People who own an xbox 360 know how awesome game achievements are.

When owning a pinball machine, it can get boring after a while trying to beat your high score. Some people will dismiss some fun games because the best way to get the high score is to keep hitting the same ramp over and over again.

Of course, a game's 'wizard' mode can give you a fun objective that doesn't have anything to do with a score, but it's only one objective, and not every game has a wizard mode or jackpot.

So, I suggest that we make our own list of 'achievements' for pinball machines that we own, with a number of 'gamer points' attached to each achievement, in order to reflect the difficulty. Most games have a total of 1000G, but not always. Also, each achievement has a 'name'.

I'll start off with a game that I own:
White Water:
250G - Are we there yet? - Complete the vacation jackpot
100G - Welcome to Wet Willy's - Finish Wet Willy's mode, i.e. get the 200M jackpot by hitting all the Wet Willy arrows, and the moving arrow.
100G - Spin cycle - Get six balls into the whirlpool during the Whirlpool Challenge
100G - Look... a cow? - Take a picture of a cow (Hit Big Foot Bluff enough times in a Big Foot Hot Foot)
100G - Triple Jackpot! - At the start of WHITEWATER multiball, get all three balls to go down Insanity Falls
100G - AHHHHHH! - Get the WHITEWATER multiball jackpot during '5x playfield'
100G - Moolti-millions! - Hit multi-millions 3 times in a row.

Feel free to get even more creative and challenging than what I came up with. While you can make an achievement for hitting a certain score, I'd try to avoid it since it would kinda defeat the purpose (an objective not related to the score). Eventually, if this idea 'clicks' then we can include our score in our sigs

Update: I just realized that since there are fewer things to do in an EM, they should probably limit themselves to 200G-500G, like how Xbox Live Arcade games only have 200G instead of the usual 1000G. Use your judgement.

Update: Changed the points assigned to "Welcome to Wet Willy's" based on Vengeance's suggestion.

I guess I'm lucky, competition is what drives me to do better, trying to chart out achivments for me isn't really needed.  Striving to be a better player is enough, it's not allways about the high score it's about being able to play well consitently, figuring out the best stratiges and when to use them and how to best take advantage of your understanding of the rule sets on each machine.  But then again I'm lucky enough to have a league that runs weekly here so I get to compete every week.  

But just to keep with the theme of the post I'd tweek your points a bit, Vacation Jackpot and Wet Willys are not on the same level.  Hell I think I've made it more times to Wet Willys then I've had a tripple jackpot during multiball.  

I agree that getting the high score is the most fun, especially in a competitive environment. But it's also fun to explore other areas of the game. There's no reason why we can't have both!

For me, just not making a total fool of myself in front of a pin is an achievement!!! Ask anyone who saw me play Heavy Metal Meltdown at jim's place a while back.

A crowning moment.

OK... seriously... here are a few for me:

1- Rolling over 3-fold the score on a Rolling Stones... when I was 8!!! Everybody was cheering behind me. Cool moment. The pin was set to difficult, so no bonus features were carried over. I managed the following:

- get up to 5x on each ball
- maxed the bonus points on each ball
- machine was set on 3-ball, and I won the maximum of 3 extra balls
- won a total of 21 credits through various hits (2 for replay scores on each rollover, 3 high score credits on each rollover, and I hit the Specials on both horseshoe lanes a few times)

...OK, not as extensive as anything on Whitewater, but a great game nonetheless.

I did rollover the score 6 times over on my Space Invaders, but it was set at liberal at that time and on 5-ball, so I don't count it as much.