Hey I'm Bo and we're here in Salem, Massachusetts to play Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle from spooky pinball. This game has had some recent updates, some changes to the way battles work, and the way that navigation works to get to those battles. We'll talk about the weapons, we'll talk about the increasing difficulty of reaching those battles as the game progresses, as well as the increasing rewards that come from playing more and more battles as the game goes on. Hopefully we can make it all the way through all nine monsters to reach the billion dollar baby's wizard mode. Meat, I love it. Oh, meat. Yes, Alice Cooper loves meat. We know that. Well, that's hot though. I'll tell you. The skill shots in Alice Cooper are all lit up in green. The ramps and the lock are the super skill shots. And the outer loops are the regular skill shots. Skill shot complete. You monster. Thank you. I am a monster. So that super skillshot lit the outlanes for a save as well as lighting the secret passage on the inner loop to start a battle. We'll start out with Cold Ethel. Cold Ethel prepares a two ball multiball and the way that this battle progresses is You first have to shoot the top shot, the zinc flashing blue shot at the top of the playfield. That is how you shoot it. You let the ball go past the zipper flipper. Now you have a new ball save, a second ball comes out, and you're charged with releasing that ball by either hitting the captain ball directly in the lock or by shooting the ramp ramp again and dropping the second one on that. So this will be a jackpot here. It's the easiest shot on pinball. There we go. Now it's multiball. At this point you can score jackpots by shooting that lock again. You can also drop balls in through the top and lock them for a temporary growth in the jackpot. So I need to get one ball of blood flipper to do any of this so let's try to move this wall over. Now I have to decide, do I want to just go for the jackpot or do I want to lock the wall for more? And well, as you can see I took the jackpot. If I had gotten three Gakbots, I would have lived this up in green instead of red, which marks that monster as being defeated for the sake of Billion Dollar Babies and some other bonuses. Cold Ethel is out of the way, and we can now proceed to some other monster. If you want to change the monster you're facing, you can shoot the center targets and change the monster mode, but once you shoot a loop to progress onto the monster, you're going after that. There's also in the menu a list of what weapons are available. So in this case, if I look at the menu, I can see that Igor, the one I have now, has a weapon in the dungeon, which is to the right. Shooting the right loop will advance you on the right half of the, of the half of the, sorry, of the nightmare castle, as it is. Shooting the left orbit will advance you to the left. So if I shoot this at right orbit, I'm in the dungeon, I'm now chasing after Igor. I can start Igor by shooting left blue. Also, the ramps are lit telling me that there is a weapon at the top of the playfield. The weapons are collected by shooting the Alice's Eye Star all the way in the back center of the upper playfield. So let's get up there. there. You don't have to get these weapons. What these weapons are going to do is they're going to make the battles against monsters easier. So I'm mixed on whether I want to actually collect this weapon because I want to show you what this battle does. So let's Let's just go for the battle. He said, while it was safe. Let's start the battle. Battle! Battle! Yes! Okay, so Igor, I don't have the weapon, so this will be a three-stage battle. There's no time limit on these modes. There never is a time limit on any mode or battle in Alice in Wonderland. So you can listen to as much of this music as you want. The Lost in America, pretty good song. Igor, you must find Igor three times. Watch for the direction Igor runs to. And if you get to the frenzy, all shots will light up for you to score some bonus. So there are three green shots lit, and I'm going to aim for one and try to find Igor. Right in the middle, no good. All right. Alright, so you collect a little bit higher by missing once, and right there, that is the effect of Igor. I now know that it can be any of these five shots, but I also saw Igor run to the left. So it was that shot I collected, and I know exactly where Igor is. you can shoot whatever shot you want to and collect a little bit of extra points for picking up a shot that isn't the correct shot. But you really shouldn't if there's a collect that you have. I think I can hit it. This one on the left. I can't hit it. All the way on the left. Not that far left. Let's get in the hole. There we go. I knew it was that one for sure because Igor had run to the left. Now you were running to the right and I was like, well I don't know where the heck you are now. All I know is you're over there. This time there were seven shots in the middle. There really couldn't be any of them except for the shot that I collected there. So this is Carter for this phase. And there he is the third time. Now I got the replay set pretty low. So now in this phase, this is the frenzy. When you beat a monster, you enter frenzy. During frenzy, there are lots of shots lit. You can continue making the shots that you were earning during