Jack In The Box

March 23, 2005

Boy oh Boy, what a machine! I used to hate this thing when I was a pup! Those pesky bumpers right by the flippers and those anatomically impossible women on the back-glass used to make me walk right past this one. Now I can’t get enough. I got 4 of these machines in the Benicia deal, 3 Jumping Jacks (the 2 player version) and 1 Jack in the Box. I have big plans to re-theme all the artwork on the J.J.s but first I had to get one going. After experimenting with hot coils and breaking a lot of targets(with the help of Robert) I finally got this tuned up to play extremely well and very challenging. You can’t blame the flippers anymore on this one, it’s operator error all the way! This is a 4 flipper, 10 drop target game with bonus, specials and extra ball features and it plays like this: At the top, there are 3 lanes of which left or right are lit alternately. The 2 kick-out holes beneath are also lit alternately and it isn’t as important to get the lit lane as it is the lit hole, as this turns on the 10X bonus for all targets. The kick-out throws it onto the playfield and it’s time to kill some clowns! The upper flippers are very important to this game and mastering those will help immensely. They will also help get it back to the kick-out holes in case you didn’t lite the 10X bonus. The two death bumpers that straddle the bottom flippers are exasperating but you can bounce it out of harms way and actually cradle the ball on occasion. Okay, so IF you get all the targets down, it will either give you an extra ball or a free game depending on which alternating lite is lit, count off your bonus, reset all targets, and lastly, lite the 500 points per target lite. Instant Pinball Nirvana and Karmic payback! The 5th ball automatically lites the 10X bonus and the 500 point target lites. Another Ju Ju favorite.

Produced by Gottlieb, 1973. 4 players. 9.5 out of 10 on the Play-O-Meter

High Score 146,090 by AMY J on January 04, 2004

Adding comments is temporarily down