Silverball guide · Batman Forever
Lock the scene you want with the gun
The plunger on Batman Forever is a trigger, and it does something no other shot does: it locks in the Gotham scene you are about to play. Including, if it comes up, the one that lights an extra ball.
The gun is a selector
You can start a Gotham scene the hard way, by hitting all the question mark targets scattered around the playfield to enable one and then shooting the right orbit to start it. Or you can take one straight off the skill shot, which is far easier.
Either way, firing the gun locks the currently lit scene in, or unlocks it. That is the lever: hold out for the scene you want instead of taking whatever the machine offered, and if the lit extra ball scene comes round, lock it.
Question marks are the key to everything else
There are five question mark targets, one either side of the left and right ramp entrances and one to the left of the U-turn loop.
They exist to enable modes, which means they are the shot to take when nothing else is lit. On a widebody with long shots, knowing which five targets are the useful ones saves a lot of aimless flipping.
The bat signals carry between balls
Seven shots wear a bat signal: the left orbit, left ramp, U-turn loop, right ramp, VUK, middle ramp and right orbit. Complete all seven and Circus Countdown starts.
Two details make this the backbone of a game. The shots only count while the bat signal is blinking, so timing matters. And the ones you have collected stay lit from ball to ball until the set is finished, so an incomplete set is never wasted. The first pays five million and each one after that pays five million more than the last.
Batarangs
The left orbit followed by the middle ramp is a combo the machine tracks and keeps a separate record for, with its own initials entry.
It is the same idea as the famous loop combo on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and it is the most satisfying thing to learn here. Worth chasing on a ball that is otherwise going nowhere.
Multiball, and the shot almost nobody makes
It is a four ball multiball. The left ramp and the right ramp collect the jackpots, then the middle ramp lights for a double jackpot.
After that, the batwing loads automatically and the super jackpot is a shot up the mini-ramp. Be warned that this is a genuinely brutal shot, described by the person who wrote the rules for this machine as something he made once, by accident, while trying to do something else entirely.
The wizard award
It asks for three things at once: matching both the good and bad heads, sighting all the bat signals, and completing every Gotham scene. Do all of it and FOREVER lights, collected through the usual mode start routes.
What follows is a four ball multiball where the jackpots come from loading the batwing, and the catch is that the batwing is moving. You can make the left ramp perfectly and score nothing because the batwing was pointing somewhere else when the ball arrived. It ends when you are down to one ball.
The batwing is a second set of shots
When the batwing is loaded, the shots it can target are the mini-ramp, the VUK, the right ramp, the right orbit and three of the question mark targets, and they are worth ten million each unless doubled.
The DMD marks them with bat symbols and question marks, and a shot stops being shown once you have taken it from the batwing.
The B-A-T lanes and the bonus
The bonus multiplier tops out at twenty times, and after that every further completion of the B-A-T lanes simply adds twenty million instead.
That is a real score on a 1995 machine, and it means the lanes stay worth completing long after the multiplier has stopped moving. Reaching two times bonus also relights the laser kick.
Bat gadgets
When the right orbit is not lit for a Gotham scene, a firm shot that ends up in the saucer awards a bat gadget instead, chosen from a display much like the snack bar on Creature From The Black Lagoon.
Collect the set and you are awarded Super Laser Kick. So a right orbit shot is never wasted, it just pays differently depending on what is lit.
Two-Face, and the good and bad faces
The pops are Two-Face's, and they pay two million each off the skill shot award. The faces themselves are a small gamble with a real payoff: a good face and then a bad one, in either order, relights the laser kick and awards ten million, and two good faces holds your bonus.
For a 1995 Sega widebody, that is a surprisingly modern piece of design and it is easy to miss entirely.
A note on this guide
The rule sheet this was compiled from is an unfinished draft from July 1995, written weeks after the machine shipped and openly uncertain in places about what some awards do.
Where the source was unsure, this guide either leaves the point out or says so, rather than tidying a question mark into a fact. If you own one and know better, we would like to hear it.
Where this came from
Silverball wrote this, but not from scratch: it was compiled against the published rules below and checked against them, rather than written up from one person’s games. None of the wording is theirs. Machines get code updates that move the right shot, so a guide has a date on it for a reason.
- Batman Forever rule sheet, by Scott R. Tiesma, July 1995, with thanks to Michelle Tiesma
