I reciently picked up a Baywatch and it has since been shopped and reassembled. When I first got the machine the skill shots didn't work at all. It was then discovered that the setting in the game had the coil power set to high. I guess this has a software bug that makes the top right ball gate mess up and keep the ball from making it to the shark flipper or the coil to shoot it to the top left flipper. So the coil pulse is now set to normal.

Still after cleaning the game and having the software set correctly, the skill shot selection is still pretty iffy. The problem isn't with the ball gate timing or the shooter not getting the ball there. It seems that if you select the shark flipper or upper flipper skill shot....the ball will make it about half the time (or a little more), but the rest of the time the ball will hit the rubber on the top right right roll over guide and bounce back to the roll over lanes.

Are all Baywatch machine skill shot selections this hit or miss? Does anyone have a game that can make it past the controlled ball gate 100% of the time? I don't know if this is an issue with the wireform that it exits not being angled just right or something else. My first guess was that it may be caused by the shooter not shooting the ball as hard some times compaired to others, but even shots that look slower than other make it through sometimes. So fast or slow shots....it doesn't seem have a correlation on if it will make it or not.

Any ideas or suggestions....or is this just the way the game is?

...but if you got 3 of the other skill shots in a row, wouldn't you also get the squid pops...+ more points than you would with the SPF rollovers?

This issue (and also needing some extra cash) pretty much soured me on Baywatch. It was in and out the door within a months time.

Things I tried were:

I did make sure the shooter wire form was pushed all the way back against the back board.
I tried to have the shooter hit the ball as dead center as I could.
I made sure the game was set at the suggested 6.5 degrees.
I made sure the game was level at both the top and bottom of the playfield.

I had never heard anyone mention adding washers under the shooter wireform to raise it up. I would think this would slow the ball down coming from the shooter, but then again I can see the added height possably making the ball hit the playfield a bit closer to the ball gate (which may be a good thing).

I also had a bit of difficulty trying to get the shooter coil bracket aligned propperly. On my machine there was very little room to work with because the right flipper button would rub / hit the coil bracket inside of the cabinet if it was tightened down just so. It was so close that sometimes just raising the playfield up and back down would make the flipper button rub when it had been fine just before raising the playfield.

If I would have kept this game around I'm sure it would have bothered me enough to eventually put a bigger coil on the shooter to see if that would help. Adding a bigger coil to the right flipper sure did fix the flipper coil getting weak after a couple of games.

I have very limited space and very little patience for games that don't work right, or in this case, have a poorly designed feature. I know the best fix for the skill shot is probably not worrying about it and just go SPF each time. Heck...you can even go for it when you select the other 2 if it doesn't make it through the ball gate. This also leads me to believe that the designers knew the skill shot didn't work relyably....so if it doesn't work, you can still get a skill shot with the SPF lanes.

It's really a shame because I thought the playfield layout was great on Baywatch. I loved that VUK shot in the middle in particular for some reason. The rules could have used some work and it made me realize I don't care as much for a game without stackable modes. I also liked the theme, audio and DMD animations. Plus the whole game looked pretty nice in my opinion.

Is there a piece of foam on Baywatch in the left side of the shooter lane to center the ball? There is another thread on that right now on LW3.

I had never heard of this foam before, but no...baywatch doesn't have it and isn't suppose to have it.

The shooter lane on Baywatch is actually a wire form that is elivated 2 or 3 inches above the playfield. Since the ball is sitting in a wireform...there is really only 1 place it can sit in there. The only adjusting that can be done about how the shooter hits the ball is by adjusting the coil bracket that holds the shooter coil.

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