Fort Worth, TX
Surely someone can invent a way to connect our pinballs to the network, to share high scores or what have you. I am surprised that this has not happened yet. sorry drunk. share boobs
(Topic ID: 102157)
it'd be pretty trivial, technologically. the problem is what do you want to do with the capability? it's harder than it seems at first to come up with cool / fun / useful applications.
first, the obvious -- it's not like you can hold tournaments or maintain global high scores or anything like that. even if you could enforce that every game was operating by the same rules and settings, the fact remains that every example of a game plays differently ... and that's even leaving aside the obvious problem that no tech could stop someone from cheating in a million different physical ways from removing the back glass to rigging switches or setting a low angle or whatever.
it could still be fun for casual competitions between friends by automatically maintaining online high scores and histories and stats and leaderboards etc for a single individual machine. this would pretty easy to do actually -- if a mod could be made that could read the final score of a game, it'd be pretty easy to take that score and post it somewhere online automatically, and then you can write whatever arbitrary software to do stuff with that data. but the system itself wouldn't be inherently trustworthy so it'd only be useful in a small league or amongst friends or something like that.
personally i think it would be cool if someone would design a pinball game that somehow tracked your "progress" by some kind of ID card or login, and then you could go from machine to machine and take your achievements and associated perk rewards with you. like for example, a medieval-themed game where you earn upgraded "equipment" that does various things like making the pops worth 3% more per hit or increases the ball saver by 10% or whatever. and your score at the end of the game lets you buy more / better equipment for your character, so that your next game you can score better and get even better gear, etc.
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