Silverball guide · Doctor Who
Choose the Doctor before you need him
Doctor Who lets you pick which of the seven Doctors you are working towards, and each one quietly rewrites part of the machine. Picking in the right order is worth more than any single shot on the playfield.
How choosing works, and why it is a decision
One Doctor is spotted at the start of any ball, and more can be spotted through the Transmat target or Video Mode. At the start of a ball, or when you lock a ball, you choose which Doctor is current, shown flashing on the backglass.
When a spotting shot lands, the current Doctor becomes solidly lit and his effect applies for the rest of the game. The current Doctor then moves to the next unlit one to his left, so left alone the machine works through them in its own order.
That is the lever. Two of the seven change the game far more than the others, and you can put them first rather than waiting for them to come round.
Collect all seven and you take a twenty million bonus, and running through all seven a second time pays it again. Each Doctor spotted is also worth a million in the bonus at the end of the last ball, and unusually that part is multiplied by the playfield multiplier.
Doctor 6 is the one to take first
Doctor 6 does one thing: he spots an extra playfield multiplier step for every Loop Ramp shot, and makes the multiplier stay lit longer. With him, three Loop Ramp shots take you to the 4x maximum instead of six.
That matters because almost every value in this game is multiplied by the playfield multiplier. The sheet says so in its very first line rather than repeating it against each award.
The scale is easiest to see at the top end. The Triple Davros jackpot is three hundred million on its own, and 1.2 billion at 4x. Simply having the multiplier lit when you collect it is worth nine hundred million.
If the multiplier is already at maximum, further Loop Ramp shots pay 250,000 instead, which at 4x is a million and is the machine shouting about a fairly ordinary award.
Doctor 7 has to be lit before Target Mode, not after
Getting to multiball has three stages. Lock two balls at the Time Expander, then the Expander raises into Target Mode, which looks like Pinbot: five circular targets, each needing three hits. Finish that and the Expander raises again to show three Dalek gates.
Doctor 7 spots an additional target every time you hit the set, specifically whichever one still needs the most hits. Without him, the last stretch of Target Mode means hitting one particular target; with him, any hit will do.
So he has to be current before you get there. If Doctor 7 is unlit as you approach the end of Lock Mode, make him current at the next opportunity. He also awards a Time Factor when you hit the lock target, which is the same help arriving earlier.
If you drain during Target Mode the targets you have hit are held to your next ball, so a failed attempt is not wasted.
Never start a multiball or a Video Mode cold
The corollary of the multiplier is blunt: shoot the Loop Ramp before you shoot the Dalek gates. A forty-five million jackpot is a hundred and eighty at 4x, and the difference costs one ramp shot.
The same is true of Video Mode, where the wave bonuses are multiplied. Get the multiplier up first, then go and light it.
The one part that is not multiplied is the Last Wave Bonus at the end of a Video Mode set, which is simply the sum of the wave bonuses you already earned.
Video Mode is three hundred million for jumping over things
Complete the six ESCAPE targets to light Video Mode at the Police Box entryway. You control the Doctor running from a Dalek: one flipper for a short jump, both for a long one.
On standard settings the first four waves follow fixed patterns. Wave one is short, short, long, long, long, long. Wave two is short, long, long, short, short, short, short. Wave three is short, short, short, long, long, long, short, short, short. Wave four is long, long, short, short, long, short, long, long, long. On harder settings the waves are random and this is no use to you.
Completing a wave relights Video Mode for the next, and a full set runs four waves, then five, then six. A whole set can be worth around three hundred million and spots several Doctors along the way. An extra ball usually arrives at the last obstacle of wave two, sometimes wave three.
Two small things that add up: jumping into the Police Box at the end of a wave pays a further million, and the not-dying bonus only comes if you cleared the wave without stumbling at all.
W-H-O, and the Sonic Boom rounds
W is the right ramp, H is the Hang-On target on the left, O is the Loop Ramp, and each pays the flashing value below the right ramp, usually two or three million. Completing the set advances the value and returns the ball to the lower left flipper.
Every ten Loop Ramp shots lights a Sonic Boom round, and a W-H-O taken during one pays ten million a Boom. A full set in a Boom round is usually worth around a hundred and twenty million, which makes this the ordinary-play scoring worth mastering.
One piece of ordering that costs people the round: shooting the Loop Ramp during a Boom round awards a Boom and immediately ends the round. So take W and H first and leave the Loop Ramp until last. If the ball comes back to the upper flipper during a Boom round, it is often better to let it fall than to take the ramp.
A set number of W-H-O completions lights an extra ball in the lanes, usually two for the first. Once lit it can be collected immediately with a single flip.
Daleks, and Davros
Multiball asks you to shoot a ball through all three gates for a jackpot. The Daleks come in levels: bronze thirty million, silver thirty-five, gold forty, supreme forty-five, emperor fifty.
The level holds as long as you shoot a fresh gate within roughly ten to fifteen seconds. Miss that, or drop from three balls to two, and the level falls back a step, which is the difference between a Davros round and an ordinary emperor jackpot.
A jackpot on emperor Daleks lights all seven Doctors and sets up Davros. Davros pays a hundred million, Double Davros two hundred, Triple Davros three hundred, and Triple repeats from there. Each Davros round asks for one more hit on each Expander target than the last, and Doctor 7 does not help here.
Shooting the centre gate at the start of a multiball reduces the number of jackpots needed to reach Davros by one. And if a multiball ends with Davros lit, your next one starts with Davros at all three gates.
The two quiet scoring ladders
Hang-On starts at 250,000 and climbs by 250,000 every hit, and it carries across the whole game. Doctor 2 doubles it and gives you a little more time to take it. On later ROMs it caps at two million, or four with Doctor 2. Hitting the target when Hang-On is not lit pays a Collision instead, worth a fifth of the Hang-On value.
The six REPAIR targets are the game's most confusing feature and worth ignoring until Doctor 4 is lit, because completing all six without him is very hard. Once complete, every further hit pays a million rising 50,000 a time; with Doctor 4 that becomes two million rising 100,000, which at 4x is eight million a target.
That is why a completed REPAIR bank with Doctor 4 during a multiball is one of the best things that can happen to you: the ball bounces around and hits them by itself.
Second Chance, and the drain not to fight
The locks have a habit of kicking balls straight down the middle. Second Chance, the ball save, is available for two or three seconds after a ball leaves a lock even though nothing flashes to tell you. Let those balls go rather than flailing at them.
The outlanes have no kickback and no rubber posts, and the inlane divider sits unusually low, so this machine drains more than most. Second Chance is also given on the occasions a good ramp shot returns the ball to an outlane.
Bonus is worth attention for a different reason: every shot to the jet bumpers advances the bonus multiplier, it carries between balls, and it can climb close to 40x.
A note on this source
Our copy is version 1.02d, dated 31 March 1993, which is early. It compares behaviour across ROM revisions, and some of what it describes changed later, notably the cap that arrived on the Hang-On value.
Several numbers here depend on machine settings, including how many W-H-O completions light an extra ball and where the Video Mode extra ball appears. The wave patterns above hold only on standard settings.
The sheet is unattributed in our copy.
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.
- Doctor Who rule sheet, version 1.02d, 31 March 1993 (author not recorded in our copy)
