Waterworld
by Joel Iott
Gottlieb/Premier's latest machine "Waterworld" has just shown up on
test at Town & Country.
The game is based on the movie that just opened Friday in the US. The
backglass features two large heads of the movie stars - Kevin Costner
and Dennis Hopper (similar to Demolition Man).
The big toy on the game is a half-pipe ramp and a suspended boat. The
boat is mostly flat, and has two surfaces (flat top & flat bottom).
It's mounted on a spit similar to what would be used to roast meat. A
motor can turn the boat to have either surface on top.
The half-pipe ramp is a large ramp about 6 inches wide and 6 inches
high. The ramp is a half-cylinder in shape, and shots up the half-pipe
will land in the boat. There's some plastic on the ramp to make it look
like a cresting wave (I think). The ramp is mounted in the upper middle
of the playfield, at the end of a wide lane with pop bumpers.
In one mode, you lock 3 balls in the boat. There are no actual
switches in the boat, so the game relies on optos in the half-pipe to
tell it when the balls have remained in the boat. The boat turns to
dump out the balls to start multiball.
When the boat does not lock balls, shots up the ramp will either return
to the left flipper (and spell WATERWORLD) or drop down the center
scoring nothing.
Other features of the playfield are a lane on the left (think Fish
Tales reel without the reel) called the "Harpoon" lane that will give
awards. It is difficult to get the ball in this area on purpose,
except by the special "Curvy" lane. The harpoon kicker seemed to have
problems getting the ball up the 180 degree return wireform.
The "curvy" lane is on the extreme right behind a target, and can only
be hit off the tip of the left flipper. A strong shot to this lane
can end up in the harpoon lane.
The game features left and right orbits, and a diverter can open to
catch left orbit shots. A small "jet-ski" toy will raise up on right
orbit shots. This looks just like the Stargate "raising guard" targets
without the actual target that the ball hits - in other words, the
jet-ski is for show only, no ball interaction.
The last major playfield feature is the "dive hole", which is a very
deep sinkhole that is pretty easy to shoot. The dive hole is hexagonal
in shape. The dive hole's main purpose is to give one of 9 awards.
9 awards are arranged in a 3x3 grid in the center of the playfield. 4
of the awards are "Feature" which gave Player's Choice. Usually one of
the choices would be "Super Hint" which seemed to be help information!
The center award is Jackpot, and the remaining 4 are various awards.
Lighting a line or the four corners lights other modes.
The thing you collect and trade in this game is "Dirt" (!) which is
definitely the strangest trading material so far. Premier has very
helpfully listed the various trade-in values for Dirt on the bottom
arch, which is a big improvement over the mystery trade in values of
Stargate, etc.
There's the usual Jackpots, Super Jackpots, combos, etc. common to the
latest Premier games.
The flippers seemed a little different than usual. In the resting
position, they seemed to be a little higher than normal. It was still
very easy to catch balls with them.
There is no auto-plunger on this game, so multiball modes are two balls
only, except for the boat-locking multiballs which are four ball
multiballs.
My first impression of the game was that it wasn't all that exciting.
The half-pipe is so wide that it's easy to loop it to spell Waterworld
or lock balls in the boat. The lack of an auto-plunger means that
there are no additional balls spit out into play like Stargate and Big
Hurt, which I enjoyed on those games. The harpoon lane is difficult to
hit on purpose, so the game seems to be consist of 4 shots - the
orbits, the wide ramp, and the dive hole. This is only a first
impression, and I'll follow up when I've played the game some more.
--
Joel Iott
joeli@eurpd.csg.mot.com
