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mmcirvinWe spent our February break in New Hampshire, and, among other things, paid a visit to Funspot (with its American Classic Arcade Museum, a huge collection of old videogames and some pinballs) in Weirs Beach, and it got me jonesing for arcadey stuff again. So I finally got around to downloading Zen's Pinball FX3 for the XBox One.
The dramatic development in pinball sims of the past year was that Farsight, the makers of The Pinball Arcade (and the Pinball Hall of Fame games before it), suddenly lost the license to all the classic Williams and Bally pinballs that had really been the main reason to play their products. Existing tables didn't go away (I'd downloaded a bunch for my phone), but it wasn't possible to buy them any more. They still had the newer Stern games, but eh. Some of those are all right, even really good in a few cases--Stern hired most of the great designers Williams/Bally was using--but you still can't beat the output Williams/Bally was putting in arcades from the late 70s through the 1990s.
A few months later... Zen Software announced new Williams table packages for their own competing pinball sim, Pinball FX3. So it's pretty clear what happened: Zen snapped up the license from Farsight. Pinball FX3 is a free download, and one of the two free tables you get with that is now the classic Mark Ritchie pinball Fish Tales--a pretty good deal all told. There are a couple of packs of three tables you can buy for ten bucks each: one has Medieval Madness, The Getaway: High Speed Part II, and Junk Yard, and the other has Attack from Mars, Black Rose, and Party Zone. Not all of these are my favorites (I'm not that fond of Junk Yard, Black Rose or Party Zone), but there are definitely some classics in there.
There was some good reason to be skeptical of the prospects here. On the one hand, I can see the rationale: Zen just produces a much slicker, more professional, less buggy product than Farsight ever did.
On the other hand, Zen's stock in trade was always fantasy pinball: newly invented machines that didn't and couldn't quite exist in real life, with animated characters walking around on the playfield, magical effects happening to the ball, weird power-ups that let you slow down or reverse time, etc. And their physics engine always felt a little weird to real pinball fans, like playing with a strange, super-heavy ball that was magnetically attracted to ramps. Could they do right by real classic machines?
So far, I'm happy to report that they seem mindful of these concerns, and the Pinball FX3 Williams packs do a pretty good job of addressing them while also satisfying people who expect the usual wackiness from Pinball FX3. The game offers two options for every table, even the fantasy ones: you can play them in a regular mode where you can level up and earn various power-ups that boost your score or mess with physics, and a "classic mode" that omits all of the power-ups. For the Williams tables, the classic mode also swaps in a different physics engine that is much more realistic than the regular Zen one (and there are also two options under classic mode, "arcade" or "tournament", that presumably swap in easier or harder operator settings for the machine itself--I haven't investigated that in detail). All of these modes have separate online leaderboards. I think the classic-mode physics isn't quite as realistic as Farsight's engine eventually became, but it's pretty good, certainly not what people might have feared on the basis of Zen's fantasy tables. Even the "regular" mode is entertaining to play on these tables, with one exception below.
And, yes, they did make their cute animated additions, but they are optional: animated characters on the table, balls that leave trails of flame, etc. In regular mode, these default to being on, and in classic mode they're off, but in either mode you can actually switch them on or off with the B button at any time, so this matters less than it initially appears.
My one major criticism is that Black Rose seems almost unplayable with the "regular", less-realistic Zen physics: the ball drains almost immediately off the plunger through one of the side drains about half of the time. Most of the time, Zen physics makes the game easier, but not here. Fortunately, choosing classic mode remedies this.
There's also a tragic aspect to Farsight losing this license, which is that it negates all the hard work they did chasing down the various IP rights they needed to release the tables with licensed themes, like Twilight Zone, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Addams Family, even Doctor Who right at the end. I can't see Zen going to the same level of effort--their fantasy tables include a lot of licensed ones, but they're usually big package deals to crank out, say, a whole bunch of new tables with Marvel or Star Wars themes. Maybe I'm wrong...
