Be Excellent To Each Other

jay!, now this pinball fx is causing some serious BEEX competition, great that everyone seems to have bought it, played more xbox this week than last 2 months

Very much

Totally addictive.

I deliberately don't challenge anyone as I don't want to be beaten!

Challenge accepted.

I like the Pasha table a lot. Seems easier than the others, but maybe that's just because I can actually hit the bloody ramps in this one. Got the caravan home safely a couple of times earlier today, which marks the first time I've completed any of the main goals in this game.

Yeah the Pasha one is excellent. In fact, all of the new ones are great. I think I'm struggling with "Rome" the most, though. Anybody else feel the same?

*waits for Zardoz to chime in with a "wasn't built in a day" quip*

Your Mum wasn't built in a day, but your face was.

Ok, over to you guys.

Multiballs are pretty crap in this game, the brutal slope of the table means you've pretty much always got all three balls clamouring for attention near the flippers, which makes the timing and aiming of jackpot shots annoyingly difficult, as it's hard to get one or two of the balls out of the way for a bit to enable proper aimage, and everything goes so fast it's hard to catch the balls on a flipper as well.

I may have to mess about with the Operator's Menu to see if table slope can be adjusted, but I guess this would prevent getting high scores submitted to the friends leaderboard.

Still most excellent overall though, probably didn't need to buy all the tables straight off the bat as still got loads to do on the core tables pack.

With multiballs I just spam the flippers whenever a ball comes near them and hope something good happens. I thought the was what you were supposed to do.

To an extent you have to spam away and hope for the best, but on a real table (or these tables with a more forgiving slope), you'd try and whack one or two balls into an area that'll occupy them for a bit (the jets for example), maybe catch another on a flipper, and then give yourself a good aimed shot with the third.

The balls roll down the flippers so fast (even from a 'catch') that delicate aiming can be very difficult.

It's still a fabby game, I spent ages playing Biolab last night, the rulesets for all the tables I've spent time on are excellent, very reminiscent of what you'd find on a genuine pinball. Extra balls a bit hard to come by though, arguably.

I still say the Pro Pinball series (and arguably even the old Pinball Dreams/Fantasies/Illusions games) are better actual pinball simulations, but FX works very well as a fast-action 'arcadey' pinball if you will.

Yeah, I bought the collection of tables from the first game last night, and am regretting it slightly. Most of them seem a bit dull compared to the new ones, with rather spitefully-positioned ramps. Or I'm just shit at them. Still loving the SFII table, mind, even though I can't seem to finish any of the combos or fights.

BTW, did they completely change the artwork for the Buccaneer table in this version? I'm pretty sure it doesn't look as nice as this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSJUjlWGCE

Just beat my record on the Pasha table by less than a million, purely because of the bonuses I was awarded upon losing my last ball. Hate it when that happens!

I got ten million for one shot, too, and am desperately trying to figure out what I actually did. Saw the 'carpet' minigame for the first time, as well.

I got 20mil for one shot on Pasha, not sure what I did as it was during multiball so it could have been for anything!

Caved and bought the new tables. Only played Biolab and The Deep by virtue of them being addictive as butterscotch flavoured crack.

What does alarm me is Malc and Trousers scores. Like literally fucking hell.

It's essentially awarded for finishing multiball. When you trigger the mode, you have to hit all the ramps and orbits to get the jackpot on it. Once you've gotten all the jackpots you're given the prompt to "hide your treasures". You have to lock the balls in seperate spots on the table. If you manage one, you get 5 million, two gets you 10 million and if you manage to lock all three balls you get the full 20 million bonus.

I must admit I'm quite proud of my Rome score. I was 5th in the world for a bit when I first got it.

Fuck, how the hell did I manage that??!

Had a quick dabble on Secrets of the Deep today and set a half-decent score so I think it'll be Rome next as my scores on that have been hopeless so far.

There's got to be a twist. Maybe it's because you've got such a supple wrist?

No, my wrist is really stiff after loads of wanking off men.

You must be going against the grain, don't force it.

I'd be proud of any of your scores.