that mode for more value. But it is going to run out of time. After 30 seconds, you can see the clock. Eight seconds left, six. Every shot is worth some points. And if you can recollect the shots from the mode, you will score big. The other thing about Frenzy Time is there's no, there's unlimited ball saves. So no matter what happens, the worst case scenario is you just end your 30 seconds. So it's meant to be, those 30 seconds are meant to encourage you to just blast off. Just play balls out and aim for whatever you can get. during that time. So we've got that one in green. We've defeated Igor, whatever his name is. I can't remember. And the next one is Vampire, although we can always change it as we go. Looking at the weapons, you can see that there is no weapon available for Vampire in the rooms that are on this easier level. If I want to get a weapon, I would go for Zombie, or Ethel, or Igor, the ones I've already played. So, I'm just going to play this out and go for Vampire by shooting the Orcs. Ah, that was a bad flip. I should have been able to save that. You get a million bonus for every monster you defeat. That's the highest value bonus. You get some bonus as well for the rooms you've traveled and the judo chops you've made to the right ramp, the guillotine ramp. Two monsters down and a ball in. Not bad. Let's see if we can get another super skill. That is my personal favorite skill shot because you get a bunch of points and you lock a ball. So it is very valuable to put that super skill into the Crestwater. I'd say more valuable than any of the other options. So we lit the secret passage that will let us go directly to the vampire in one shot no matter where we are in the now. But also it's only one shot we made in the right loop to just start the vampire the normal way. That is the best mode. This is the best mode. This is nothing big. You gotta turn this up, right? No, I was just kidding. Now, this mode requires you to hit the ice card at the top of the playfield three times to kill a vampire, because there's no vampires. three times before they die. Not once, but if you had the weapon, you'd be able to do it in one shot. Let's get up top. Kill him. Kill him again. Kill him again. Oh, yeah. Look at the extra wall blowers. Kill him again. Kill him again. I swear it's usually more difficult than this as I said after you get through the requirements of a monster battle you enter a frenzy where in this case the outer loops as well as the top targets are worth a large amount of points and drain time you gotta get that ball back We've got 30 seconds of a notice flip. Two one zero And at the end when the time is up it will count down a hurry up for all the points you earned and you can recapture that value if you quick enough to that hurry up So I picked up 57 million out of that mode in a hurry The other thing that's happening over the course of the game is that every time you battle a monster, you also increase the base value of all the monster battles by another 20% each time. So you may have noticed those vampire shots were like 2.8 million or 1.4 million or whatever they were. They were all 40% higher than the normal base value. And by playing that one, now they're 60% higher. So going into Alice Cooper, which will be the next battle, I will be shooting shots at 60% bonus. But I can also pick up a new weapon because I've advanced to a harder level of the game. Now the left orb will take me to the ballroom, and it will take two right orbits to attack Alice. But if I feed that left orbit, I can pick up a weapon. So let's try getting it over there by transfer. Oh, we missed. So we're going to rip the Nihilus with the bell. I swear we're going to get a weapon this game, but so far we don't have one. For once, you are not going to lose your head over this. Oh, that's funny, Alice. So this is a classic from Alice's stage show to be 18s. And three shots to the ramp there. You gotta make the ramp first, if it counts. Ah, am I getting that back? Yes. Good audience. Thank you, Ball Saver. Let's do better. Nope. It'll be hard on that feed to catch it on the upper flipper, but This problem is usually to catch it. You can feed that flick to either side. That was a fun shot. And, whoop, up we go. So that shot, which normally would have been 2 million if it were to be more at the beginning of the game, is worth 3.2 million, 60% higher. And that's one ramp. The second ramp would be worth more. The third ramp would be worth... Victory. three oh that was cool hopefully you saw that uh if you complete the inlanes and outlanes it's about safe you get that, you get an instant save off the outlays. So one way to play the game strategically is to save it, like load up three out of four, and then get the fourth one to go down the outlay and get that ball back immediately. We got two out of three shots. One shot to that guillotine ram, we'll chop it. You can see the chop is in position to take that hit off. Look out. Ah! Bad. Probably a mistake there to shoot directly for the left ramp. You've got to get a really clean shot on that ramp. I did not. Shoot again! Shoot again! Got four of the eight battles completed. We haven't played or even talked about Frankenstein multiball, so let's do that. Shoot again! The next battle will be Werewolf. Let's see if we can get the weapon off of Werewolf. Memorize this or look through