Favorite and least favorite wizard modes in TPA

From the tables in the collection, what wizard modes do you love, and which drive you crazy? In case of controversy, feel free to define wizard mode broadly to accommodate your favorite and least favorite "late-game" reward modes.

Love:

Cactus Canyon. I have a big soft spot for this one. Challenging to achieve, with a good variety of tasks to complete. Plus incentivizes advancing rank to increase value. Well integrated into the theme. Generously timed and generous with points. I enjoy playing Cactus Canyon to try to get to High Noon more than I enjoy playing it optimally for points, which must be a good sign!

Honorable mention: Road Show. A lot better in reality than in TPA: takes both time (cross the country) and skill (two locks under time pressure) to activate. More than one reasonable strategy (wheel awards, ramps for points). Just misses out here because in the long grind of TPA wheel awards are too dominant when in the mode.

Hate:

Cirqus Voltaire. I like the table. And I appreciate a varied, challenging wizard mode. I just can't get past the fact that draining doesn't end the mode! The most frustrating experience in TPA for me is repeatedly draining while choking on CV's wizard mode, losing a potentially great game because I was trapped in the Cirqus rather than back in regular play.

Honorable mention: Addams Family. Just repeat everything that you just did to get to wizard mode? Without being able to get properly back to regular play afterwards without draining? Snooze!

That's my two cents. Fire away!

STTNG: Warp, done it once b4 finishing the reg goals, so it didn't count, now I can't do it to save my life. RBION: Trip To Atlantis, never came close to getting all the letters to activate this, 3 or 4 at most, the time limits are a *****. FH has a Trapdoor goal I can't get. There's many other, will add as they come to me, can't remember them all right now.

Question for pros while I'm thinking of it: On RBION, can you just do the same continent over & over & get all the letters to activate Trip? Thanks.

ZREXMike said:

Question for pros while I'm thinking of it: On RBION, can you just do the same continent over & over & get all the letters to activate Trip? Thanks.

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Yes, it's possible. I play for Australia, Nord America and South America only. After one continent round the modes activates letters again.

Tarek Oberdieck said:

Yes, it's possible. I play for Australia, Nord America and South America only. After one continent round the modes activates letters again.

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Okay, thanks for your help.

2nd vote for ST:TNG for favorite, it's great how your jackpot in Final Frontier depends on how many artifacts you've collected, making the wizard mode feel like something you have truly built towards.

Dunno about least favorite, but in recent memory LAH "World Premier" always feels like a letdown when I get to it.

Edit: Theatre of Magic for 2nd fav. Always stresses me out (in a good way!) trying to complete MAGIC THEATER before the mode runs out.

Favorite: Medieval Madness (Battle for the Kingdom) - Every part of this table is perfect for me. The wizard mode is no exception. I tend to like games that have a challenging wizard mode that can be completed

Honorable mentions: Theatre of Magic (Grand Finale), Champion Pub (Ultimate Challenge. Might have been #1 if not for the bug)

Worst: Black Knight 2000 (Ransom) - One of the first wizard modes isn't very good. While the music makes this a great table, the rules can get kind of boring. And spelling Ransom isn't very fun and the fact that progress carries over from game to game kind of makes it less satisfying.

I like this topic. I hope you make a poll out of it after you get some replies, or maybe I will .

I love Monsters of Rock. Nearly everything about MB is perfect including this mode. The last shot to complete the six shots seems to always be a different one, and I love stuff like that. "Emergent behavior," maybe. The increasing point values is also great. Simple idea, but not widely used, like a lot of Lyman's rules for MB. Minor gripe: I wish the maximum values were higher, maybe double what they are.

On the other hand, I don't like the Monster Bash mode. I don't have anything strongly against it, I just don't care for frenzy modes, like those in the already-mentioned CV and STTNG. I think frenzies should always go along with something else, a frenzy all by itself is boring. I'm not picking on Lyman too much though, this mode needs to be less interesting than Monsters of Rock.

The Genie Battle (?) on TotAN is probably my all-time favorite, on the real machine. I've played it hundreds of times and it's always exciting, not too easy or too hard. I seemed to win it about half the time when I last played it regularly a few years ago. You really miss a lot, like the constant, frenzied plunging, in a video version. TPA's is trivial of course and so, sadly, a least favorite.

