4.4 - What is a "tournament mode?" (Pinball Tournament Play)
Description
This article is from the General Pinball FAQ, by Keith Johnson keefer@access.digex.net with numerous contributions by others.
4.4 - What is a "tournament mode?" (Pinball Tournament Play)
The purpose of tournament modes is to take the "randomness" of a game as much
as possible. What this mainly means is that any random awards given out by a
game will be made non-random. Examples: The Fish Finder on Fish Tales and
the Burn Rubber award on HS2 give out the same awards in the same order each
time.
Along these same lines, games that physically lock balls (FunHouse is a good
example) often attempt to not give one person an advantage by "stealing"
other locked balls. In FunHouse, when someone has multiball lit, at the
start of each ball the clock resets to 11:30 no matter what to keep it 100%
consistent. Some machines (Gottlieb's Wipeout is one) actually release all
locked balls.
Starting with Baywatch, Sega has included an option for letting the player(s)
decide whether they want to play tournament settings or not. There is a
special tournament play button that basically puts the game into Tournament
Mode without having to have access to set that in the machine's menus.
-- Thanks to Mark Phaedrus <phaedrus@halcyon.com> for suggestions.
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