As a mass-market entertainment, they’re effectively dead. Unfortunately, with the decline of the American arcade and other venues where pinball tables once stood, finding a pinball machine to play can be difficult these days. Video games don’t have to deal with those forces, which lets them do things that no pinball machine can but that very freedom can also make them feel hollow, disconnected from the real world.
I’ve always loved real, physical pinball machines there’s something about their tactile response and the challenge of fighting elemental forces like gravity and resistance that I enjoy. One of the few I’ve found that really stand out is pinball games. So I’ve been exploring the device, looking for examples of apps that really shine on a device with this form factor. Partly because the increasing popularity of tablets made me think that professionally I should have some experience with using such a device, but mostly because I’m a nerd with an insufficient number of barriers between me and my credit cards. I recently bought one of Google’s Nexus 7 Android tablets.
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The layout of this board is such that you’ll rarely encounter frustrating ball losses where you feel like you had no control – clever setups of simple obstacles and shapes ensure that most of the time the ball will roll in a way that you can deal with it.“Sorcerer’s Lair,” the free table included with Zen Pinball HD We also enjoy the idol, which is a totem-pole-like feature where first you knock down barriers in front of a face, then shoot the ball in its mouth, and then the head rises from the table to reveal successive heads with more hungry mouths. The flow of ramps is great here, with a whole bunch of sweet, swirling highways of goodness to hit in rapid succession. The second table is El Dorado, with a sort of Indiana Jones-style theme. We should note that we spent a paragraph on these complaints because they take time to explain, not that they make the board bad. The other problem is that the catapult sits right over the area the ball rolls through to reach your left flipper – meaning much of the time you have to use the left flipper you can’t see the ball for a second, which can affect your prediction of motion. Bizarrely, if you launch your ball while aiming for a skill shot for the last slot in the upper part of the board, your ball will roll down, hit the spinner, and always fall down the side lane and be lost (your ball will be saved since it happens soon after launch, but then your “ball save” just got wasted). The first is the placement of a “round table” object in the lower left, which spins around when you hit it. We were able to get used to it, but it’s unfortunate that certain camera views (in fact, most of them in our experience) were useless.Įxcalibur does have a couple of design problems that we’re a bit surprised weren’t remedied through playtesting.
This just isn’t feasible here as everything is way too small, so we had to opt for our less-preferable low-angle view which follows the ball around. When we played Pinball FX on the consoles, we preferred a camera where we could see a full, top-down view of the table.
The main problem with pinball on a handheld is that the screen is just too damn small. Playing with the slider all the way up gave us a bit of a headache, but the middle of the slider was a sweet spot we could enjoy for extended play sessions, and we just loved how the ball was an actual sphere rolling on the table. With 3D effects, the tables gain that extra sense of physical space and weight you can’t get from 2D depictions. One of the great appeals of pinball is its physicality – a real table with real objects that have physics and where you can peer through the glass and admire all the cool details. You’d think that 3D is about as superfluous as a gimmick gets when it comes to something like pinball, but it actually enhances the experience a surprising amount. We’d have to say that the 3DS is both a hindrance and a boon to playing pinball.
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