At our local barcade, after years of visiting, I got really into Medieval Madness, and I got a good laugh at myself after reading that little card and thinking "oh, imagine that, there's actually useful information in the instructions."

Who'd have guessed?!

Love Medieval Madness. Great, great machine.

One of my favorites as far as merging of the form and the story is Black Knight (and Black Knight 2000). The machine itself is framed as your knightly opponent in this apparent duel (it even taunts you, LOL), and the table layout is such that you can be on offense—ball in the physically-elevated high part of the field, with scoring and mode-progress opportunities and basically no risk of losing the ball as long as you keep it up there—or defense, in the lower part of the field, where it's quite easy to lose a ball, and play's alarmingly fast & reactive, but there are also some good bonus chances or ways to set up your next play in the top field.

And that theme song on Black Knight 2000. Oh man. So good.

[EDIT] Oh and I forgot that the "knight" taunts you during that awesome song with "give me your money!" (among other taunts), which is another machine -> character connection. You are dueling the machine. It's basically a perfect fusion of story/motif and the form of the game.

I haven't gotten into Black Knight so much, I need to give it a few more plays! All my quarters usually get pumped into Medieval Madness and (when it's rarely working) Banzai Run. I'm decent at MM, and just awful at Banzai Run - but the temptation of that upper (vertical!) playfield is too much to resist.

Medieval Madness though just stands head and shoulders above every other table I've played. One of my favorite things about it is that in my opinion it's a really fair table - in that "Dark Souls" style, if I lose a ball, I almost never say "ah, bullshit" - it's almost always because I took a bad shot or whiffed on an easy save. I know these machines are designed to eat your quarters, but some of the Stern tables I've played seem to have a really high "that was bullshit" factor. (Although, of course, my own mediocre skill is more to blame than anything else).

There's a reason that MM has been at the top or in the top ten most popular machines since it came out in 1997.

You've probably got similar taste to me—I like a table that's a bit relaxing to play, at least once you've got a feel for it. Black Knight (and 2000) are a lot more challenging than my usual sweet-spot, but do at least feel fair, which is why I still like them. Lots of alarmingly-fast losses when you're starting out or if you aren't really feeling it that day, but fun if I feel like being very engaged (and after a couple dozen games to learn how to not lose within seconds, LOL)

You might like Attack from Mars, which shares the "knock down the barrier on a high-central target, hit it, move on to the next" thing from Medieval Madness. It has less fun with its theme and of the two I'd say MM is unequivocally better, but if you're out and about and run into one, might give it a try. I'd especially look for Theater of Magic, if you haven't played that one. It's not quite as clean as Medieval Madness, but in roughly the same difficulty zone and has a lot of fun shots and gimmicks, and really runs with the theme. Might enjoy Whitewater, too—it's in the same ballpark, difficulty-wise, but with a more complex playfield than MM despite looking fairly simple at a glance, but is still quite legible once you've given it a look over and a couple plays. Theme's less obviously-fun but I find it really nails a kind of kitsch appeal that works for me, at least. Both the Elvira games I've played have been in that zone, too—one's better than the other, IMO, but I forget which. [EDIT: Oh, of these, Whitewater probably has the most unfair-feeling losses when you're starting on it, just to calibrate expectations]

Oh, and find Monster Bash. Learn it. Get good at it. There are few things better in mid-difficulty pinball than finally getting the whole monster band together so they can rock :-) Fun, goofy theme like Medieval Madness.

A step up the difficulty level, I like Addams Family (doesn't everyone?) and Junkyard a lot. Everyone seems to love Twilight Zone but I can't get into the damn thing. It's got the same thing Addams Family does where if you don't have precise and well-planned shot control (looking a move ahead, if possible) you'll end up with lots of drains down the sides [EDIT: which is one of those things that feels unfair, because you can make an apparently "good" shot and lose the ball, but can be overcome if you learn the table's patterns well and keep things under tight control], but is just enough harder to learn that I've not managed to enjoy it yet.

