While we don’t cover a lot of redemption pieces here, we have done so every once in a while. I haven’t really heard about any new ones this year, which is odd in that we have seen more video game announcements than redemption, thus another norm that’s been flipped on it’s head.
This comes to us from LAI Games, whose last release was the video title Outnumbered. While the company hasn’t been big on licenses over the years, they have occasionally dipped their toe into that pool, and that is the case for this upcoming coin pusher game, Angry Birds Coin Crash. Given that the pandemic still has many places shut down, they do not anticipate shipping this one until August 2021, with a hope that they’ll show it at Bowl Expo (June 20-24th) and Amusement Expo (just pushed back from May to June 29-30th). This isn’t the first time that Angry Birds have graced the arcade scene in an official capacity – there was an AG videmption title back in 2012 released through ICE that many of you have probably seen and played out there.
Here’s a trio of cabinets that use a linking marquee – artwork is always subject to change of course:
Now I’ll readily admit that I’m no expert at coin pushers – the only time I’ve played them is at trade shows, but while they can look a bit busy at first glace, they’re really quite straight forward. This one features some standard pusher tropes – drop coins down a pinboard by timing shots, accumulate coins around the pusher area and collect ticket earnings from what drops. But it also has some new additions to stand out.
Perhaps the first and most obvious one are the coin towers. I’ve seen these before, but I believe it’s still a relatively new concept (pusher fans feel free to correct me there). The game builds these cool looking towers of coins in the center that slowly get pushed along, with the ultimate goal resulting in a satisfying collapse of the tower once pushed over the edge. You can also have multiple towers on the field if played right, but note that there are three coin catchers beyond the edge – it only counts if they fall through the center.
Another element to this one are the “cards” – not as in cards that are vended out to the player, but what are basically special targets that you want to drop the coins through. The three cards are: Coins (drops more coins onto the playfield), Tickets (rewards you with more tickets) and Tower (does both the Coins and Tickets cards while building up the coin tower). I’ll let LAI’s supplied explanation go further:
Once the tower meter is full, the player races against a tower timer to spam the pin board with coins in an attempt to get as many tower cards as possible to earn bonus spins.
Once the tower timer reaches zero, the player can collect their bonus spins and enter the mini game to add coins to their tower, which gets built in front of their eyes and pushed onto the playfield. The more bonus spins they’ve earned, the bigger the tower!
Then the game goes back into normal play mode, where they can work to push the tower over the edge for a massive ticket win!
To better convey how this all works, LAI also sent along some gameplay footage, which I’ve edited into this video below:
If you are into coin pusher games, what do you think about this one?
(Thanks again to LAI for providing details and media)
New for the western market, sure, but coin towers are old hat for medal games.
I really want someone to take a chance on bringing more complex medal games to the western market because they are *cool as hell*.
And I’d really like to see them avoid the pitfall of redemption. Honestly medal games are cool enough you don’t need tickets to make them engaging.
I think that this is a step in that direction, much like Injustice and (the failed) Capcom Mario Party games have been trying to adapt those games for the US market. Unfortunately, there’s just no way they’d do them without redemption here though :/