Video Pinball

[s1mplehumar]

^ Nice! I need to play before I crash tonight. Great scores you two.

[retrosportsgamer]

Ripley's 39,936,110

Got ya here too, now

I probably won't get to Arabian Nights until the weekend, though...

Well played, sir.

I'll check out these scores tonight.

[dsheinem]

Here are my suggestions for some score threads:

Gorgar (Williams Collection)
Black Knight (Williams Collection)
Pin*Bot (NES version for fun)
Devil's Crush (TG16/PCE/Genesis)
Victory (Gottlieb Collection)
Tee'd Off (Gottlieb Collection)
Rock Fantasy - Extreme Pinball (PS1/PSN/DOS)
Pokemon Pinball Ruby and Sapphire (GBA)

Do enough people have these to make them a viable proposition for some friendly forum competition? Are there games you want to see added or removed? It might be fun to create a list of 10 games or so that everyone can reasonably pick up and compete in. Would a "Pinball of the Month" club - perhaps starting in June - be more appropriate? Is there enough interest?

[BurningDoom]

Pin*Bot (NES version for fun)

I LOVE this game. As a result, I can tell you, that this wouldn't work for competition. The score only goes to 9,999,999; and then it resets to 0 again, which I have done.

[dsheinem]

Pin*Bot (NES version for fun)

I LOVE this game. As a result, I can tell you, that this wouldn't work for competition. The score only goes to 9,999,999; and then it resets to 0 again, which I have done.

we could use the honor system (e.g. I cycled the high score X number of times + final screen score...)

Do you like the "Video Pinball of the Month" idea? If I see a good 5-6 people interested, I'll get a thread going for discussion of titles for the rest of 2012...

[retrosportsgamer]

I have Pinball FX (and the free FX2 upgrade just to be able to DL new tables) on Xbox360 and downloaded Zen Pinballfor the PS3 last night.

Is it just me or are the load times horrible and the ball movement a little iffy?

Pinball Arcade just seems leaps better in my short experience.

[c0wb0y]

I have Pinball FX (and the free FX2 upgrade just to be able to DL new tables) on Xbox360 and downloaded Zen Pinballfor the PS3 last night.
Is it just me or are the load times horrible and the ball movement a little iffy?
Pinball Arcade just seems leaps better in my short experience.

I agree, the load times are quite long for PinFX2.

I read an article/saw a video someplace where the Zen studio is adapting the game for longer ball times since you are playing on a console at home.
Real pinball makers have to balance the difficulty of a pin with player enjoyment. A machine that is too tough will not likely get players' coins. But if you made the game too easy, operators would not like giving away too many free games due to high scores.
The same economics don't apply to video pinball. High score and player enjoyment can be the only concerns since you're playing on your own device or console. Zen narrowed the gap between flippers, added all the animations and things that could never happen on a real pin, and made the physics what they are.

In PinFX2 the ball seems "heavy" to me. If you make a bad flip and it doesn't go far, it seems to drop towards the bottom of the table with an unrealistic increased speed/extra gravity. It seems like the ball has really strong spin at times. But the heavy feel seems to allow for better better ball control at the low end of the playfield. Maybe I'm just imagining it.

I play a lot of actual pinball, and Pinball Arcade is the closest to reality I've played yet. It's not perfect, but very enjoyable. I am looking forward to the first new table releases on XBL.

[ExedExes]

Pin*Bot (NES version for fun)

I LOVE this game. As a result, I can tell you, that this wouldn't work for competition. The score only goes to 9,999,999; and then it resets to 0 again, which I have done.

Not exactly. I have the game and I got this back in 2006. The score has not rolled over for me. On the name entry screen, it will cut off the first digit of the score to only display in millions, otherwise in-game and elsewhere it displays just fine.





One night I just sat down with it and spent a couple hours at it, making a mess of solar system trips (at least 3), saw every single colored table, and stacked a whole mess of extra balls. Good times.

[BurningDoom]

Pin*Bot (NES version for fun)

I LOVE this game. As a result, I can tell you, that this wouldn't work for competition. The score only goes to 9,999,999; and then it resets to 0 again, which I have done.

Not exactly. I have the game and I got this back in 2006. The score has not rolled over for me. On the name entry screen, it will cut off the first digit of the score to only display in millions, otherwise in-game and elsewhere it displays just fine.





One night I just sat down with it and spent a couple hours at it, making a mess of solar system trips (at least 3), saw every single colored table, and stacked a whole mess of extra balls. Good times.

Huh, guess it does show it. Never made it to that screen when it happened because I was using the Game Genie and using infinite balls cheat (I wanted to see how many times I could make the gameplay table change colors and enemies). On the actual play screen, where it shows your score below the gameplay field, it resets to zero.

[Hobie-wan]

Huh, guess it does show it. Never made it to that screen when it happened because I was using the Game Genie and using infinite balls cheat (I wanted to see how many times I could make the gameplay table change colors and enemies). On the actual play screen, where it shows your score below the gameplay field, it resets to zero.

If you're playing with a cheat device or non-standard equipment, there's no telling what other changes could be going on.