It’s a Pinball Thread. There has to be a Twist!

[Becksworth]

Somewhere between television and meatspace games lies Pinball. I’m going to err on this forum since most pinball games nowadays are digital representations of the Pinball tables of yore. Discuss pinball (both real and vidya game forms) here.

Anyway, I was in a pinball mood, so I went looking on the eShop and saw that Zacharia had its tables 60% off this week and bought a few. Being a Yankee, I’m largely unfamiliar with Zacharia (were the physical tables ever distributed in the U.S.?), so I don’t know what to expect.

 

[lincolnic]

Before the pandemic shut them down, we used to have an amazing pinball spot here in NYC (called, appropriately, Modern Pinball NYC). The owner wanted it to be a pinball museum as much as an arcade, so they'd have machines from all over pinball's history. If you were interested in how a particular machine worked, they'd open it up and show you. Or if you just wanted to play, you simply paid your entry fee and played as much as you wanted. No quarters needed, no time limits. I really hope they're able to reopen someday soon.

 

[Becksworth]

Finally got a chance to try the Zacharia tables I bought out. So far they seem more like Gottlieb style tables over the Williams/Bally tables and more modern stuff inspired by them, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The Zacharia app though seems a little inferior to Pinball FX 3 or Pinball Arcade though, as I experienced some stuttering occasionally on tables, and the ui was a bit messy. The HD rumble was unexpectedly good though, so I might need to go back to the other two to compare them.

 

[nataeryn]

Where I live, we have a local Pinball Museum. They've got mostly older tables, but also a few of the more modern ones. A couple years ago when i was there on a whim, the owner showed up and challenged anyone there to a score competition on one of the 4 oldest tables. It took me an hour, but I did finally top his high score and won a poster.

My wife really enjoys pinball in digital format and plays weekly tournaments on a discord group. She's probably better than me at pinball most days, but the folks she plays against are absolutely amazing players that can record scores every week that I might get lucky and be able to get close to once or twice in a long while of playing. apparently these folks used to get together and play in person, but had shifted to the digital format because of the pandemic. My wife says they are mostly older gentlemen and that they had never used discord before the pandemic forced them to.

I'd like to heard what tables people really like. I like Medieval Madness a lot. I like Funhouse too (my wife and I like to shout some of Rudy's lines at our dogs)

 

[Kirin]

I don't have a lot of pinball experience, but I remember getting halfway decent at High Speed because there was one in my college dorm lounge for quite a while.

 

[John]

I really enjoyed the Pinball Arcade app on iPad, and was sad that they lost the Bally/Williams license over to Zen Pinball. Pinball Arcade's physics may not have been the most accurate, but it always felt better than Zen Pinball's. I still think the Pro Pinball games had the most accurate ball physics of them all, which doesn't necessarily make them the most fun.

I like Monster Bash and Twilight Zone as the pinnacle of modern pinball, and considered getting one of the new Chicago Gaming versions of Monster Bash at home before coming to my senses. My wife and I were visiting the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas a few years back, and were talking to one of the operators who was making some tweaks to one of the machines. My wife asked if we should consider getting a table at home, and the operator said, "Do you enjoy playing Pinball, or fixing Pinball machines? If it's the former, don't get one".

 

[jpfriction]

Champion Pub is my favorite. I think I first played it at California extreme or maybe that pinball museum in Alameda but I've seen it a few places. You go through a handful of training sessions like wailing on a speed bag or jumping rope with the ball and then you fight a big dude in the middle of the table by smacking him in the face, doing different moves based on whatever ramps you use, etc. Very cool. I have the digital version on my ipad but definitely missing something without all the physical moving parts and the physics feel off because the ball pretty much immediately drops down the exact middle of the playing field every time I land a punch. If I ever buy an actual machine, it'll be that one.

Campus restaurant I worked at back in college had Revenge from Mars, Austin powers and then the first south park one and those were all pretty stellar too. I like the ones with lots of objectives.

 

[John]

Oh yeah, back before COVID we visited the Galloping Ghost arcade outside of Chicago. They had just opened up a dedicated pinball building down the street, so we briefly checked it out. They had a prototype of a Predator game that never went to full production, allegedly due to the creator never actually owning the license to begin with. It also had some technical issues, the ball would get stuck from time to time. Still cool to see a super rare thing.

 

[jpfriction]

Galloping Ghost is the best.

 

[Becksworth]

Thread Necro. Has anyone looked into virtual pinball table builds? Just curious what options there are.

 

[Torzelbaum]

I've heard that Zen Studios has something like that on Steam but I haven't played any of their stuff so I can't vouch for it.

 

[jpfriction]

Thread Necro. Has anyone looked into virtual pinball table builds? Just curious what options there are.

Atgames has a reasonably priced one that looks really nice but apparently Zen tables are a little too laggy on it,

I’ve monkeyed a bit with VPX, but I don’t know that I’ll ever want to dedicate the space to a table. I’m fine just going to the pinball bar every now and then.