Be Excellent To Each Other

This could turn out to be a brilliant pinball collection if they keep the quality up and keep the DLC coming.

As much as I've loved Visual Pinball over the years, the recreations were always limited by the software, plus the fact it was never really designed as an emulation tool so had the VPINMAME integration which was a bit of a faff.

Arabian Nights is a case in point, the genie's lamp thing in Visual Pinball was a real botch job (as best as could be implemented, it was simply constrained by the tools available), but on Pinball Arcade it works perfectly.

I just hope they get the licensing sorted out for some of the big names, off the top of my head:

Twilight Zone
ST:TNG
Addam's Family
Demolition Man
Indiana Jones
Tommy
Star Wars

And there are loads more.

Only played the Believe it or Not table and it's good stuff so far. It'd be nice to have the nearest friend high score visible while you're playing or notification when you pass someone, but not a big deal.

You like that? I think 90% of my games end because I get nervous when that window pops up!

The whole interface here is very 'last gen', though...

Well, found this all a bit dull to be honest, compared with the funness that is Pinball FX2.

It looks rather poor in comparison, too. I care not if a table's 'realistic' or not - the other game has that ace Roman table, and the Merlin one, and Spiderman, and Wolverine... and so on.

Then again it has been out for longer, so this new one needs more tables I suppose.

PFX2 isn't a pinball game though, it's a video game using a sort of 'pinball format' if you will. And I don't mean that PFX2 has stuff that would be impossible to recreate in a real pinball table, but the fundamental fact that it's just flat out WRONG as a pinball game.

Well okay, but, the realism thing doesn't interest me, you know? It's just about hammering the flippers anyway (I accept you will disagree here!), so for me, in that respect, the other game is better for being more fun.

My nerd circuits have overloaded!

Pinball is a game of strategy, skill, planning and of course luck.

The fact that PFX2 reduces it to 'hammering the flippers' says it all really

But why should it bother you that I prefer the other game?

I've explained my reasons as to why, so I don't see the problem.

What bothers me is that your avatar is making me crave Creme eggs.

Appropriate, for a tasty Easter treat!

Black Hole is a bastard. I can't even tell what I'm hitting to open the gate for re-entry, and half of the time I fail anyway.

How do you start Harem Multiball on the Arabian Knights table?

Its the only one i'm missing from the basic goals however there are two ways to do it

1) When you do not have tiger loops enabled the other light is harem , so send the ball round that loop 5 times to start the multiball
2) Hit the ball into the 'secret' entrance to the harem 3 times (the secret entrance is at the back of the genie figure)

Ace, thanks!

I've just played the demo of this and boy, is it different to Pinball FX.

It's proper pinball and I like it!

I absolutely love Black Hole. I feel like I'm in an arcade when I'm playing it. Neon carpet and everything.

I still love Pinball FX but the tables in Pinball Arcade are far superior and once the additional tables come out (ST:TNG - dribble) comes out then I can see Pinball FX being confined to the shelf for only the very occasional outing.

The biggest bonus for me is the games themselves don't last 20-25 minutes a go. Sometimes on Pinball FX you can actually get bored of playing when you're 8 balls in and grinding away trying to get within a few hundred million of MrC or Malc74. A good game on Pinball Arcade lasts nothing like that and you can still rack up a decent score. An exceptional game can last that long but it's such a rare thing that you embrace it when it happens rather than sigh.

This is yet another reason why PFX2 isn't a proper pinball game.

During the time I spent with it I had some pretty long games, and seemed to be doing pretty well, then when I finally lost all my balls I'd see Trousers and co were fifty gazillion points ahead of me, and I did think to myself 'How long were they fucking playing for?'

One has to remember that pinball was always a commercial enterprise, they weren't designed so that you could play for six years off a single 50p piece, but they were designed to reward the skilful player with extra balls and extra credits, (not that extra credits matter so much in free play), but these weren't dropped into your lap. It was also possible to get flat out unlucky sometimes, and watch a crucial last ball disappear down the sidelanes without you getting a single flipper on it, this was all part of what gave pinball its unique character.

Take that away (as PFX2 basically did) and TBH there's not much left of an actual PINBALL game. I'm not saying PFX2 is flat-out poor or that it can't be enjoyed as a video game, but it is a bad pinball game.

I bought this. I know bugger all about pinball, and sometimes get frustrated at a piece of bad luck (ejecting balls from features straight down the gap - aarrgghh!), but this is ace. Excellent fun, and even has tables of extreme simplicity (Black Hole). I've only had a couple of turns, and expect to see all my scores ground into dust, but I'm going to enjoy learning the secrets of various tables.

