Are you ready to have a ball? Even if it's a bit out of season, it's never too late to have a Snowball, Pixeljam's polar pinball pleasure. You're probably familiar with the standard controls of [left] and [right] arrow keys (or [A] and [D]) to control the flippers, plus [down] (or [S]) to control the main launching spring. However, you're not just dealing with two measly flippers at the bottom of the table, you're dealing with a handful of flippers, several springs, and well over a hundred targets to pick up in this huge pinball experience.
One of the fastest ways to rack up a huge score is to snag as many of the colored jewels scattered around the table as you can. Each one is worth an increasing amount if you clear a quick chain at once. You'll find large clusters of jewels gathered around the two magnet towers (activated with the [spacebar]), so be sure to swing by there for a quick score boost, as well as the chance to re-spawn all of the gems by collecting a certain amount. The large blue gems are worth a whopping ten grand each, but they take a combination of skill and luck to nab.
Snowball is a huge pinball experience, but it's not without a couple of drawbacks. Hitting one of the snowmen scattered across the map gives you instant multi-ball play, but the screen isn't large enough to let you see all three balls at once. The camera tends to follow whichever snowball is largest, meaning you might not see a ball close to falling out of play, or capable of racking up the most points, whichever you might be more concerned with. Also, the [spacebar] can be used with any [arrow] key to nudge the ball (while not near a magnet tower) at the somewhat steep cost of 1000 points. This is a fair tradeoff, but sometimes it's easy to accidentally trigger a nudge while trying to catch a ball in the magnet tower's power.
Despite this, there's a certain addictive charm to Snowball's wintry setting. Be it the original and lovely jazz music soundtrack, or the way the snowland denizens interact with the paddles as you play, Pixeljam has created quite a fun experience with this mammoth pinball game.
I like the large scrolling, multi-flipper pinball concept. Although I was never really good at pinball games, this was a fun game!
Pardon the pun but this game is loading at a glacial pace for me. I emptied my cache and closed other windows and all the usual things but it's still been loading for the past 20 minutes. Is it just me?
how do you get into the snow tower at the top?
No game hosted here should take 20 minutes to load (assuming you have a standard broadband Internet connection). Try emptying your browser cache and reload the game when something like that happens. Something likely corrupted your initial download, so emptying your browser cache will force it to redownload the game again.
I currently hold high scores #1, 2 and a variety of others in the top 20 (dan), once you figure out the flippers decently well it's not that hard a game and I'm surprised I'm doing as well as I am. To get to the tower at the top, hit the ball as it is coming down the top middle at the last moment, sending it through the boosters along the top/sides, while this happens hold the left flipper down, which creates a triangle bumper at the key of the arch, so the newly boosted ball will hit it and be send to the tower.
To really get going, the key is to hit the tower three times (which reveals more of the 10K gems) early, and then unlock and hit the snowfort 3 times as soon as possible afterwards (giving triple ball and a 3x multiplier) and then try and collect as many of the big gems as possible in the 20 seconds of bonus multiplier. Since the 10k gems down respawn, hitting them during the multiplier will get you much further in a lot less time. In my #2 score (390k) I got more than 100k in those 20 seconds by hitting so many of the big gems - my second and third balls were both duds, but I pulled out the extra ball, and a decent round besides to put me way up there.
Maybe it's just cause I'm good at it, and can figure out the mechanics of pinball fairly quickly, but I really liked this game.
Are there any cheats with this game like there are with Gamma Bros.? Or hidden keyboard cheats, ala the old Apple computer Sim City typing F-U-N-D to get $10K, etc.
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