the menu to see that there is a weapon for Werewolf available in the Conservatory on the right side. Two different rooms have weapons for every monster. Not all the rooms are accessible at the lower difficulty of the beginning of the game. Pick up we can't we're also going to try here for spring inside multiple by walking the first ball That locks up and You pick another ball now have to go to the upper plate field and and either knock down the drop target or hit the Alice's Eyes target to load up the lock. So what basically has to happen is you're going to lock that ball on the other end of that same round, around the back. We also can play Crip multiball, the other Quick 2 ball, because we locked the ball in the Crip earlier from the skill shot. Usually I can backhand that, or I can forehand it either way. The scoops are jackpots. And we're going to go into the werewolf balance. Everything else that you can do during the game you can still do during trip multiball. So let's talk about werewolf. In werewolf your job is to kill the werewolf by making five shots. You have to shoot the major fire shots loops the ramps the inner loop and then hit the center target And you make whatever shot you want if you accidentally hit a shot you've already hit you lose help Notice that the The range of shots are now lit green and some red the red ones the ones that I've already hit The green ones are the ones that haven't hit yet This is kind of a nice position to be in. You get one ball on each flipper. And we can maybe make the key and scan ramp and the jackpot and the vampire shot. Sorry, werewolf shot and save that. Nope. That's a good line. I don't care. That's a good line. So we've done three successfully with no misses. And if you can get all five with no misses, you get a huge bonus. Also, because I played this as the fifth battle, everything is worth almost double what it normally would be if we had played it as the first battle. So I'm going to try to backhand the right orbit here. I almost got it, but didn't quite make it all the way out of that one. You have to be careful because if you hit something again accidentally, it kills off the opportunity. But I would say that the smoking mullet is not exactly the most opportune thing to bring in with the werewolf for that reason. There we go. Okay, we have four out of five now. No fight. And each of those shots is worth a hundred Oh yeah! Boom! Oh! 57 million! And then, again, as before, we go into a 30 second frenzy where all the things are available again. So at this point I'm now trying to make as many of the same werewolf shots again as I did before and they are double value. So if somehow I manage to finish all of these shots again in the time I have, I can get a 100 million shot here. Come on, come on, yes there's five! Gimme! Gimme the ball there! Oh no! I didn't get it! But I have a chance here to catch this one. It ends, it ends, there goes the, oh there goes the hurry up as well. Oh wow that was so close. Oh wow, that was so close. I don't think I'll ever be able to hit that. But it shows the potential of some of these modes. That there's a lot in the game to earn based on the decisions you make. Whether you choose to get weapons or whether you don't. If you get a weapon for Werewolf, it becomes very easy to finish. But you won't be able to score it for the number of points you just saw. Moving on, we've got five battles done. Zombie is next. There is a weapon for Zombie available, I think two actually, on the dungeon and on the lab, the very end of the track. So I'm going to go for that and see how it is. You can see now we are at the top tier. This is when it gets to maximum difficulty to reach the battle. Two shots each of the left orbit and the right orbit. And... And there we go. Good shot. Good shooting, Tex. Come on, play better. The zombie hunt is on! Ah! Darn it. Alright, so we're going to the last ball now, although there is another extra ball available. We're still going after the zombie. We have the Frankenstein multiball ready to go at the top, so let's concentrate there and see if we can't get Frankenstein going first. then we'll worry about what else we have on the table. So to get the Frankenstein multiple you have to knock down that drop target. You can also shoot the highest target in the back and that will count. And the lock is ready here so I've just got to go up this little ramp to get a Frankenstein multiple. and we have some jackpots. The guillotine is a super jackpot which you get after making three jackpots. Both balls will jump one way and then the other way so you have two balls you can bat around with right off the bat I trapped up with that one ball That giving me a chance to play with the other ball One, two jackpots. Reject. Reject. And the super. So, that was quick. We also locked the ball into the crypts. The other way you could have played that. And I can release that ball from the crypt and start a three ball crypt-like stat. It's still going but did not get the real value out of having three balls. Definitely in this game I feel two balls are enough to play the multiball as well. Super is lit. The jackpot is still crypto lit too, so the scoop in the middle and the the crypt block are both for jackpots. Priority right now is up top that guillotine is lit for a super. It can be tough to manage this because you've got one