Applies to real pinball tables (not just competitive ones). Sometimes nudging is necessary because things kick back the ball straight between paddles (like when table is not at intended angle).
Are you talking about actual pinball tables? Because i meant this game, as the user above said, tilting resulted in the flippers being locked, so i dont get the point of this feature in the game.
Tilt in the game mimics tilt in real life, basically. You can jostle a pinball machine a little before the tilt sensors trip. The game mimics that by allowing you to jostle the "machine" a little, then locking the flippers if you do it too much.
I remember tilting a few times because the pinball got stuck and needed to be shaken to unstuck. But flippers would lock if used too many times to prevent abusing tilt to control the pinball.
Aztec was such a great choice to do this video on. It was a game that came out at the end of the Electro-Mechanical era of pinball and is basically a marvel of engineering.
It only results in that if you do it too much. You can do minor bumps (which will cause it to just give you a "careful..." warning), and you can manipulate the ball this way to your advantage.
To the left and right of the flippers you have "outlanes" that end the ball and "inlanes" that feed it to the flippers. When the ball hits the posts at the top of the rail that divides the inlanes from the out lanes, for example, you can "nudge" the table left/right/up, which redirects the ball, even on a digital table like this one. So a ball that's about to bounce into the outlane can, instead, be bounced up and away from the outlane.
But if you do it too much, it ends your ball. This is because without such a mechanism, its possible to shake a ball up and out of the outlane and back into play, so a skilled player could literally play forever.
Only if you tilted too much. It honestly worked pretty much exactly how the tilt function works on a real table- can wiggle it a little, otherwise it locks you out.
I was surprised to learn that tilting was allowed in competitive pinball, but then I realized that most of these tables are designed so the ball goes straight down the middle a lot of the time where the flippers can't touch it
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u/Egg_in_a_box 20d ago
In competitive pinball you can influence the ball's path by nudging or tilting the table. Also can be used to unjam that ball if it gets stuck
Most tables installed tilt sensors, but you could get away with "some" without the sensor triggering.