The second ball could be the magic ball. I go thru the entire game. Never just restart

Depends on your definition of a quick first ball. Some games you are lucky if any ball lasts very long. I have several of those and I play them through no matter what.

DO NOT give up after a first bad ball. You never, EVER know when "that moment" is going to hit, and you crush your old scores. A bad first ball does NOT mean a bad game is going to occur.

I restart it.

Hold down start, don't shut er down

Set my AC/DC GC score after musing a reset due to a bad first ball. Trying to cut down on resets since then.

I've had horrible first TWO balls, then crushed ball three, picked up two extra balls, and gotten high scores. You never, ever know...and you never, ever quit.

I once shopped a friends BSD. I swear on BSD I must have restarted 40% of the time!

but if you would have restarted after the two horrible balls you would have crushed ball one and had two more balls plus your two extra balls to build on it.

If the game lets me hold in the start button to restart after 2 awful balls I usually do. But man, I don't think we're supposed to talk about this. It's just one of those things everyone does and you pretend not to.

Everyone having these 2 house ball games followed by an amazing third ball, just think if that amazing ball was ball 1

Take your lumps and have a terrible game now and then..........

I played a tournament game of Star Trek once where I ended ball 1 with under a million, and then ended the game with slightly over 200 million. Many games (Star Trek being a particularly good example) work where once you settle in and get things rolling, they really start rolling, so one bad ball can just be a step in settling in to the game. Not worth resetting.

I play to beat the highest scores and think that getting off to a good start is important,so I re-start if I have a crap first ball.Nothing worse though,than getting a lower score on your re-start than what you had the game before!!Sometimes it takes 10 re-starts to actually finish a game.

That's like saying the Ravens should be
8 and 0.
Nunca Te Rindas!

I really need to start doing this. Constant restarts are ruining the game for me. I find that I have unofficial rule about what I expect from Ball 1 and if I don't achieve it then I'll do a restart out of frustration without even thinking. It sucks.

I.e, if I don't start multiball on TAF ball 1, or on AFM if I don't destroy the first flying saucer and lower shield for the second one on ball 1.

I should go ahead and disable the restart setting on all my games until I've got it out of my system!

If I'm going for wizard mode and make little or no progress on ball one, then yes, I'll reset. Usually though, if my first ball is crap, I'll try to rebuild and get at least a moderately competitive score. Good practice for tournaments.

On BSD at least you get a special sound when you finish a game with score below 10mil (or something low like that..)

I wouldn't restart - bsd can be a cruel, fast and short game, but that's how it is.. and with the strategy involved it sometimes doesn't matter as with the last ball you could get everything started together and get huge points.

Had some blinders on ball 3 , a couple of extra balls an it was like rough start never happened!!! Always play your game through, u never know what's around the corner...

I just played in a tournament in Indianapolis and I had 200 million on JM going into ball three. My final score was over 6 billion and was the highest qualifying score by over 3 billion. I never restart. These types of games happen to me all the time.

Most of my best scores come from 1 great ball, not three good ones.

Great games are usually based on one great ball - and that's rarely the first one.

Literally all of the high scores on my machines are the result of that one magic ball, not all three.

Just last weekend we were playing LotR. First ball was an insta-drain, second was taken by another player by mistake (he thought it was his saved ball) and also drained quick. With the last ball I almost made it to Valinor, just missed it by 5 or 6 shots.

Not true. It's more likely that you would have just had three shit balls because deep down inside you know you're a quitter for resetting the game.

I don't care if one ball can make the game. For me that needs to be ball 1. If I havent at least made some progress on ball1 then the game gets restarted.

I'm not the a great player, but I do alright. I used to restart f-14 (my first game) all the time if the 1st ball sucked. Now when a get a new game I change the settings to be a easy as possible. Extra balls, save progress, tight outlanes. I've even put a game on 5 balls (gasp) to learn it better and have longer ball times. At home you should have fun, however you do it. Don't let the game get to you because that one great ball can happen whenever.

Once I learn the machine I start raising the difficulty.

Wow....that must have totally sucked for the people playing with you.....that ball must have lasted over an hour!

I generally do not restart. Occasionally if I'm going for something specific and the first two go drain, drain I might........but never on IM, on IM you only need one good ball.

if I don't reach a certain goal on my first ball i typically restart. but the number of games i can play is limited, so i don't want to waste them if i can help it. that's why when i go to sell my AC/DC the number of games counted will really be about a third of what is registered!
I also have 10 minute ball save times!

Nicely played! That's true on all my games, too.

Depends on my mood, really. If I start to get a lot of house balls and start to get aggravated I reset back to ball one. But, if I'm in a good mood, I just keep playing and try to make up for it. I never restart if I'm playing with another player.

Actually, if the other player is having a kick-ass game, that's the PERFECT time to restart.

I say owners of games should set their games up however they like.

Tight tilt? great
Loose tilt? great
3 ball? great
10 ball? great

The way I see it, it is no different than people who own Call of Duty and set the difficulty level to match their skill set.

About 90 minutes.

The other two friends played something like 25 games on The Shadow in the meantime.

In general I try to avoid playing LotR with friends, but they just like it a lot.

I say play it like you paid to play it. Play all 3 balls out. When you have a really bad first ball (or two), try to get a replay on what you have left. Just knocking the game after two tragic balls can be as thrilling as a high score.

Enjoy the bad games
they make more satishfying good games !