A tactic generally considered illegal in pinball; it is a relative of the bangback for outlane drains. There are a couple different varieties of death saves, but I'm going to describe the most common one here; it can only be performed on drains via the right outlane.

The principle is similar to the bangback: you want the ball to hit that slanted wall behind the flippers so that it bounces up between the flippers and onto the right flipper. You need a ball that is headed directly for the drain, not bouncing around under the flippers or anything. Hold up the left flipper, and as the ball reaches a point under the right flipper, shove the machine in a semi-circular motion, starting to the right, then toward you and back to the left. If the ball is moving fast enough, you may only need to shove it to the right; the rest of the motion is intended to increase the range of the bounce so that it is both high enough and far enough to get the ball on top of the right flipper.

On a machine with normal tilt settings, this will usually tilt your ball unless you can make it work with just the single shove to the right.

Really fast right outlane drains sometimes death save themselves; experienced pinball players have probably seen this happen at least once. Some games are more apt to produce death saves than others.

At least one pinball machine of the dot-matrix display 1990s variety congratulates you for a "nice death save" anytime the ball triggers an outlane rollover but then does not drain. Milen said that he's read about this belonging to the Jurassic Park pinball, which sounds about right to me.

Rocky and Bullwinkle (1993) by Data East is often quoted as the first pinball machine to recognize and reward Death Saves. Mr. Peabody says, "Good work, Sherman!" and there is an amusing animation of the two displayed on the dot-matrix display.

Source: http://www.pinball.org/rules/rockyandbullwinkle.html

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