I'm learning to embrace sheer bad luck myself at the moment - no free 'shoot again' time here! If you launch your ball and it heads straight for the gutter, tough shit.

What's yer Gamertag, Yog?

Klatrymadon, mate. I think my friends list is at 100, but I'll have a comb through it and give someone the Spanish archer.

Funnily enough I sent out a friend request to Curiosity just this afternoon when his friend count was at 99.....talk about bad timing

There are plenty of people on my list who can be culled.

But still, stupid that the limit is STILL 100.

Very annoying because you see a name you dont quite recognize and think you might bump them and then later find out its someone you didnt want to lose :-(

Especially, considering it was one of the main reasons for turning off the original Xbox Live service.

The main reason given, that is. Man, I feel so disillusioned with corporations right now.

This is such a great 'I have 15 minutes spare' game.

Had a corking go on the Theatre of Magic last night while the wife was settling the child. Unfortunately for her I did better than expected and she had to sit and watch me play for a bit. Got three multiballs without losing a life, and maxed out all the regular goals on my first play on the table.

Was unconnected to Live though, so as to avoid notifications when watching telly from a memory stick.

Seems they had some issues with the Apple cert process for the new tables but they are out now on Android :



I assume IOS and XBLA to follow at some point.

And PS3 / Vita version should be out now.

You can turn off notifications during video playback in the settings.

I'm third on the Black Hole friends leaderboard!

I just got 39mill on Arabian Nights.

I was over 30m off the first ball, and then both 2 and 3 took unlucky bounces and lasted under ten seconds. Gah!

I fucking love this game. It's excellent. Wish the UI wasn't designed by a five year old, though.

It's great. I think I've always loved Pinball games, just not known it till now.

I've definitely always loved pinball games, but this one seems to matter more because it's so faithful to the real thing. As others have said, there was always something missing with Pinball FX, as good as it is. It's a video game. This is a proper pinball sim.

I'm looking forward to coming across one of the featured tables in real life, because I'll actually know what I'm doing for a change.

I've still only played two of the four tables in this, but I would like to play a 'Believe it or not' table in real life now. However, are there many places that have pinball tables these days? I certainly don't know of any local to me, but I wondered if maybe any of the seaside towns still have some or they'd been replaced by fruit machines and the like.

I've been looking myself for tables in York. There are two according to the internet. And one in some guy's front room...

http://www.pinformer.co.uk/find.pl?town ... ine_id=226

Bit of a shame, but I'll be checking the two out that are in pubs. As is the case with everything, there are plenty down south, particularly as you say in the seaside resort towns on the south coast.

I'm going to buy one eventually, any way...

Ooh! Twilight Zone in Farley. Few in Scarborough as well... Might have to organise a day trip.

I wonder if it's acceptable to go to a pub on your own just to play a pinball table.

I had a go on the Ripley's table last night. At no point did I even have the vaguest clue as to what I was doing.

Sometimes the condition is not really that great though :-(

About 3 years ago there was a "Scared Stiff" in the Sutton Scottney service station on the A34 that i used to stop by every so often however it lasted about 4 or 5 months before the flippers stopped working correctly and other bits got broken :-(

There also used to be a nice selection of them in Southsea (in the various arcades) although those are all gone , and the last time I took a trip to Hayling Island again the machines were in a very poor state of repair.

I think that was always one of the issues with real pinball - they need semi regular maintenance - whereas a fruit machine will keep going as long as money can go in and out and at least the start button works and an arcade machine will last for a long time as long as the controls function reasonably well a Pinball machine needs someone to actually look after them.

http://www.pinformer.co.uk/find.pl?town ... ine_id=226

Four tables in Scouseland, two of which have problems with the flippers or lost balls not being recognised, and one of which is a "waste of time".

The saddest thing I've ever seen was an Outrun sit down arcade machine, in bits in the corner of an arcade.

Well... perhaps not the saddest, but it was pretty sad.

True. My local pub replaced their Terminator 3 pinball machine with a rubbishy Street Fighter upright cabinet. Mind you, last time I tried the pinball table, I didn't even get a ball, which made for a pretty low-scoring game.

Maybe I have bad eyes (eye test said I don't need glasses) or a shit TV (yes) but I found it impossible to see where the ball was on the Arabian Nights table against the busy artwork.

None of the camera angles seem "high" enough either.