I can't do shit on Rome and the table rules are pretty confusing (as are all of the them, they use the worst screenshots to illustrate the rules).

Got any tips?

[quote="Blucey"any tips?[/quote]

Can I give some tips? You're not on my friends list at the moment so I can safely give you a few tips with no risk of you overtaking me (then again anyone can read this but I don't think it's exactly top secret info). And yeah, the rules are confusing, it's almost as if they want you to work half of it out yourself by putting in the hours....


On the Rome table, you can get some relatively easy points by lighting up the blue Conquer letters (shooting the left and right water ramps until all the Conquer letters are lit, then shooting the centre hole) - this let's you choose a garrisson to attack - if you choose Southern, for example, you have a minute to shoot one of three holes (the one with the red circle will give you a million, the one with the red square half a million and the centre hole 250,000). You want to do this five times in total - it's quite generous, you have a minute for the first shot, and each time you get one in any of those holes, the timer resets back to a minute. After you get all five, you can get a further 2 million with the shot from the upper left flipper that lights up like a big lance. (bear in mind that the water ramps will not give you Conquer letters when the "shoot the lit ramps" mode is on, which is almost always when I play. I'm not being much more helpful than the official rules, am I?

That's if the ball doesn't go straight down the middle after going halfway up one of the water ramps......which it will....

Alternatively, hit the captive ball 4 times and then the right water ramp to activate the catapult - hit the launch button when the light flashes red for a hit on the boat, then do the same again....after that hit the captive ball once then the right water ramp for another automatic hit on the ship. Repeat until ship blows up.

You won't beat Malc's score that way, mostly because he was a jammy bastard not to lose the ball too often on his mega-score, but you should get 30 million or so eventually.

My routine on this love-or-hate table is great score on the first ball, straight down the bloody middle on the second followed by straight down the fucking middle on the third.

http://www.vg247.com/2010/11/15/marvel- ... this-year/

Typically, the VG247 folk haven't got a fucking clue, and reading that you'd think it was some sort of standalone game. But worry not! We're getting some sexy Marvel tables for Pinball FX2! Woo!

MOAR TABULZ!!1111

Indeed. I still need to buy the Rocky & Bullwinkle and Earth Defence (or whatever it's called) too. The addition of Super Score is a bloody good way to increase the sales of tables you didn't particularly want in the first place.

Rocky & Bullwinkle is the least played of my tables. Earth Defence is ace.

I've not even tried the Earth Defence table yet - I ran out of points buying the others.

thanks MrC! I went from 3m to 22m or something by rinsing the southern garrison. Ace!

I'll keep going, this table feels better now. Top tips!

those new tables look lovely!

Super Score is indeed a cunning addition - no one else had bought the Excalibur table before FX2 came out - but it's also great for the addicts like me, keeping me playing leapfrog with Malc74 (purely platonically and online).

I generally like all the new bells and whistles, though I could do without the weekly high score thing - starting every game with a pop-up saying "you are 37 points behind Zardoz's weekly high score of 37" is just distracting.

Also looking forward to the new tables....

Yeah, I keep meaning to turn off some of the features. But then I just fire up a game instead.

I've fallen out with the physics in this game, it's just too far off real pinball to be consistently good fun, which is a real shame 'cause I'm an absolute pinball nut, but maybe it's because I like the real thing so much that in the final analysis, FX's physics model has turned me off.

It's too fast, basically, simple as that.

Insane slope that you'd never find on a real table, made tolerable by a teeny-tiny gap between the flippers, and outlanes that are about 10% as hungry as the outlanes on real tables are.

The slingshots are incredibly weedy too (slingshots are the things above the flippers), and don't behave realistically at all. (On real tables they have a brutal habit of firing the ball into an outlane, especially if they bounce back and forth once or twice, so the player has to try and keep the ball away from them most of the time.)

It's an extra-shame because the table design is fantastic, as are the artwork, sound, dot matrix, and rules too - everything's there but they fucked up the most basic thing of all

do the slingshots on extreme get a bit erratic for some people? quite often the left one seems to get stuck.

