The pinball game
- Audience-Alienating Premise: If you want to get pinball fans interested, you shouldn't deviate this far from basic pinball terms.
- Catharsis Factor: During "Assault On The Vault", it’s implied the robbers shoot and kill the guards as well as the bank teller. It can be cathartic to see them get their comeuppance if they ended your attempts to get to the vault.
- Narm: The bank robber, full stop.'Ey! Look up and play da board game!
- That One Achievement: Getting all 26 tokens in The Pinball Arcade is listed as a Wizard Goal. The fact that duplicate tokens are possible makes it even more tedious to achieve, since adding one to the collection increases the likelihood of receiving a duplicate token.
- Scrappy Mechanic: TNT Multiball, as you can accidentally trigger it when trying to restart the board game if you get caught by the dog or hiding from the alarm. Worse still is if you get it as a teller award during the board game, which instantly ends your run.
- Vindicated by History: Safe Cracker was so bizarre when it first came out that either people couldn't figure out how to play it, or the people who did hoarded all of the tokens they earned. Since only one run of tokens were ever produced, machines quickly ran out of them. This machine developed more respect when they went on the secondhand market for personal use, however, as the new private owners have their own supply of tokens to use and can learn the game's rules at their own leisure. Of course, the original reasons for this machine flopping still apply today, and Safe Cracker is exceedingly rare to find in public play, though at the very least, The Pinball Arcade had a digital recreation before it got Screwed by the Lawyers, and then Pinball FX3 went on to have its own recreation, so it's not hard to play in the modern age if you're into digital pinball.
The video games
- Most Wonderful Sound: The "ding-dong" chime that plays when you've solved one of Mr. Adams' puzzles.
- That One Puzzle: The first game has a slot machine found in the basement of Crabb Manor. It uses American quarters, you are given two sets of seven, and a children's book tells you which slots must be set at what symbol. And unlike most slot machines, you're given 3 pulls per round. BUT, not only are the odds of winning close to 9000 to 1, according to the hint guide, the payoff is worthless: You're rewarded with a postcard that gives you a drawing at a sweepstakes the developers had when the game first came out. And to top it all off, the slot machine is irrelevant to the game proper, but there's no indication that that is the case.
