I was playing the UFO table and noticed that the part that opens to reveal the left hole (the one that gives you Center Post, Super Kickback, or the Lucky Star games) was moving very fast upwards. It went out of the screen bounds and then reappeared at the bottom about 30 pixels to the left, and when it reached the left edge, it continued at the right side of the screen.

I would have taken a screenshot but it happened just as I lost my last puck. I don’t remember doing anything special to trigger the bug, so I can’t give instructions to reproduce it. Has anyone experienced this before?

I’ve never found that bug while playing Galactic Pinball, but I did find a score bug on the Alien table, which I know also theforce81 and Undead found, and I don’t know if either of them ever explained it on this site, so I’ll go ahead and do that now:

If you manage to get 1 billion points on the Alien table, you “break” the score counter, and it begins to cycle back and forth between the scores 999,999,999 and 1,000,000,000 each time you hit anything on the table that should give you more points. Therefore, you cannot gain any more points beyond these marks. When you lose your puck, a screen appears that applies the “Lost Bonus” to your score. These points are, in fact, added to your score on this screen, so your score becomes 1 billion points plus your Lost Bonus. However, if this was not your last puck and you begin to play the table again, the “broken” score counter takes effect again, so it cycles back and forth between the two scores mentioned above again, which lowers your total score back to one of these two scores. Consequently, you lose your entire previous Lost Bonus. Hitting objects on the table won’t increase your main score but will allow your Lost Bonus to accrue once again (but there is no way to keep track of what amount your Lost Bonus is at; you only see it when you lose your puck). When you lose your puck again, the new Lost Bonus is added to your 1 billion point score again, and only if this is your last puck will this Lost Bonus be saved to your score and, therefore, appear on the TOP SCORE screen. Otherwise, the cycle will continue again, and you will lose your Lost Bonus with the next puck that you launch. Even if you don’t hit anything with the next puck launched, your score becomes either 999,999,999 or 1,000,000,000 again just by launching a new puck.

Therefore, if you are going for a high score on the Alien table, the absolute best score that you can get is 1 billion points plus the highest possible Lost Bonus ON YOUR LAST PUCK (no other lost bonus for any other puck will matter). If I remember correctly, the highest possible Lost Bonus you can get is 8 million points, without any multipliers. Once you do whatever is necessary to get it that high, you cannot make it increase any further. I don’t remember there being any multipliers on the Alien table. If that is true, then the highest possible score that one can achieve on Alien (where the score is saved and, thus, appears on the TOP SCORE screen when you are done) is 1,008,000,000. If there are multipliers, I’m pretty sure that the highest Lost Bonus you can get with the maximum allowable amount of multipliers applied is 32,000,000, so you could get a score of 1,032,000,000.

This score glitch does not appear on the Cosmic table, and I don’t know if it appears on the other two tables since I haven’t broken a billion points on either of them yet. I know that I can break a billion points on Colony but I haven’t put in the time to do so yet, and I don’t think I will ever be able to break a billion points on UFO because I can’t “figure the table out,” in order to be able to safely rack up points using a reliable method. So at least on Cosmic, you can get as many points as you want. But Alien has “the perfect score” due to the bug, and I hope nobody ever gets it and posts it on this site since that will make me have to run the pinball marathon again and try to match it. 😉

HorvatM wrote:
I was playing the UFO table and noticed that the part that opens to reveal the left hole (the one that gives you Center Post, Super Kickback, or the Lucky Star games) was moving very fast upwards. It went out of the screen bounds and then reappeared at the bottom about 30 pixels to the left, and when it reached the left edge, it continued at the right side of the screen.

I would have taken a screenshot but it happened just as I lost my last puck. I don’t remember doing anything special to trigger the bug, so I can’t give instructions to reproduce it. Has anyone experienced this before?

I experienced the same glitch on the same table. This happened to me twice, once about 3 years ago and the other just lastnite. The door would float around the table then go off screen only to reappear from different borders of the screen. Not only was it floating around but the 3-D depth of the door would get so dramatic that it will cause you to go cross-eyed really badly. The door would go back to its original state after losing the puck. The first time this happened, I had no idea what I did to trigger it. But lastnite it seemed like all I did was hit the puck into the door just as it closed and knocked it off its hinges. I would assume that perfect timing is required to pull this one off but haven’t confirmed that.