I agree, it's definitely the most busy of the tables and I really struggled with it at first - particularly after playing the relatively simple Black Hole - but if you play it some more, you'll find that it doesn't bother you any more.

It does not do a good job of explaining things but there are about 6 different views which you can cycle round in two different groups.

There is a 'follow the action' mode where you have 3 different views (cycle round with B) and then there is 3 overhead views (select with A i think then B to go round them) - I'd much rather just have some way to select the views and hit one button to go around them all but have a play around and see if you find one that works for you.

Am I missing anyone off my friends list who's playing this?

I may well have been defriended by a few BEEXers over time as I've hardly been on XBLA in the last 12-18 months and/or because you think I'm an obnoxious PC spod cunt.

If you have defriended me for either of the above reasons (or have never friended me at all) and are playing this excellent pinball game please could you add:

ChoppoTurnip

as a friend for maximum leaderboard score sharage. (I've only put in a half-decent score on ToM up to now though.)

I'll send out requests to anyone posting in this thread who isn't on my list so if you see a request from ChoppoTurnip, that's me!

As for the Ripley's table, it should be noted that it was designed by Pat Lawlor, so its insanely complex ruleset makes total sense since he was responsible for some of the most complicated (and therefore rewarding) pinballs ever, including the epically brilliant Twilight Zone. (I owned a real Twilight Zone table for about three years and I can honestly say it took me a few months before I genuinely grasped all the nuances of the ruleset, but by christ it was satisfying to really master that table.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Lawlor

Therefore, expect to be confused by Ripley's for a while - (I certainly was/am, but now I realise it's by Pat Lawlor I'm definitely going to stick at it) - but if it's anything like his other tables the genius of the design should start to show through pretty sharpish.

The loss of real pinballs to play over the years is a massive shame. When I first came to the IOM I'd say about 50% of the pubs here had one (a couple of pubs even had two), this has dwindled and dwindled over the years, and the last one sited in a pub disappeared about four or five years ago

Ultimately as far as the operators are concerned they're a pain in the arse. They need regular maintenance, they're prone to having bits break and thus getting turned off and not taking any money (there's no getting away from the physical nature of them), they take up loads of space and they're bastard noisy - so unless they're harvesting a pretty penny in the cashbox they make precious little commercial sense.

Also, they require some specialist knowledge to keep them running properly, I remember a pub here had a table that was 'losing' balls on a regular basis. The software in pinballs is suprisingly and ingeniously adaptive* so it works around stuff like this as best it can, but after a certain number of balls had got stuck in this one location the table simply went into 'ball search' mode and couldn't be played. The engineer who came out to it every other week would just release the balls from where they were stuck, turn the table back on, and call it 'fixed', until the balls got stuck again and the cycle repeated.

In the end I wrote a short description of exactly what the problem was (a weak solenoid and a cracked ball launch chute) and left it behind the bar for them to give to the engineer. And what did he do the next time he came out to the table? Release the stuck balls and turn it back on......

No wonder they were making fuck all money, but of course the operator just sees the bottom line and removes the table from service, rather than realising that if they ACTUALLY KEPT THE THE FUCKING THING WORKING PROPERLY it would have a fair chance to make some profit.


* For example, if a single switch or opto isn't triggered for a certain numbers of games, the software assumes that the switch is broken, flags it as inactive, logs an error for the operator maintenance mode, and will then attempt to work around it. A simple case might be a loop that has a rollover switch at the beginning, middle and end. If the ball triggers the three switches in order the software knows that a successful loop shot has been made. The switch in the middle might only be used for specific features, or to trigger some sort of 'halfway house' sound effect or animation.

If the middle switch in the loop ceases to function, the table will no longer know the status of the ball after the beginning switch is triggered - (did it get as far as the middle or not? the table doesn't know) - but if the beginning switch is triggered and this is followed by the end switch, the software will assume that a loop shot has been made, and award the loop shot, even though the middle switch in the loop never 'called in'.

If you're ever playing a real table and the software seems to 'catch up' sometimes with what you've done, chances are that a switch is out somewhere and the software is trying to extrapolate what's happened from the inputs it's received.

When I bought my ST:TNG table it was really badly shagged and had been dreadfully neglected, but what amazed me about it was how successfully the software was able to compensate for all the switches and optos that were broken and still provide a reasonable game.

Took me ages to restore that table to its former glory!


FINAL NOTE (I promise) - Good Twilight Zone tables now sell for around £8000. I wish I'd kept mine...... If you want a genuine appreciating asset, get a well liked pinball table and look after it.

Have you seen the film Special When Lit, AE? Worth a watch?