Poof

I saw that score earlier. Bloody hell.

I've now got the two tables I was missing. Rocky & Bullwinkle seems very generous in dishing out points so hopefully that'll boost my Super Score a bit when I get the hang of it.

OK then one for the uber-geeks only

Real table, set up properly, (not mine, but I did have a TZ a few years ago).

Note how everything behaves on this table, and note how it's a really, really long way away from how Pinball FX behaves, in particular the multiball, the slingshots, the greedy gap between the flippers and the outlanes, the time you can take to put together shots, and just, erm, everything really. (Extra balls are easier to come by as well.)

I so want to like Pinball FX because I so like pinball, and doubtless I'll be playing it more as time goes on, but oh it'd be so easy to fix it and make it truly awesome.

Pay particular attention to the 'POWERBALL' that appears at 4m09s, a real TZ held (IIRC) about 8 pinballs, one of which was the powerball, a special pinball made out of hardened ceramic with a really slippery coating on it, this was the 'loony ball' on this game, but it actually acts like the standard metal pinballs in FX. (The powerball was cycled through a (working!) gumball machine at the back left of the table, so as balls got locked/lost/etc it would work its way through the system and pop out again. The table could tell when the powerball was on its way out due to some clever magnetic resistance detectors at the pop-out points on the table, so it could shout POWER BALL at you before popping it out and activating powerball mode.)

Bizarrely rotated through 90 degrees for some reason, so hopefully you have a supple neck.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1E9up0lmco

Man, I really fucking miss my TZ!

It's bound to behave differently.

IT'S ON ITS FUCKING SIDE!

Choppo, IIRC you can fanny about with the settings of the tables to set them up how you like. I think it stops you posting to the leaderboards though.

Indeed Wullie, they do have operators menus (and actual table set up options), but for that very reason (no leaderboard scores) I haven't touched them - as online leaderboards are so integral to FX and FX2 (and indeed XBLA full stop), and help to make it as much fun as it is.

This is the thing with FX1/2, you can't even say that Zen were trying to make an 'arcadey' version of pinball so the physics decision makes sense, because they've gone to such incredible lengths to replicate everything else that real tables have, right down to the operators menus and 'physical' adjustment options.

Surely video pinball is a pretty niche market anyway (i.e. your audience is paying and playing because they like playing pinball), so I don't understand why they felt the need to speed up/arcadeify/simplify the game of pinball itself - they've gone to so much trouble, so why fumble on something as basic as how real pinball tables actually play?

I'd say that's exactly what they've done. They've taken many of the real aspects of pinball and made them more suitable to a console, so you've got the fancy minigames like Biolab's rotating maze thing and the cannon firing stuff in Rome. Plus they added the ball trails and sped things up a bit. I think if it'd be too authentic you'd have ended up with something like Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection which had a nice collection of tables but most were utterly dry to play for any length of time.

After initially detesting this game I'm now completely in love with it and have bought all the tables and, on most of them, got myself to the top of division two (ie - behind Malc and Trousers).

I'm still not a fan of the help sheets though - fucking vague as anything - but I enjoy the tables. Need to take a look at the achvs soon also.

I like how the achievements often have two ways of unlocking - either by carrying out a task in the game or beating enough of your friends' scores on the table.

Oh fuck off Blucey.

Erm no, you mean mid-table in League One....feel free to add me (MrC863) unless you already have 100 friends, in which case kick one of them off, obviously. No more tips then, though, except that there is that one shot on Rocky & Bullwinkle that gets you 333 million. But I'm not going to tell you about that. And I may have just made that up.

In global terms I'm strictly amateur Rymans League Divison Eight South reserves.

But my friend list is Malc, Trousers, ConsoleMAD (also quite amazing) and then everyone else.

Malc, Trou, ConsM have dropped scores that don't even make sense to me. Truly epic.

Btw, my comment was supposed to be an invitation, not an insult. Anyway, I've just seen Malc's new R&B score, which is a mere half a billion higher than it was last time I looked. I had hoped I'd never have to play that bloody table again, damn you Malc!

I wish people would stop beating my scores.