I took the softcore hetero porn film Pachinko Queen Explosion and edited it down to just the parts that teach us something about modern pachinko or show off the parlor. There is nothing remotely pornographic in this clip.
Someone brought this to my attention over in this pachitalk thread, but I thought I should repost it all here.
The videogame Shenmue 3 apparently has areas where you can go to an arcade and play Smart Ball variants.
from the thread:
Shenmue III takes place in rural China in the mountains along the Lijiang river in the year 1987 and across your martial arts journey you find a few places where you can play Smart Ball, they are completely optional and have no bearing to the games plot but you can play Smart Ball and win prizes.
I am not sure if Smart Ball machines were ever imported into China, but certainly it could be that they are making references to the spa towns in Japan where you can still find retro smart ball parlors. (though only a few retro parlors remain)
If you have any info on machines like this being in China, I would love to hear about it! I've found so incredibly little about any 20th century coinop machines in China. The only related thing I've posted was this bit about the Hong Kong Museum.
There are three general "periods" of smart balls that I can see: the hand-operated ones (1930s to 1960s) the automatic payout ones (1960s to 1970s) the solid-state redemption ones (1980s-present)
Shenmue seems to combine a lot of these things together in varied ways.
The hand-operated ones had the balls cleared out manually with a latch accessed at the back. Most allow balls to fall to a tray at the front, but in some cases the ball rack was handed to you by an attendant. These did not have backboxes / backglasses.
The automatic payout ones used similar mechanical technology to the automatic dispensing pachinko machines, just scaled up the larger marbles.
These are my favourite as they winning are dispensed from the head. The balls roll down the glass and can be fed into the shooter lane easily.
1960s/1970s style smart ball with automated payout
Then the solid-state machines offered scoring on discrete games, with the chance of winning a prize. I am not sure if some of these ever had "ticket dispensers" like North American redemption machines.
if you can score 10 points, a prize ball will be dispensed out of the bottom slot
There is also a market of people making brand new 1930s-style smart ball tables. Well they aren't quite like the 1930s machines, they have a very fundamental layout, but it's the same principle of operation.
they are sometimes found at fairs, where it seems the cost is now 300 yen. :)
A horizontal bar, but you push a button and it recedes. The ball or coin on it then falls. That's it! A delightful little gameplay mechanism that has been around for decades but is still barely known. Machines here span almost 100 years.
Let's start with a basic machine, and the earliest. There's a whole lot more under the cut.
1900 The Halfpenny by Price and Castell
when you push the button the shelf retracts, allowing the coin to enter the winning slot
I'm starting a new series of blog entries where I just post up a bunch of media illustrating cool arcade gimmicks and mechanics that span decades and continents.
These are not going to be a definitive works, nor meticulously researched things. But if you have more stuff to add to them please reply to the bottom and perhaps I'll update them with new entries as I go.
These are all cool little things I've noticed in my research of coin-op machines and that I've fallen in love with. There are a bunch of topics in classic coin-op that I could include here, but won't because they are just too massive: pitch-n-bats, physical horse-racing games, shooting gallery machines, bowling games, EM arcade games, etc.
But stay tuned for a handful of small Niche Mechanism posts in the future!
