I still play Project X never mind all that I did play way back when - my hat's off to you sir.
I'm a weird one as far as pinball is concerned. I never really got a chance to play pinball properly when younger, and on a lot of broken/mute machines so I never had a real chance to make it 'click'. The only pinball I ever remembered for any sort of 'gameplay' reason outside of gimmicks everybody remembers at least superficially like TAF's Thing / multiball-onset and
A13's crazy multiball, was F14 Tomcat because it was in the basement of a Blackpool hotel our family stayed at once, and my dad played the ever-loving crap out of it - though not very well! - while we played a bootleg upright version of video game Cabal. I eventually started wondering what on Earth all of the Yagov noises were about and was pretty entranced by the taunting game. The one time dad managed to actually score a Yagov kill, and get the oh-so-satisfying death scream sound sample, he shortly afterwards got the ball hung up in the rails as the VUK was getting hilariously weak, and he tilted the machine trying to free it up to no avail so had to turn the machine off and lost the high score he set. I'm still trying to work out how this was really possible on a machine that's close to sanely set up... but maybe it wasn't. But that lost high score and open taunting from that game stuck with me where other pinballs didn't.
After that, nowhere I ever went really featured pinball machines, and I started to get even more heavily into video games. Pinball not a part of my life except for Pro Pinball: The Web, and Timeshock, being amazing, but somehow I hadn't quite realised that these games were slavishly copying game design that existed all over the place already in pinball. I knew they were trying to be as real as possible but I guess I thought the real games could not be as deep or exciting.
Fast-forward until recent years where for reasons I've totally forgotten, I remembered that pinball machine and had a bit of nostalgia about it and tried to find out the name of it. Eventually found it again and landed on
this infamous PAPA finals video on the game. Being very much into my ultra-hard video games and music games, I was amazed to see that the game was supposedly so difficult - just made the appeal of that memory of lost glory of beating Yagov even more intense. Setting me a gaming challenge as high as Everest is just a red rag to a bull for me.
I wondered if anybody had actually tried to do the 'impossible' and made a simulation of pinball I could play a la MAME, and stumbled on The Pinball Arcade, and was astounded to see F14 in the game list. Bought all the tables (starting with Tomcat of course...) Went crazy into pinball at long last and made up for the lost years of not being into something that, by all rights, I should have been massively into since I was a teenager.
And because over the years I became a major tinkerer and got myself into what I could only describe as a Lazarus resurrection of a Mazda MX5, I wondered if there was such thing as a cheap, broken F14 machine... and here I ended up on pinballinfo where I got myself one. With current pinflation I wouldn't be able to afford getting even a beater machine, so I remembered pinball just in time.
Nowadays I'm fixing other people's machines more than playing pinball, almost... and polishing up my game to a frankly stupid sheen