vale[ blog ] diary of the last hollow soul

For about a year now i've had a Nokia phone—don't ask exactly what kind, i don't know. The most important thing is that it has a game called Glamour Pinball. As the name indicates, it's a pinball (sometimes called flipper), and i really enjoy playing it in my spare time, while travelling or when i couldn't read a book. I've been playing it for a while and time by time i encountered modes or extras nowhere documented—you can't really find any resources on the net about this game, that's why i decided to write this post. I couldn't attach any pictures and maybe i'm mistranslating a few names, but i'm playing a localised version of the game, so i don't know how stuff are called in english.
First a few details about the game. When you launch the ball, there's no stop. You can quit to the main menu without trouble, but if you exit the game, you'll lose the current ball, even if you had million points of bonus. The game doesn't care and doesn't save. You can kick the desk with the buttons 4 and 6, but these details are written in that short intro in the game. But don't believe that you'll lose all your bonus if you use kicking. To be honest, i really doubt anyone could complete the game without using it a lot. The only problem is when you kick twice immediately at one time, because then, if you're lucky, it'll first just warn you (that's no problem), but in a worse case the controls will get locked and you'll lose all your bonus indeed. And the ball too, naturally.
Gameplay in Glamour Pinball is quite simple, as expected from a pinball game, especially on a phone. But still there are a couple of tricks you'll find pretty useful. First of all, the most important thing is to keep the ball savers always active. These are the lights at the points of the table where the ball can fall down (on the two sides and between the bottom flippers). When you launch the ball these are active for about ten seconds, flashing, which means they'll turn off. They can be reactivated by reaching level six on the ramp at the top of the playfield (which means the ball goes over the ramp six times without leaving the top part of the playfield, bordered from the bottom by the two top flippers), then making the ball activate the rightmost light at the top of the playfield. Those SKY lights also can activate multipliers, if all three are active, up to ten times, after which you can get an extra ball with them (after that, they are no use).
The bumpers in the top are the main source for bonus points. If you activate Lobby mode by hitting all five targets in the top area, you'll get 500 bonus points instead of 100 on each bumper hit, and if you can activate them all again before time runs out, you can get a more-times-lobby, which results in even more points. But you shouldn't really concentrate on this before you have activated the ball saves on all three exits (have to be done separately for all three), because those bumpers speed up the ball a lot, and if you're in higher level lobby mode, that can be so fast you don't even realise it's going down but you've already lost a ball.
But if you got all three saves, the next step should be turning on the ramp lights in the bottom part and getting the multipliers. That's plain play, the main thing is trying not to lose the ball, because then you'll have to activate the ball saves again, and that takes a while. Activating the ramp lights is not simple at all, but worth it. If you have all lights for the left and right ramps, you can have a try at the jackpot. But first you should pump up the jackpot. You can do that by getting into hotel mode. Without a ball save it could get very-very dangerous, but it's not simple anyway. The most simple way is to slow the ball down by kicking the desk, and stopping it on the left flipper, then launching it onto the right ramp. It's not difficult if you get used to controls. But don't try going over onto the left ramp, because probably that's the most dangerous move in the game, because you either have to let the ball go the very tip of the right flipper, or making it hit the right slingshot (which in most cases results in losing the ball on the left outlane), or hitting it lucky enough with the left flipper.
To activate hotel mode, the simples way is to hit the ball on the right ramp over and over again, holding the right flipper up, making the ball go on over the left flipper, from where you can once again launch it on the right ramp. This is a lot safer and quite easy to do too. Once i got up to hotel mode multiplied by five, which is loads of jackpot points, but it's pretty monotonous to do this. You can get the jackpot by activating most of the ramp lights (it'll say when you can get the jackpot), and launching it four times up the middle ramp. That's not easy to hit but with practice not too difficult either.
In Glamour Pinball you can get as many jackpot points as you want, you couldn't outscore your bonuses if you played well. With lobby mode and the top bumpers, you can get four-five hundred thousand bonus points without really concentrating on that aspect (rather on the ramp lights and the bottom stuff), which with the 10 multiplier is over five million points. The jackpot is usually around a million points or so, a nice amount.
An ugly trick is to let the ball fall down immediately after launching it at the beginning of the game, this way one after one activating the Sky lights, and the multipliers. It can get dangerous, if you're not careful not to let the ball hit the slingshots, of if the ball doesn't fall down fast enough. And it just doesn't seem to fair to me, but feel free to use it, if you want. You can get a couple of points with this alone.
In Glamour Pinball the drink lights and the left and right bonuses are nice scoring places, but you won't get rich on them. The drink lights are right above the bottom flippers at the top of the playfield, which activate the light at the second inlane over the left flipper. That's not an easy thing to make the ball activate that, and it's not really worth risking either. The left and right bonuses are activated by using the top two ramps, and can be achieved by using the two bottom ramps. You'll get these many times enough without paying attention at all.
I think this is all i wanted to put down here, if you have any questions or pictures to share, please leave a comment.