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Pinball stuff
Apr. 12th, 2008 11:25 amMy preoccupation with pinball sparked by the Crave Wii Williams sim continues.
It looks as if the definitive online collection of information about real machines is ipdb.org, which is pretty much what you'd guess and has nice pictures and reviews of almost everything. (Though, as on IMDB, the reviews are of varying quality, and in this case probably strongly affected by the vagaries of individual machines; almost every popular table has somebody calling it too easy and somebody calling it an impossible drain-o-matic. Check out the page on Black Knight for a really weird one claiming that Black Knight was hyped by some sort of conspiracy to destroy pinball.)
The Tower of Pin isn't the slickest or most modern site, but gives a sometimes interesting historical overview of personal computer pinball simulations, with screenshots. I don't know of anything comparable for console sims, but I suppose the general gaming sites review them all.
My impression is that the category of commercial PC sims is pretty much moribund because of free Windows projects like Visual Pinball/PinMAME and now Future Pinball, none of which I know much about.
In general, the simulated games run a wide spectrum from realistic sims of old tables, to things designed to be in the general genre of real tables without bringing down the lawyers (like the great Pro Pinball series, which played very much like 1990s Williams/Bally Superpin games), to things that are more or less pinball but would be mechanically impractical in real life (lots of multiple-playfield tables shaped like monitor screens), to fantastical games with pinball elements like Flipnic and Odama (which was a partly voice-controlled pinball/wargame hybrid for the GameCube in which you knocked a huge stone ball around a battlefield with medieval Japanese army guys running around on it--very strange and quite difficult).
I think that, in general, I like the more realistic and historical ones best; bring in too much fantasy and you might as well just abandon the pinball tropes and make some other kind of game. The appeal of pinball is the real-world physicality of it, and if you're simulating it the great goal is to capture as much of that as you can, knowing that it will never quite be enough. But I admit that it's also fun to speculate about what pinball could be freed from real-world bounds.
It looks as if the definitive online collection of information about real machines is ipdb.org, which is pretty much what you'd guess and has nice pictures and reviews of almost everything. (Though, as on IMDB, the reviews are of varying quality, and in this case probably strongly affected by the vagaries of individual machines; almost every popular table has somebody calling it too easy and somebody calling it an impossible drain-o-matic. Check out the page on Black Knight for a really weird one claiming that Black Knight was hyped by some sort of conspiracy to destroy pinball.)
The Tower of Pin isn't the slickest or most modern site, but gives a sometimes interesting historical overview of personal computer pinball simulations, with screenshots. I don't know of anything comparable for console sims, but I suppose the general gaming sites review them all.
My impression is that the category of commercial PC sims is pretty much moribund because of free Windows projects like Visual Pinball/PinMAME and now Future Pinball, none of which I know much about.
In general, the simulated games run a wide spectrum from realistic sims of old tables, to things designed to be in the general genre of real tables without bringing down the lawyers (like the great Pro Pinball series, which played very much like 1990s Williams/Bally Superpin games), to things that are more or less pinball but would be mechanically impractical in real life (lots of multiple-playfield tables shaped like monitor screens), to fantastical games with pinball elements like Flipnic and Odama (which was a partly voice-controlled pinball/wargame hybrid for the GameCube in which you knocked a huge stone ball around a battlefield with medieval Japanese army guys running around on it--very strange and quite difficult).
I think that, in general, I like the more realistic and historical ones best; bring in too much fantasy and you might as well just abandon the pinball tropes and make some other kind of game. The appeal of pinball is the real-world physicality of it, and if you're simulating it the great goal is to capture as much of that as you can, knowing that it will never quite be enough. But I admit that it's also fun to speculate about what pinball could be freed from real-world bounds.