Silverball guide · Cactus Canyon
Every bad guy is a second of High Noon
High Noon lasts thirty seconds, plus one for every bad guy target you have hit all game. The badge tells you how to get there. The bad guys decide how long you get once you arrive.
Five things light the badge
The sheriff's badge needs Mother Lode, Showdown, Combo, Stampede and the Bart Brothers. Complete all five and the Gold Mine starts High Noon.
They are five separate errands rather than one escalating chain, which is unusual and rather generous: nothing is gated behind anything else, so on any given ball you can work on whichever is closest.
The timer you have been building since ball one
High Noon runs for thirty seconds, and one extra second is added for every bad guy target you hit at any point in the game. That includes bad guys from Quick Draws, from Gun Fights and from Showdown Multiball.
So a player who has been taking every Quick Draw arrives with a minute or more, and a player who ignored them gets thirty seconds. This is the single most useful thing to know about the machine, and it is invisible while you are playing.
What High Noon actually is
Every ball goes into play and any you lose come back for the duration. Every bad guy target is up and every jackpot is lit. Twenty bad guys shot wins it, for twenty million.
It is one of the few wizard modes that is genuinely winnable on a first visit, provided you brought the seconds with you.
Quick Draw is fast and you cannot cradle for it
The inlanes trigger Quick Draw and the ball does not stop while it happens. A bad guy drop target pops up and you shoot it as fast as you can.
Winning lights a Bounty, and beating four different bad guys starts Showdown Multiball, which is one of the five badge items and lights an extra ball on the way past.
Rank is quietly changing your scores
You move up through stranger, partner, deputy, sheriff and marshal, and rank raises what you score in Quick Draw and in High Noon.
It goes up in three ways: the bounty award, the lasso skill shot, and winning a gun fight. The lasso skill shot appears in that list and in almost every other list on this machine, which is a hint about how much attention the plunge deserves.
The bounty is a wildcard
Light it with the lasso skill shot or by beating a bad guy in Quick Draw, then collect it at the Bart Brothers.
It can hand you a lit extra ball, a lit gun fight, a lit Quick Draw, a lit lock or the lock itself, or five bonus multipliers. There is no bad outcome, which makes the Bart Brothers shot worth taking whenever it is lit.
Gold Mine multiball, and the Mother Lode
Lock three balls in the mine. Once it starts, each of the three ramps and both loops is a jackpot, and each can only be taken once until all five have been made, at which point they reset.
Every jackpot lights the Mother Lode, which is collected at the Gold Mine, and one Mother Lode lights that part of the badge. Making all five jackpots inside a single multiball raises the Mother Lode multiplier, so the discipline of going round the whole set pays twice.
The two you can plan for
Stampede needs all five main shots completed: the Bronco loop, the River Adventure ramp, the Train ramp, the Trick Shooting loop and the Bank Robbery ramp. Starting it lights its badge segment.
Combo needs ten. There is a combo light on all three ramps and both loops, lit briefly after each ramp or loop shot, and the longer your string the faster they go out. Ten across the game, not in one run.
Gun fights, and the one mode that is a rescue
A gun fight is the slower cousin of Quick Draw: the inlane traps the ball, a bad guy pops up, and the ball is released for your shot. Miss and you have a few seconds to try again before he leaves. Winning one raises your rank, and it is lit by the bounty award, by the left outlane when that is lit, or by beating one of the Bart Brothers.
Save Polly Pearl is started by completing any one of the three ramps, and then you are working against a train. Shooting the Train ramp slows it down and buys you time; the Bank Robbery and River Adventure ramps are what actually stop it, as many shots as the display is asking for.
Neither is a badge item, which is exactly why they get skipped. The gun fights are worth taking anyway for the rank, and every bad guy who appears in one is another second on the High Noon clock.
Which machine you are standing at
This was written against the 1998 Bally. The remake that is also on UK floors carries a great deal of extra material that the original never had, so treat everything here as the floor of what that machine does rather than the whole of it.
The five badge items, the bad guy seconds and the rank ladder are the parts that hold either way.
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.
- Cactus Canyon rule sheet, version 1.65, by llamaman2, April 2006
