Contact

Think Space Mission on steroids. It’s a widebody with the same kicker saucers outside the flipper elbows, center swinging target, top right horseshoe shot with a center pad shot in its face and no return lanes. But with the widebody, now you’ve got double bottom flippers, but with no wire protectors underneath, so you can lose balls by scissoring between the paired flippers. You also have a recessed shot below the horseshoe on the right side.

Instead of a bottom rebound post between the flippers, Contact has a raiseable center post. The top C-O-N lanes and the left side saucer raise it; the side slings below the saucer and below both right side horseshoes lower it.

The game is somewhat complicated. You have three scoring colors: white, green and yellow, which start at 5K and go up to 40K in steps. Hits on the swinging center target when the light below it is on an “advance color” circle advance that color’s value. The three top letters each advance a color: C advances white, O increases yellow, N increases green value. Completing the drop target 4-bank at the top left scores the white value. The horseshoe shot scores the current green value. The yellow value is only scored via the swinging target when it’s on either of the two indicated “scores yellow” circles.

The CONTACT letters are worthless unless extra balls are on. If EBs are on, I’d still ignore the letters unless all you need are the A and C stand-up targets next to the swinging target. (You can get the two “T”s from the slingshots with normal random ball movement.) Otherwise, their only use in competition is the color value advance the C-O-N letters provide.

The recessed pad targets on the right side of the game advance the lit value of the current color.

End of ball bonus is the current value of the active color only.

The A and C stand-ups outside the bottom swinging target change the current swinging target value, cycling it from left to right; hitting the swinging target scores its value and moves to the next value to the right.

As on Space Mission, ball control is tricky with the saucers behind the flippers and now also the doubled flippers with drain potential. If you have the post up, by all means let the ball settle against it. When the ball comes near the upper flipper of each pair, you can hold them up to try to get the ball to fall into the saucer, but learn where the saucer kickouts go to see if that’s a good idea or not. Since you can’t cradle up to take precise shots, your best strategy is UTAD and just use nudging and flipper deflections to try to keep the ball safe as long as you can.