Guelph Pinball Club Part III - TAXI

Part THREE of Guelph Pinball Club? Yeah, why not! I mentioned in Part Two of my Guelph Pinball Club reviews that I was going to do Twilight Zone or Star Trek: The Next Generation but the same Twilight Zone already made an appearance at Bumper City: A Pinball Exposition and I just don't feel like writing about ST:TNG just yet. So I got to thinking, Guelph Pinball Club has a pretty impressive roster of System-11 era tables, like the Natural Disasters, Earthshaker and Whirlwind, which we got to check out in Part 1 of the Guelph Pinball Club trip reports. Pin-Bot was also a part of the lineup as well as a classic System-11 from Mark Ritchie, that is ...

Taxi! Taxi! There is just something about System-11 era tables that makes them so much fun. They are like the NES-era of pinball; primitive and rudimentary yet groundbreaking and historical for their time which left such a great impression on the people that played them. Wherever I go, whether it's a barcade like House of TARG, pinball expos like Michigan Pinball Expo or Ottawa Pinball Expo, or private collections, there is at least one System-11 table. These tables were revolutionary. Never before did you have ramps, music, and sound effects like this! Sure, there were some tables that did have those features; Jungle Lord had a dual playfield with small ramps but not the kind that started appearing with the advent of System-11 tables. Loads of ramps with criss-crossing habitrails were par for the course on many System-11 tables, Taxi especially!

Not only that but the gameplay of pinball was evolving. No longer were you just hitting everything on the table for points but now you were actually trying to complete objectives for really big scores! In the case of Taxi, you were tasked with picking up several passengers, ranging from Dracula to Pin-Bot and Santa!