ball on the right flipper, one ball at the top. And if you're wondering, of course we could do that on purpose. Put the super up there and make it harder. Oh, man. This song reminds me of Wayne's World. You're a regular Ghostbuster, aren't you? Now you can get back into Frankenstein again, you can lock the first ball right away. You can, to get the second lock, you have to hit the drop target, or the back target, down a few more times. Now I still have a chance here to go for the zombie, or I can even go for the extra ball at the top playfield. Let's try getting a zombie going first here. I want to show you what a weapon looks like. You really need to knock down any weapons. So we need one of the right loops, one of the rough loops. Maybe we can make one, you know, that would be nice. Ah, shiz! I don't know why I was disappointed. We did not get to see a weapon, so why don't we play again? Let's keep going. And we're going to just see this... I'm just going to enter something weird like... Whatever. Chop house. Crank mode. I reset everything before playing this, so it's going to run a little long. Alice mode, Wolf mode, Wolf speedrun, boom. Keep track of the speedruns of every battle, only if you did not get a weapon. If you get a weapon, you made the battle significantly easier, so you can't qualify for the speedrun for that battle. Alright, let's play again. We're going to put the focus on weapons this time, get you one or two weapons, and try and try to show some of the battles we didn't see in that first game. I'm looking for a few corpses. Corpses. Is it like a knight or a thousand of them? I don't know. Hooray! Let the games begin. That's not you. That's not the guy. Alright. We've got Igor here. Igor has a weapon. The weapon in Igor is on the right side in the dungeon. I just know this from playing the game enough, but if you're not sure, go through the stats report and you'll see on the map where each person's weapon is located. Let's say this is Igor, dungeon. But at the earliest phase, not every monster has a weapon. But as it expands and gets harder, you get more room to access and more opportunity to pick up weapons. So to get the weapon for Igor, the first thing you shoot is the right orb to get into the dungeon. I have a weapon. 1968. yes, yes I am. I'm taking rid of the display, pretty obvious. the weapon is acquired by going up the top and then hitting an ederim create target on my back. here it is. Now I have a weapon. Ho Ho Ho. Once you have the weapon in hand, when you actually get to the monster battle it will just activate automatically. So we get to Igor and he's down. Two X's up top, like the bonus multiplayer on BattleSport. Here we go, we're in the igor. Find igor, he is hiding. He is hiding extra well. You can see on the display, the whip, he started, bounce three. So I already found him twice. Now this is good at that because I only have to find him once, but I also don't have any information on any of the shots. I usually go for shots that are more control returning, like this one here. And the orbits. And I just kind of hope that it's right. There's really no information other than just 2 and go. Well that would have been, I should have given that to me for the backhand. But that's the other way. That one? No. No. That one? No. Yes. And you lose. So, weapon does make battles easier. In some cases the battle is significantly easier. But in some cases, I will be one of them, the battle is not that much easier. much easier. So you can judge based on what weapons do whether you want to take the effort to acquire the weapon and then once you have the weapon what is it doing in the battle. Often times it also makes the battle a little more scoring so it can affect you in that way as well. You will love this place to death. everything is Alright, the best battle, vampire battle, again, there's no question, this is the best battle. Wow, that was a hard shot. This is an assessment of my shooting accuracy. I just blowed out with the E. I'm just doing this so that I can enjoy the music. There's the Crump Monkey Ball that begins dropping into the Crump. So, it's a nice little thing to keep in mind. On that other play field, if you're going to drain, you might as well drain the glue down to the lock. Also you can do that through a crisp with your button. Dirt Crip after you play all three of the jackpots, you hit the X target on the right and it's going to light the ball again. Double jackpot. I'll just call it a super jackpot because it makes it double the regular jackpot. Go on. There we go. It is possible to get a really good score on a cut multiball but you have to go for a long time. The jackpots are getting higher throughout. Two! One! Two! One! Two! One! Two! One! Two! One! Two! One! Two! One! Two! One! Two! One! Two! One! You wouldn't hear this part if I had shot better. Come on now. Get over there. Oh, the song's all over. All right the song over The song back over Let just just pretend this is math at the beginning of the song Oh boy. I like this song a lot. Here we go. I just don't like the part where I'm sucking, flipping, aiming at things. I got that whole deck by playing the inlanes carefully the rest of the time. I can get the back of the tornado sails. I was carefully not collecting saves for a while. and saving or you know time actually they go down now get em oh get em yeah