Silverball guide · Led Zeppelin
The song is the clock
Song modes are not a menu of equals and they do not wait for you. Each runs for exactly as long as the track does, and when the music ends so does your claim on that record.
You are playing against a running time
A song is chosen at the start of every ball and then runs continuously, through multiballs and wizard modes alike, until the track finishes. Then it ends and the next song on the list begins.
The target is five gold records to complete the song and ten to go platinum. Records come from record sales, and sales come from shooting the lit arrows. Nothing here can be banked for later, which makes Led Zeppelin unusually unforgiving of standing around deciding.
Watch the cue lights, not the arrows
The lit shots change with the musical sections of the song, and a song that is all shots during the chorus can drop to a single ramp during the solo. Before each change, white cue lights blink briefly to show you where the next section is going.
That is a couple of seconds of advance warning, and using it is most of the difference between a good song and a wasted one. Every lit shot you make also raises the value of the ones after it.
The four target banks are the scoring engine
Each bank does a different job. The two-bank at the far left arms a ball save at the left outlane. The ROCK bank qualifies the locks for Zeppelin Multiball. Completing all four lights Icarus X at the centre target.
Treating the banks as things you hit on the way past is the common mistake. They are the multiplier.
Combos, and what Icarus X actually is
While the combo inserts are lit, hitting any target bank, lit or not, completes the combo and raises that bank's multiplier by a tenth for each shot in the combo. Icarus X is the four bank multipliers multiplied together.
Complete all four banks and the Icarus target gives you that number as a playfield multiplier for fifteen seconds, plus five more for every side flipper shot you made before or during it. Shots to the Icarus target while it runs recalculate the multiplier upward.
Band Boosts are free combos
Press the action button when it flashes green and the game completes your current combo for you, at whichever bank has the lowest multiplier, and pays five times the combo value. You start every game with one.
Save three and you get a Super Band Boost, worth ten times and raising two banks instead of one. Inside a multiball the ordinary boost spots the Icarus target and the super one simply adds a ball.
Tours are chosen, and they get harder on purpose
Tours start at the left eject once qualified by shots to the right ramp, one more each time. You choose which tour to play, each has its own set of objectives and its own multiball at the end of them.
Every subsequent tour in the same game adds an objective to the list and a ball to the multiball that follows, up to four objectives and five balls. Each objective you tick off is effectively a lock.
Zeppelin Multiball rewards combos, twice
Three left ramps lock the balls. Four jackpots start lit, and taking one lights a timed double jackpot at a shot you can combo into from where the ball is going: left orbit into the upper flipper, left ramp or centre ramp into the right orbit, right ramp into the left eject.
When all four are done the super lights at both the left eject and the upper flipper for the total of everything since the last one, and the side shot pays twice what the easier eject does. Completing LED, ZEP and ROCK while it is lit multiplies the super up to four times. Three Icarus targets add a ball.
The side shot is a menu of supers
Every shot to the side flipper starts the next super in a fixed order: spinner, pops, slings, then ramps. Each lasts for a set number of hits and dies with the ball, but finishing one permanently doubles what it is worth the next time you start it.
Eight of these lights an extra ball at the left eject, and every side shot also buys five more seconds of Icarus X. It is the least obvious high-value shot on the machine.
Where it is all heading
Five completed songs lights Mothership Multiball at the right orbit. All four tour multiballs played lights World Tour at the left eject. All ten songs completed lights Top of the Charts, which exists to drag your unfinished songs up to platinum, and getting every song to platinum opens the last mode.
On the Premium and LE there is also the Electric Magic spinner, raised by completing the LED and ZEP banks, which leads to two multiballs of its own that the Pro does not have.
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.
- Led Zeppelin rule sheet (author not recorded in our copy)
