Pinball: Next Gen

awesome thread. i'm looking forward to giving TPA a whirl. zen pinball for ios is the first pinball simulation i've played in decades and it's been a real go-to game on the ipad. i think the physics are both better than what i've played before (not played TPA yet), but also boring. this goes hand in hand with the table designs -- some are interesting and some are not, but almost all of them are ridiculously rampy. so, the ball slots into the ramps like a slot racer and although sometimes you'll get a return ball from a ramp entrance, play is usually fast and focused on endless ramp-hitting. bumpers are not only weak but usually nearly insignificant, kind of a reverse from the tables i used to play growing up. that's really cool that TPA modeled Bride of Pinbot, that's probably my all-time favorite game (not a major expert, just had a couple arcades in my neighborhood growing up). so yeah, while i hope that TPA can offer a more realistic experience, i do appreciate what ZP brings to the err table: fast fun, no bugs, fast loading, lots of tables -- imo best are probably Epic Quest (persistent xp gain system, would love to see more of this - modernization that can be useful), Tesla, maybe Excalibur. Blade is nice for being less rampy. Thanks for the tips tho guys!

 

Broke down and bought the discounted season pass.

Flipper lag appears to be radically reduced over the PS3 version. Table quality appears to the same however. For example Black Hole is still totally broken, possibly even more so than the PS3 version was (camera problems, balls getting stuck in the reversed table, etc.). They also appear to have lost the ability to compare your scores against your friends scores which is lame.

Cheers

 

Which version did you get? I haven't noticed bugs on the pc version, but on their facebook page I do see people complaining about various bugs on other versions. Not being able to compare scores to your friends is really weak, that's half the fun! Not sure why that's not working for you, maybe it's also a version specific bug.

Also has anyone compared the ps4 version of pinball arcade to pc? I don't have access to a ps4 to check myself, but I've read that currently the ps4 version is supposed to be the best looking version with it's visual enhancements coming to the pc at a later date. I'm curious how much better it looks.

 

Night and day, really. PC version looks like the PS3 version, PS4 version has significantly better lighting and reflections. I assume they're going to move those enhancements over eventually, the PC can certainly handle it. But for now, yeah, it seems PS4 version is the one to get.

 

You'd have thought even the PS3 could 'max out' a pinball game - i.e. make it look near photorealistic. I guess not! It does look pretty good on the PC but I look forward to seeing the improvements. 3D works very well in the game too, is it supported in the console version. I can only imagine it on Occulus Rift, there wouldnt really be that much difference between the game and a real table.

 

Super League Football pinball. Give me 100 of this. Football's coming home.... One of the most fun original pinball tables I've ever played was a football pinball table I played on Visual Pinball.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Supe...ntus-Arsenal-and-More-to-Pinball-422150.shtml

It featured this wonderful song.

 

Love these pinball games in 3D. Just a big shame that because of the vertical nature of them, most of my screen is basically useless. If only we could turn a big 50" around and play vertically, now that would be amazing.

 

That's what she said.

 

LOL

 

Oh you are pure filth!

Yeah but it's just not big enough. It gets big but then you keep moving around and that's annoying.

 

gotta say, super whatever football is brilliant. got it the day it came out for ipad and it has become my table of choice. i hope they can continue to produce these sort of original game-hybrids in the future. this is what digital pinball should be about imo.

 

Zen Pinball and Bethesda has formed and alliance to create an epic pack of pinball with SKYRIM, DOOM and FALLOUT. Long live Pinball FX2. Sold.

 

Something about video game pinball just seems...wrong.

But sometimes I think the same thing about sports games. Well, more so for something like a skating game.

It seems so wrong to play a video game of an activity you can easily do in real life.

I guess i get NFL, NBA games. You're not going to have 22 friends in football pads around, and even if you did the pro game is far more strategical and complex, you can play as you favorite athletes, etc. But simple real life things like Skateboarding, Pinball, pool, seem a bit odd to me in video game form sometimes. But, carry on!

 

Pinball and Poll okay, but skateboarding simple? I mean get onto a vert ramp or in bowl or just free skating with tricks? Anything but simple I tink.

 

There are a grand total of 2 pinball machines within a 10 mile radius from where I live, both of which leading a miserable existence of various states of brokenness. So no, as much as I adore the real deal, getting my hands onto actual working pinball machines is actually a very tough thing to do. At €1 per 3 balls it's also a rather expensive endeavor. I'd imagine this holds probably true for most people outside the Americas.

@Arwin: Have Zen Studios ever said anything in regards to a VR version of Zen Pinball on the PS4? I know they did something for the Oculus Rift (albeit in a very limited fashion. Like, 4 tables or something), but i never heard anything about a PSVR version. Would make a lot of sense, though. It's already a 1080p game running at 60fps on PS4, and given that it looks marginally better than it did on the PS3 at best, the conversion shouldn't be too daunting a task.