jackpot oop skunk skunk so during during the frenzy During the frenzy, after you've hit something, in this case, the vampire, you're going to take shots with light-up performances. Every shot is worth a little more than what it would normally be. In this case, the jackpots are in the loops, as well as the shots that you're already making. Every other shot, like that window shot there, that was worth a third. We're going to time this out, assuming he has an opportunity for that 5 minute hurry up, and there it is. Hurry up happens at the end of any successful battle. Whatever the time, I'll rub down. And we've got the mystery ward. The first mystery ward gives you advanced monsters so you can get more battles in your game. In this case, this will be the battle with the Owl's Cougar for the Deity. That's a great first. That's a great second. If you pick up a weapon for the Owl's Cougar battle, it makes it the Deity ready to go in one shot instead. Same for Vampire. You pick up the weapon, it's a one-shot affair. That makes it. There's one. Oh, Tom. These ramp shots are really critical to success in the Empire and in the L.S.C.U.P. And where you're at, you need to be really well-balanced. In my case, I just don't get it for a while. That third chop is always 13 right in the middle. I like this animation. This is a really cool animation. I love the chopping it around. And shooting the arrows for a couple more of these. Yeah, there we go. And again, at the end of that time, you get a hurry up. And the hurry up increases as you go through the game. So if you're ready to shoot that hurry up target right when the time runs out on frenzy, pick it up at max value. That can be a very significant source of points. all the points you earned during the frenzy time and a minimum as well so in that case I collected for the minimum of 10. Three battles down I got two wins and a loss next is werewolf if I look on the map I can see that the werewolf does have a wolf bane in the conservatory so I shoot to the right to get that to get that but oh man let's shoot the lock for Frankenstein Prime that and we can get that whenever we feel like it oh So one thing to know about your multi-voltage, basically everything available is still available during the trip other than the cranking cycle. We won't let them out again. Or draining the installation with no jackpots, that would bring some wet holes. Then we go back to getting the holes banged. That would look really pretty. There we go. There we go. Okay, so now the weapon is ready. And we go up the top of the playfield. The gallows and the ice target, we have the weapon in hand. That means that when we do reach the battle against the wolfman, the werewolf, the wolfman is a totally different type of thing. thing a wolf man and a werewolf are I can't believe we're discussing how different they are yeah get over there to the left loop start this battle the right way out and send them all to the right foot so just something to think about keep in mind when you were excited that announce the more you rack on the bonus the better multiplier you of course go to 468 and you can really appreciate it I am a brick, brick, brick, brick, brick, brick master. Ah! He gave me that. Even though I didn't deserve it. I like you. Okay, brick master. Come on, make the spinner lay. Oh, my God. How about now? How about now? How about now? That was less force. Oh, you made the same shot you made on the other side. It was still raw. There. No! Get through there. Oooh. What are you? Well, at least we can get an extra ball. I know. We can get an extra ball by getting to three monster battles. Oh, I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. I see. And if you're wondering, if you're playing your own al scooper and you're looking to compare to mine, this is one of the two prototype al scoopers. So it has numbers up there, a two and a three that I would replace. Some of the other lights moved around as well. For example this light that says Super Jackpot and it says Special. Anyway no big deal, it still plays the same but you might have noticed that. I'm sorry because I just don't want anybody to see how bad I'm shooting. Those shots. It's draining again. All I want to do is battle a werewolf. Come on, brain. Is that so wrong? All right, let's go. I would like to go in your hole. Oh, God. All right, get this in the process. Boy, that's embarrassing. Alright, so, if you have the weapon like we do, then it becomes a one shot affair on the werewolf. Boom! And you're not going to get nearly as many points for it, but you can collect, oh yeah sure, now I can shoot the spinner and great! So again, some of the weapons are extremely powerful, in that they could lead to a difficult battle to a one shot, but it comes at a price, a literal price of points. Yeah, it was easier to do, but also, how many points did I get from werewolf last time? Come on, come on, come on. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Oh. Zombie hunt is on. And now as you go through more battles, battles become more difficult to reach. agree I was in a weapon room again so it could have gotten the weapon for your zombie are not worthy there we go pure poison So, we've seen a little bit of weapons, seen a little bit of the game, but didn't get to uh, Billy Dollar Baby, so we're gonna do that another time. Thanks for watching.