Zardoz wrote:
Atrocity Exhibition wrote:
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
Poof
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=d1E9up0lmcoMan, I really fucking miss my TZ!