There's another level that's easier than the ones I like, that I really despise. Like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I practically have to try to lose that one, to get the game to end. It's just boring and feels like it's patronizing me.

You have good taste in tables.

For random trivia: Medieval Madness has Tina Fey as a voice actor. Monster Bash has a voice that sounds like Katey Sagal (Peggy Bundy, Leela/Futurama), but I have only seen others speculating the same on Pinside. Do you have any idea?

You rarely see Junkyard (or ToM-- a top 5 IMO) mentioned, but it is a unique table. High Speed 2: The Getaway is another I would lump in top tier. Maybe toss in Hurricane as a throwback DMD table?

Space Station is the most infuriatingly "easy" table I have encountered.

> Monster Bash has a voice that sounds like Katey Sagal (Peggy Bundy, Leela/Futurama)

No idea how I hadn't made that connection—as soon as I read that, I heard some of the lines in my head and went, "wait, that does sound like her!"

Dunno if it really was, though.

> You rarely see Junkyard (or ToM-- a top 5 IMO) mentioned, but it is a unique table.

I'd played a whole lot of Addams Family at a pizza joint that had it (also Johnny Mnemonic—a table I've seen a few times that has some really great, flowy ramp play, but always seems to have something broken), and some time later played a fair bit of Junkyard at a different pizza joint. I'd never really looked up any pinball stuff online, so didn't have any tips or clues about what to expect—the day I stumbled on Addams Family's Mamushka mode in Junkyard I just about died from joy, LOL. Totally unexpected.

This is an awesome post, thank you for taking the time to type it up. You nailed where my tastes lie, so I'm really excited to put some time in on the tables you recommended. Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars are both at my local spot, so I'll definitely pump a few bucks into those the next time I'm there.

This is like when you find someone else who digs the same three unrelated albums because they get the common thing you like about all of them. Thanks again for the recommendations!

Trolls!

One of the blogs that gets posted here a lot (I don't recall which) is someone who teaches some sort of history of video games. One of the things he has to convince his students of is just how impossible it is to figure out certain old PC games without reading the instructions (IIRC Ultima IV is one where students would just be 100% confused).

Even now, a little reading goes a long way. I have to constantly heckle my son while playing the new Zelda game - "hey, maybe that person is telling you something you want to know!"

I used to drive my own father crazy when doing computer stuff back in the day, though - clicking through menus at lightspeed and such. Guess it's karma. ;)

That’s a great machine. I found it after playing through all of Attack From Mars, also by Bally. I really think those machines were the apex of pinball. Not too mechanical, not too digital.

One of the biggest steps on my pinball journey was an older player explaining to me that most machines (the ones that weren't super-ancient, anyway) had one or more "stories" or progressions of play, and that playing well required understanding those. From there, you kinda learn to "read" a table before you try it, between LED screen directions and printed directions under the glass and looking over the table layout & elements. Gives you a big advantage. I'd poked at pinball machines every chance I got (which wasn't that many) as a kid, but that part had somehow never clicked.

Another surprise was that about 50% of playing well is in the hips, not the fingers.

That card is relatively new. Back in the old days, I wrote in another comment here I started playing pinball before The Who penned the song Pinball Wizard, there was no card. You had to figure out the rules of the game by playing the game. Pay attention to the lights, they direct you to what you need to do. They don't always make it clear, but they give you an idea. Generally speaking, a solid light means you've already achieved that goal, and a flashing can mean many things but most often it indicates a goal that's available for you to achieve in a set timeframe, usually until you've lost the ball.

We had pinball machines at my last job, and it was the first time I’d ever realized that there were goals to achieve and modes you could intentionally get the machine into. It suddenly became a lot more fun.

I learned about that from the game Pokemon Pinball!

I never usually last long enough in real games to learn what I'm supposed to do to make progress.