Of those mentioned, I agree with liking Battle for the Kingdom / MM and Grand Finale / ToM. LAH's World Premiere is a bit of a letdown, but I still like it, as there's a bit of strategy involved in how quickly you play it.

I don't know if CBW's Nine-Ball round counts, but it's one of my favorites. Very, very stressful, fun to watch the ball bounce around the upper playfield, hoping it'll hit the right drop target. CBW takes a lot of heat, but I greatly like a couple of things about it.

If Jack*Bot's Casino Run and/or Multiball (after the first big jackpot?) counted, they'd be easy picks for favorites. Of course these two are the majority of the game so maybe they shouldn't count.

I like Frankenstein's quite a bit, except maybe that the letters on the outside that seem to usually be the last ones can be a little bit frustrating to hit. Ah Franky, someone really needs to hack your ROM and remove that damned 9,999M score limit.

I'd love Rule the Universe, except that the required 5B is WAY too low. I don't think I've ever lost RTU, in TPA or in real life. I think it should be 10B (and award another 10B), at least for the second one on.

A least favorite: Harley Davidson's. The one where you're supposed to get 48 states or something like that, but it's impossible to even come close, IIRC.

Here's a non-TPA table: I don't remember Shadow's Final Battle (?) completely well, but I remember it being my all-time favorite in the brief time there was one near me, in 1995-6.

No favorite or least liked.....Just like to get to them when the machine does something out of the blue. So I guess I'm thinking of 'oddest' wizard modes. Scared Stiff and Whitewater (where the machine goes crazy) stick out to me. Never made it to Atlantis on RBION so I don't know how that works....

BTW - Does S5 have any tables that do Midnight Madness?

Judge Dredd! Absolute worst. Are you kidding me? This is what I've been completing the modes for? Pointfest. Wow. Tha ta creative it fails almost as much as the movie adaptation with Sylvester Stallone. No, I take that back, they both fail equally. Cirqus Voltaire has steps, it gets you excited. Judge Dredd (even the title is so bad I'm getting sick of saying it) is a great table that leads up to nothing

ST:TNG just missed out for me. Like CC, I'd rather play for Final Frontier than grind Borg multiball.

MB I do see the appeal but it's middle of the pack for me mostly because the table as a whole leaves me cold. MB is probably the number one table I'd like to get some extended time on in real life. I've only ever played a couple of games on it.

CBW nine ball is an interesting call, I do lean to liking it even though I'm terrible at it.

High Noon for me, too. The first time I finished it, when everything stopped and the balls drained and there was that long moment of silence, I thought I had broken it or something. It was a cool experience. I can get there on a fairly regular basis now, and I usually bail out when High Noon’s over because it feels like it should be over.

Same thing with Scared Stiff. You hit all the goals, get through the big finish and ride off victorious. Monster Bash is good but, as Invitro mentioned above, Monsters of Rock is more fun, challenging, satisfying. And… Well, I think those are the only wizard modes I’ve seen, so I don’t have a least favorite.

Wait! I’ve hit Rule the Universe a few times — in the distant past — but I recall being underwhelmed. I think it seemed a little tedious on the way, having to hit that center shot over and over and over to get it started. Do I have that right? I should get back to playing that again.

dave950lam said:

No favorite or least liked.....Just like to get to them when the machine does something out of the blue. So I guess I'm thinking of 'oddest' wizard modes. Scared Stiff and Whitewater (where the machine goes crazy) stick out to me. Never made it to Atlantis on RBION so I don't know how that works....

BTW - Does S5 have any tables that do Midnight Madness?

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The "machine going crazy" thing seems to be Dennis Nordman's "signature" design. I'm sure other tables do it (RBiON does it briefly before frog multiball).
Anyway, WH20 is one of my favorites, as are Lost in the Zone, Battle for the Kingdom, and Red Line Mania.

Least favorite is the King's Ransom, but it was the first official "wizard mode" in a pinball machine. They've come a very long way since then.

I'll have to do some "research" this weekend to see if any of the WMS tables have midnight madness. I hear Fireball has an intense one LOL.

Not TPA but Congo and the new ghostbusters table have midnight madness

Monsters Of Rock as a wizard mode on its own isn't exceptional - but it's the journey as much as the mode itself that makes it so satisfying.

The same can be said of Rule The Universe, and even then it gets ho-hum after the first time because you don't need to conquer Mars.

