, everything on the upper half of the table points between the flippers: Any time the ball goes up there, there's a chance it will zoom right down into the gutter when it comes back down, with nothing you can do about it. Perhaps as compensation, it's much easier to get extra balls for this table. In a way, that kind of reflects the game design philosophy of these Sonic games: It can get very difficult sometimes, but they throw extra lives at you like crazy: For every 50 Rings you collect, you get one more life. Of course, if you look at the table, you won't find any Rings--you find these weird hexagonal plates instead. You collect these tokens to deposit into the slot machine at the upper left corner of the table. You'll deposit five of them (or whatever amount you have if less than five), and if anything lines up on the slots, Rings explode out from it and slowly slide down the table for Sonic to collect. As Sonic obtains 100 points for every Ring he collects, and you rarely gain more than 50 points per action otherwise, the slot machine is by far the biggest source of points on the table. (The only thing worth more points is traveling through the horseshoe lane, worth 200 points for each trip.) There are three means to which Sonic can reach the slot machine. If Sonic goes up the habitrail on the far left three times, it will turn over and lead Sonic to a smaller pinball table (with a wider gap between flippers). Bring Sonic to the upper-right corner of this table, and he will travel down another habitrail that leads him straight to the slot machine. There are three rollovers he can also activate that will provide him access to a token before reaching the slot machine. There is a translucent tube towards the right. If Sonic goes up this tube, he'll be transported to a small circular platform with two bumpers on it. If you can turn on all of the lights around the edge of this platform, the bumper in the middle will rise. Put Sonic directly underneath the bumper to have him ride a lift to a path where he'll automatically move forward. Use the flippers to guide him straight to the slot machine. There are no flippers on the circular platform, however, so you will have to rely on tilt if Sonic's not going where you want him to go. The third is via the habitrail on the right. If you can light up all four of the dots on the upper-right portion of the main area of the table, the habitrail will turn over and lead Sonic to another plunger instead of the right inlane. Here, Sonic will automatically roll down a another path, and you have to use the flippers to keep him going. The path leads to the mini-table from before. (For the record, paths that move to allow the ball to travel somewhere else is known as "diverters" in pinball parlance, in case you ever want to impress someone.) Now, each time Sonic enters the slot machine, and it yields Rings, one of the Chaos Emerald images on the main table will light up. Once all seven Chaos Emeralds light up, if you enter the slot machine again, matching up any picture three-in-a-row will provide a big fat bonus. The slots will keep spitting out Rings for a good two minutes or so, and as long as you aren't sidetracked, you can easily obtain four or five extra balls in this way. (Or more.) If you can pull this off with the three balls you begin with, that means each cycle of eight slot machine bonuses will end with you having more balls than you started. From here, it's a simple matter of continuing to play until you reach the score cap of 999,999. (As everything here gives points in multiples of 10, this is the only way to have a ones digit in your score other than a 0.) I decided to see if there is also a cap to the tokens you can have. I assumed it was 99, but it looks like you can have three digits' worth too. Finally, with the score as high as I could make it and getting over a hundred tokens, I just purposely drained the table of all the Sonics I gained. Tells you something when I took as long as I did to run out and get the game to record my score.