ANNOUNCEMENT AND GAMEPLAY VIDEO

Alien Poker is an awesome early solid state game from Williams. It has a 5-bank of drop targets as the main scoring feature: the player scores Royal Flush "jackpots" by knocking down the targets in order. (There are several gameplay and tutorial videos on YouTube.) Alien Poker is great, but I have played it to the point where I can play entire games on autopilot, without paying any attention. Not much fun any more. So recently I have begun playing around with the game rules (thanks for the information on the Green ROM, @slochar!) to see if I can make the game interesting again.

And, yes, turns out that even a few fairly minor changes have made the game much more interesting again for me. What I tried to do is to make the game less controllable/predictable with a set of changes:

• Lane change has been disabled. (It's amazing how much more enjoyable this simple change makes the game.)

• I made the Joker jumpy and evil: When you hit an unlit Joker target, the evil Joker (blinking) jumps to a new spot. When you hit a blinking Joker, the game acts as if you had hit a target out of sequence: the last target pops back up and the Royal Flush value drops.

• Unlit ace-card ejects drop the next target in sequence. This is similar to actually hitting the next target in sequence, but it does not advance the Royal Flush score value. This change makes it harder to complete the Royal Flush with maximum score.

• POKER awards have been added for the P, O and E letters. (Alien Poker has awards for K and R.)

• To free the Joker targets I put the bonus multiplier on "auto-shift".

Having played with these rules, as well as a few earlier iterations, for over a week I have become convinced that it is worth turning this into a more serious project. Since there is quite a lot of extra ROM space available, my goal for Dealer's Choice is to create a patch for a N-in-one home ROM where N is the number of different games which should be at least 3: the original Alien Poker, an updated version of AP with modified and deeper rules, as well as a game that is fundamentally different.

I would like to use this thread to report on progress and discuss feedback and ideas. If there are at least a few AP owners interested I am hoping for another fun thread.

Yay, great to see the interest!

Alien Poker was my first game -- a surprise birthday present from my wife, which got me back into Pinball after a long break. The game has had amazing staying power for me, but in the end it has become a bit too controllable, especially once I mastered the right orbit shot (which is not all that hard). I used to play it without the ball guide between the right flippers and opposite stage-flipper setup to increase the challenge but the game is much more popular with guests with the original setup I got the game with, so I returned it.

I only fully realized just how much control had become a problem for me when I disabled the lane change. I had not actually planned to do this -- that would have sounded like a pretty dumb idea to me -- what I wanted to do was explore other uses for the lane change, unrelated to the King lanes. Disabling it was just a first step toward that goal. But when I played a test game to make sure that everything else still worked I immediately liked the game better. (I do almost all my testing with the glass on, playing real games -- very slow process but has many advantages.) Even without lane change it's easy to complete the King lanes with help from the right inlane, and now the pop bumper action is worth watching again. I love it when a small change to the rules unexpectedly makes a game more interesting

I'd very much like to experience the new-pin smell one day...

Over the weekend I fixed the knocker on my game, only to realize that System 6 does not knock when the game is set to free play. This needs to be fixed.

Funny you mention the million FX. Just last night I was wondering whether a 1M shot would make a good reward for a mini wizard mode for the AP+ game (AP with deeper rules) that could be enabled when POKER has been completed.

Yesterday I made another version to test out different game rules. This is already the third fully playable patch that I have made. It would be interesting and useful to get others' opinions on the game play. So if any of you have the equipment to burn EPROMs and are willing to go through the effort of fabricating an adapter that is needed to use a modern EEPROM chip with a System 6 CPU board, send me a PM and I'll be happy to share patch files for some of the versions I am playing with. While the three "full" versions I have made so far all have bugs, AFAIK there are none that crash the game. (In case you are worried about your game: In over 10 years of making ROM patches I have never manged any worse damage than locking on a solenoid or two and burning a fuse.)

About the newest version:

• Evil, jumpy Joker as before: When you hit an unlit Joker target, the evil Joker (blinking) jumps to a new spot. When you hit a blinking Joker, the game acts as if you had hit a target out of sequence: the last target pops back up and the Royal Flush value drops.
  
• Different rules for ace ejects: The aces are not on memory and do not advance the POKER letters. The first ace lit on a ball enables the left inlane to spot a King. The second ace lit on a ball enables lane change. The third ace lit on a ball increases the bonus multiplier and turns off all aces to restart the cycle.
  
• Scoring Royal Flush advances the POKER letters, with awards for all letters, including lighting the EB and Special at the letters K and R as in the original game.

I made the new version because, somehow it seems more logical to me to count/award the number of times the main scoring objective is achieved, rather than the number of times the main bonus source is hit (the ace scoops). But since logic does not always make for good game play I wanted to test this idea. Additionally I wanted to know if the inlane and lane change would make suitable rewards.

I only played this version for a couple of hours or so. Which is amazing because when I started I was tired and wanted to play for half an hour max. What made me want to play one game after the other is that I was chasing the extra ball. I got close most games but only rarely made it. But not making it did not get me annoyed with the game, just with myself. And both the inlane and lane change are great rewards (power-ups), because without the King lanes it's difficult to get a decent score. I definitely need to get more playtime in, but I think I may be on to a thing or two here...

This is the last game-play video before I swap my playfield. I am psyched. I want to get this done so I can get back to playing the current version. The main difference compared to the version described in the previous post is that the Royal Flush sequence is now progressive, becoming more difficult (with up to 3 evil Jokers) after each completion. Additionally, after POKER is complete another, even more difficult, Royal Flush must be completed to score 1M (mini wizard mode). Here's why these rules work for me:

• The POKER progression tied to the Royal Flush shot makes me come back to play another game, much more so than the original rules ever did once I had mastered the RF targets and the right orbit shot.

• The evil Joker targets make the Royal Flush sequence more varied and interesting because I have to consider the lit Joker targets when making the shots. When more than one Joker is lit scoring the Royal Flush becomes much more difficult.

• To advance toward the 1M jackpot I need to complete the Royal Flush sequence as often as possible; there's no need for the ace ejects. However, if I want a good score I need to get the Royal Flush multiplier up and this is almost impossible possible with the aces.

The main overall effect is that every game plays differently and requires much more attention than the original rules do.