                                Quicksilver
                      A Visual Pinball adaptation by 
        Joe Entropy (Mercurial programmer, joe_entropy@hotmail.com)

                        Release 1.0, 10 July, 2002

Thanks for downloading my table and taking time to read the doc. If more 
people read the doc, more people would know what a dork I am.

Please don't modify any of the files in this zip without the express 
permission of the author or shapely naked women with yellow skin and no 
hair will come after you. Uh... well, actually that would be kind of 
cool... OK, so don't modify any of these files or shapely naked women with 
yellow skin and no hair will _not_ come after you. I will cave to popular 
consent and allow files to be added to the zip file (such as flyer jpgs) as 
long as they are apropos (such as medical papers describing links between 
jaundice and nakedness in shapely women with alopecia).


Version 1 notes
To get help with game-specific keystrokes at any time while the game is 
running, press F1.

Boy, aren't the playfield graphics terrible? I was held up for a long time 
because I couldn't take good pictures of my own game. And even if I did 
have them, I have very little patience for detailed graphic work (not to 
mention sound and table design). So, faced with the choice of releasing the 
game with not so hot graphics or working on it for _another_ year, I chose 
to release it now. I'll beef up the graphics in some future version. Also, 
of the four pinball games I own, Quicksilver is currently the only one that 
is completely working, so I have no intention of stripping the playfield so 
I can get some pictures.

This is probably one of the first tables where the sound isn't horribly 
compromised. I did cut a corner with the bonus sound, which escalates 
slightly with each 1000 points collected... I chose not to include all 450 
individual sounds. In that mythical future version I mentioned above, I may 
add more of the bonus sounds. The real game also stops the background sound 
when another sound is being made and restarts it at the very end of said 
sound. The difficulty/benefit ratio on that was a little too high, so I 
didn't bother.

As always, the preset high score belongs to Mighty Joe Entropy, my younger 
alter-ego, from the game when I played it over 20 years ago at the Sega 
Center in Fox Hills Mall, Culver City, California. This is actually a 
pretty respectable score, though I have beaten it on my own game.

Sadly, Quicksilver is not supported under VPM, so it may be a while before 
an emulated version surfaces. Although I have downloaded the VPM code as a 
prelude to see why QS doesn't work, I and everyone else know that I may get 
around to doing that some time next decade... cheez, it took me over a year 
to finish _this_ game. Destruk has suggested that Stern's last game, 
LazerLord, may use the same roms because it has the same playfield design. 
I can't really verify this, since the only picture I could find of LL is a 
crappy black & white flyer pic. Based on that, the playfields look similar, 
but I have tried LL under VPMTest and the rules appear significantly 
different. I will give it another try and see if there's something I 
missed...




Heh heh... 'mercurial'... get it? I swear, I'm too cleaver for my own good.