Battle For The Kingdom is a hard challenge to set up, and a hard challenge to complete, even with Troll Bombs in reserve.

Join The Cirqus is unforgiving and can be wildly frustrating.

Rescue The Princess is a lot of fun, and yes, is so much more fun for real when you're constantly having to plunge balls. Love it.

Red Line Mania is repetitive and too easy to get.

And I agree, The Shadow has a great wizard mode, in fact it's a great table all over, it needs to be in TPA so FS get on the horn to Mr Baldwin's agent and Get. It. Done!

EldarOfSuburbia said:

The Shadow has a great wizard mode, in fact it's a great table all over, it needs to be in TPA so FS get on the horn to Mr Baldwin's agent and Get. It. Done!

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This!

invitro said:

I love Monsters of Rock. Nearly everything about MB is perfect including this mode. The last shot to complete the six shots seems to always be a different one, and I love stuff like that. "Emergent behavior," maybe. The increasing point values is also great. Simple idea, but not widely used, like a lot of Lyman's rules for MB. Minor gripe: I wish the maximum values were higher, maybe double what they are.

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Yup, Monsters of Rock is the best. The audio package stands above any other as well. Which does matter, even if sometimes we pretend we're above that. That satisfying visceral WHACK on hitting every monster and the "MONSTERS OF ROCK!" scream make for a bigger thrill than anything in pinball, even AFM and Ripley's "soooooper jackpot" cries.

But you wish the maximum values were higher?? The one complaint anyone ever has about MB is how the wizard modes dominate the scoring over everything else.

invitro said:

On the other hand, I don't like the Monster Bash mode. I don't have anything strongly against it, I just don't care for frenzy modes, like those in the already-mentioned CV and STTNG. I think frenzies should always go along with something else, a frenzy all by itself is boring. I'm not picking on Lyman too much though, this mode needs to be less interesting than Monsters of Rock.

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Monster Bash does have the escalating Bash Jackpot value, collected at the Mosh Pit lane. But the real thrill of Monster Bash is that you're supposed to be using it to stack and complete instrument modes towards Monsters of Rock.

invitro said:

I don't know if CBW's Nine-Ball round counts, but it's one of my favorites. Very, very stressful, fun to watch the ball bounce around the upper playfield, hoping it'll hit the right drop target. CBW takes a lot of heat, but I greatly like a couple of things about it.

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Ugh, this one is a casualty of poorly tuned TPA physics. You're supposed to just shoot the 9 directly from the flipper, you're not supposed to have to rely on bumper bounces. But the timing window in TPA is both off-kilter and unrealistically tight.

And CBW (and Teed Off) takes heat mostly from the annoying audio package. That really does matter.

invitro said:

I'd love Rule the Universe, except that the required 5B is WAY too low. I don't think I've ever lost RTU, in TPA or in real life. I think it should be 10B (and award another 10B), at least for the second one on.

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I've lost RTU in real life. It is harder than in TPA, because the starting values for the super jackpot and Total Annihilation won't be as high. 5B is right. What it really should do is continue some kind of multiball after winning. Pro Pinball gets this right, in all of the games, winning the wizard mode continues on to a bonus victory multiball.

invitro said:

A least favorite: Harley Davidson's. The one where you're supposed to get 48 states or something like that, but it's impossible to even come close, IIRC.

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Also a casualty of Farsight physics. Real flippers can actually shoot balls up the middle and whack the bike much faster.

Not mentioned enough: Atlantis in Ripley's. In terms of gameplay, this might be the best and most interesting of them all. It gets short shrift in TPA because you can't really play it for fear of lost-ball and ROM-crashing bugs, and you don't really need to because doubled continent tours dominate the scoring and the EB limit is easy to reach without it. But the mode itself is very cool in re-collecting the temple awards over again. It's Tour the Mansion done right. People seem to like the wizard modes that are a challenge to win. Atlantis has that, that getting all 8 temple awards yields a Super Jackpot whose value is your continent total. But the game doesn't make a big enough deal out of it and nobody seems to know that that exists.

Also needs mention: Break the Bank in High Roller Casino. It's also quite interesting in a risk-reward element of building up the bank value before you collect it. But HRC is drastically overlooked in TPA, both rightly (for Farsight's terrible tuning) and wrongly (for its annoying audio package).

All of them are my favorite and least favorite wizard modes, even the ones that aren't