Pinball cleanup

There are a number of issues with the wiki's pinball pages. This thread is dedicated first and foremost to cleaning up pages in the Pinball/ namespace, as well as relevant examples on trope pages. A list of pages in the namespace, sorted into categories based on whether they have already been fixed up, can be found here.

Recurring problems to look out for:

• Walkthrough Mode – this tends to affect pinball-specific tropes like Skill Shot (which is full of fairly precise explanations as to how to make the shot in question)
• Excessive use of pinball jargon that's impenetrable to non-fans
• Shoehorned trope examples
• ZCEs of all sorts
• Trope-slashing – I've seen pages put up to four or five tropes in a single bullet point, which obviously violates wiki policy. These are also frequently ZCEs to boot.
• General examples – these are naturally more prevalent on trope pages than work pages, with several examples describing things common to most or all pinball games
• Meta-troping – this tends to go hand in hand with general examples, as with this example I deleted from Earn Your Happy Ending:
  Take almost any pinball table that requires you to complete several "missions" to unlock a final, very difficult Wizard Mode - you'll probably have to go through this trope to win it all. This is especially so when you only have three balls to work with, losing a ball would also force you to start a mission over, and it can be pretty darn easy to accidentally drop the ball into those @#$%-ing outlanes if you don't know how to tilt the ball back into the field from there. Some missions might be really tough just because you can't easily pull off a tricky shot or hit a particular target.
• Opinions outside of YMMV pages – many pinball work pages conclude their description with some text explaining the general reception to the work, which How to Create a Work's Page explicitly discourages. In addition, some examples end up coming off as complaining about a particular game's shortcomings.

(This is my first time creating a cleanup thread, so please forgive me if things are a little wonky or non-standard.)

Can pinball video games be cleaned up too? Because Pro Pinball and the games associated with it may need a look. I already commented out some ZCEs and removed some complaining on one page, but we may need to look for potential problems that you mentioned.

(For the record, these games are among the few experiences I've had with pinball.)

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Mar 25th 2021 at 7:01:05 AM

Absolutely. A lot of the pages for Digital Pinball Tables tend to suffer from similar problems (partially because many pinball work pages were written by the same troper), so they should be cleaned up as well. I went ahead and expanded the sandbox page accordingly.

While we're on the subject, I am wondering whether examples from digital tables should be categorized under "Pinball" or "Video Games". Most every page covering a digital pinball table uses the latter namespace, but I've seen them filed under the former on trope pages at times. (This ambiguity doesn't really affect full-on digital pinball games, like Sonic Pinball Party, since those are more easily recognized as complete games in of themselves.)

Bumping this to get some input on the various Real Song Theme Tune examples for pinball tables on the wiki. Since the majority of them are based on existing properties, a significant amount of their examples are simply variants of "[game] uses the original music/main theme from [source material]", which I don't think fits the page's definition.

That said, there are some that I think do fit the definition, being either original themes with licensed music or licensed themes using music that isn't part of their source material. As an example of the latter, The Twilight Zone uses "Twilight Zone" by Golden Earring (which was vaguely inspired by the series but was never officially associated with it).

Anyone mind if I delete all of the misuse?

Sorry to triple post, but there's an issue largely unique to the pinball pages that I've been wondering about for some time. There are several pinball machines that are later aesthetically reworked into another theme; for the most part, tropes for both versions are listed on the same page as the original. For example, The Simpsons Pinball Party got reworked into the one-off game The Brain, and the page subsequently looks like two stapled together: one for the original game and one for the retheme immediately afterward. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - for instance, the many versions of El Dorado probably do not warrant splitting, since they have very few tropes individually - but it does pose some questions regarding how exactly to handle situations like these:

1. The de facto model essentially segregates the two games, with separate descriptions and trope lists in one continuous article (as mentioned above). I'm considering changing it so that they instead have a single description, with the tropes being listed in three folders: one for items shared between games and two for items exclusive to one iteration. However, this leads into my next question:
2. How should we crosswick tropes that both versions of a game share? Most of the "two-in-one" pages have a redirect covering the secondary version used for wicks pertaining specifically to it, but when it comes to tropes that apply to their shared gameplay, I'm not quite sure how to handle them. Should the rethemed game be regarded as a sub-bullet of its original version, or should they be listed separately on the trope page?
3. The reason I bring this up is because Spooky Pinball recently released two games that share the same playfield layout and (I believe) rules, but have entirely different themes - Halloween and Ultraman. In this case, I'm not even sure which one would be the "main" game - Halloween was announced first, but based on what I've heard, I think Ultraman was the original version, development-wise.
4. Of course, this is all assuming that the pages should be lumped together in the first place. Part of me wants to split some of the more disparate rethemes away from their original versions (like Shrek and Family Guy), but logically it seems that they should stay together unless the retheme has enough tropes of its own to warrant a separate page. (Think something like Doki Doki Panic being separate from Super Mario Bros. 2.) I wanted to get some feedback from other people to see if there were any potential alternatives to this.

I apologize if this is a bit rambling or confusing - I'm trying to give as much background information as I need to for non-pinball fans to understand this - but it's a bit of a tricky subject.