Not entirely bogus, as it turns out. Not quite, say, Stewie / Shrek mini pinball, but certainly more entertaining than the AC/DC Premium lower playfield.
And I'm 100% sure this is the only NIB pinball machine anyone will ever buy that will appreciate in value over the years, if other American Girl stuff is any guide.
So, at the risk of the inevitable mockery to follow, I present to you...
The Flip Side
Basic Playfield Guide and Rules....um...version 0.1, I guess. 12 Oct 2019.
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The 'backglass' has a six digit LED score panel, but high scores of 7 digits or more are tracked and the scores will scroll.
At startup, the high score is displayed. This remains in memory until the batteries are swapped. Startup is by the traditional button in the front. (There's a switch on the bottom to turn it on, with a center setting for a lower volume).
There is a manual plunge. There's no plunger knob, you sort of have to peel the plunger out, not hard (this is probably to avoid having a breakable thing extending out, given that it's a toy.)
Note that while there's a "Ball in Play" section on the 'backglass', nothing actually indicates which ball is in play. When the machine detects three balls have drained, the game is over. There is a kind of a skill shot, from the plunger to the left hidden saucer, but it doesn't do anything other than score the normal point value (and it's a hella hard shot) for the saucer.
No tilt, no levelers, so you have to have a dead level surface to play and not cheat by holding the machine up. Nudging does you almost no good though; it's all flipper control.
The flippers (two) are manual, and the left flipper also operates an eject lever for the upper left hidden outhole. The more force you apply to the flipper button, obviously, the more the ball will travel. It's an interesting skill, and it actually has more precision than similarly-mechanical larger gumball pinball machines, or at least the ones I've played. Most of the usual flipper skills apply; I have found alley passing is a lot easier than post passing, but I actually managed to do this off the corner of the ball return lane, in lieu of an actual post.
On the playfield, on the upper half are three passive bumpers (styled to look like pop bumpers) and one pretty fast electric spinner (that I'll call a "paddle" to avoid confusing it with a true vertical spinner) with two prongs that constantly spins counterclockwise, plus the hidden saucer/hole on the left. If you hit the ball into the "paddle", it acts as a randomizer the way a pop bumper or a slingshot does on a normal game. One of two basic strategies on the game is to use this paddle UTAD (see below).
Note the "paddle" spins the whole game until the third ball drain is detected.
There are two standup-style metal targets on the left and right side about halfway up the playfield; these are labeled "adds bonus" but they don't really add bonus (see below), BUT they are the key to a good scoring game. There *is* a hidden bonus in this game, though, as end of game count up.
On the lower playfield, where the slingshots should be, are metal contacts. Call them "passive slingshots" or something, but they act as standup targets. These do score points but they're the same as the "bonus" standups, and they're actually pretty hard to hit square. You can do a carom shot off them, left to right, that then goes up into the bonus target -- kind of a fun shot to make. But irrelevant to a good game score in the end.
There are two return lanes where the ball enters on each side, about a third of the way up. These arc pretty fast down towards the flipper so you have to hold the flipper up to avoid a drain. The only way to drain is down the center; the inlanes (if you can call them that, with the entry so high up, but I guess you can) are hazardous only if you don't hold the flippers up.
Each pop bumper hit scores 100 points and each standup hit or shot to the hidden upper left saucer scores 1000 points.
BUT....there is a 10X playfield multiplier ("WOW") you can turn on! It's indicated by a star with "10x" on it in the middle of the PF.
It activates after N number of hits, and I haven't figured out what N is. You then have to hit a standup "Add Bonus" to light the WOW multiplier. You then get 1000 points per bumper hit and 10000 for every other standup-style target hit, until the multiplier turns off (after Y number of hits, which I haven't figured out yet.) The playfield multiplier can be relit an indefinite number of times.
So the two strategies are:
(1) Try to hit it back UTAD. Harder than it may seem, and it only really runs up the points if 10X is on and you get the ball stuck in the spinner. However, it's the quickest way to get the 10X playfield multiplier on.
(2) Then hit the right standup from the left flipper and vice versa, all day, until the PF multiplier turns off. This will score 10000 a hit.
BONUS:
So, quite bogus here -- the standups that say "add bonus" don't add end of ball bonus. In fact, no matter what you do, you'll get exactly 1000 bonus at the end of each ball. (The countup sounds for end of ball bonus, EM style, are impressive but identical each time for your paltry 1000 points).
BUT...there's an odd end of game bonus that took me a while to figure out, and it's apparently 10 points for each hit during the game, or for each "Add Bonus" hit, plus Z times 1, I haven't figured out Z except you only get it if you've had a long game (deliberate house balls have borne this out. Otherwise the last two digits of the score would always be 00, since the only scores on the PF are 100, 1000, and 10000 points.) I haven't verified this exactly as yet but it seems approximately right. The bonus is just added on and will show up in your final score after the third ball is plunged, and the lights go darker.
Lights: little flashing lights for the bumpers and side GI light. They actually work pretty well in time with the hits. There are four lights on the playfield itself: the WOW 10X Star and three "Bonus" insert style lights. The latter don't seem to indicate anything but just flash and add themselves on as you get more hits. The backglass has three lights, two of which turnoff when the game is over.
Note the machine turns itself off to save batteries if it's left inactive after the end of a game for a couple of minutes, just hit the start button to restart.
Sound: recorded sound, early SS style. There's a short tune at startup. Then hits are recorded EM-style sounds, the same annoying way EM sounds are dubbed on modern pinball machines in movies and so forth to make them sound "pinbally".
Cabinet and art: there's only blinking lights in the backglass, but the cab art and the BG art are decent for what it is. The legs are actually really solid metal! The "glass" is plastic, of course, and while i haven't taken apart the whole thing, I am imagining from the screws on the bottom you could, but I don't expect there's a way of replacing the balls or cleaning shmutz off the PF if it gets a lot of use over the long term.
The size is such you can play it sitting on your living room couch if the machine is on a coffee table in front of you, without hunching or bending over. It's probably bigger than you expect. And the construction feels pretty solid -- it's got plastic parts but the whole thing is not cheaply made. It really does look like a shrunken pinball machine -- they got the dimensions and proportions and such just right.
Overall: OK so it's not a pinball machine, but as a toy, it's a much better simulation of a pinball machine than pretty much any other pinball-style toy I've ever seen. Is it worth $150 or $120 with your discount coupon? As I noted above, I expect this is the only pin you are going to buy new that will appreciate in value, since it's a different collectible market. If you do have a kid who's interested in American Girl, it could be a great bridge to get them interested in pinball.
The game *is* fun, and honestly I've seen worse rulesets and playfields on some *actual* early 70's machines that bored me much earlier than this one did. I mean, you may feel like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, but this is more fun than playing, say, Hercules, pretending you're Stuart Little or one of The Borrowers.
To be honest it's probably not $120 worth of fun for a grownup, unless you're interested in having it as a gameroom novelty (that was why I took the plunge, as it were; I have a gumball and a bunch of weird pinball toys, I like seeing all the odd corners of flipper games), and I don't usually buy my kids toys that are this expensive because kids break everything; but, then again, I've wasted $120 on much worse things in my life and probably will again.
I have my doubts about its durability if played a lot, but then again American Girl is supposed to be good at this kind of thing so that's purely speculation on my part. Just have your dolls keep their drinks off the glass, and make them smoke outside the gameroom!!