All in all, I'm eager to see what Zen can do with the rest of Williams' output. I'm hoping they do some of the older tables from the days before dot-matrix displays, like Pin*Bot, Funhouse or Black Knight 2000, though I can see why they wouldn't want to lead with those.
The dramatic development in pinball sims of the past year was that Farsight, the makers of The Pinball Arcade (and the Pinball Hall of Fame games before it), suddenly lost the license to all the classic Williams and Bally pinballs that had really been the main reason to play their products. Existing tables didn't go away (I'd downloaded a bunch for my phone), but it wasn't possible to buy them any more. They still had the newer Stern games, but eh. Some of those are all right, even really good in a few cases--Stern hired most of the great designers Williams/Bally was using--but you still can't beat the output Williams/Bally was putting in arcades from the late 70s through the 1990s.
A few months later... Zen Software announced new Williams table packages for their own competing pinball sim, Pinball FX3. So it's pretty clear what happened: Zen snapped up the license from Farsight. Pinball FX3 is a free download, and one of the two free tables you get with that is now the classic Mark Ritchie pinball Fish Tales--a pretty good deal all told. There are a couple of packs of three tables you can buy for ten bucks each: one has Medieval Madness, The Getaway: High Speed Part II, and Junk Yard, and the other has Attack from Mars, Black Rose, and Party Zone. Not all of these are my favorites (I'm not that fond of Junk Yard, Black Rose or Party Zone), but there are definitely some classics in there.
There was some good reason to be skeptical of the prospects here. On the one hand, I can see the rationale: Zen just produces a much slicker, more professional, less buggy product than Farsight ever did.
On the other hand, Zen's stock in trade was always fantasy pinball: newly invented machines that didn't and couldn't quite exist in real life, with animated characters walking around on the playfield, magical effects happening to the ball, weird power-ups that let you slow down or reverse time, etc. And their physics engine always felt a little weird to real pinball fans, like playing with a strange, super-heavy ball that was magnetically attracted to ramps. Could they do right by real classic machines?
So far, I'm happy to report that they seem mindful of these concerns, and the Pinball FX3 Williams packs do a pretty good job of addressing them while also satisfying people who expect the usual wackiness from Pinball FX3. The game offers two options for every table, even the fantasy ones: you can play them in a regular mode where you can level up and earn various power-ups that boost your score or mess with physics, and a "classic mode" that omits all of the power-ups. For the Williams tables, the classic mode also swaps in a different physics engine that is much more realistic than the regular Zen one (and there are also two options under classic mode, "arcade" or "tournament", that presumably swap in easier or harder operator settings for the machine itself--I haven't investigated that in detail). All of these modes have separate online leaderboards. I think the classic-mode physics isn't quite as realistic as Farsight's engine eventually became, but it's pretty good, certainly not what people might have feared on the basis of Zen's fantasy tables. Even the "regular" mode is entertaining to play on these tables, with one exception below.
And, yes, they did make their cute animated additions, but they are optional: animated characters on the table, balls that leave trails of flame, etc. In regular mode, these default to being on, and in classic mode they're off, but in either mode you can actually switch them on or off with the B button at any time, so this matters less than it initially appears.
My one major criticism is that Black Rose seems almost unplayable with the "regular", less-realistic Zen physics: the ball drains almost immediately off the plunger through one of the side drains about half of the time. Most of the time, Zen physics makes the game easier, but not here. Fortunately, choosing classic mode remedies this.
There's also a tragic aspect to Farsight losing this license, which is that it negates all the hard work they did chasing down the various IP rights they needed to release the tables with licensed themes, like Twilight Zone, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Addams Family, even Doctor Who right at the end. I can't see Zen going to the same level of effort--their fantasy tables include a lot of licensed ones, but they're usually big package deals to crank out, say, a whole bunch of new tables with Marvel or Star Wars themes. Maybe I'm wrong...
All in all, I'm eager to see what Zen can do with the rest of Williams' output. I'm hoping they do some of the older tables from the days before dot-matrix displays, like Pin*Bot, Funhouse or Black Knight 2000, though I can see why they wouldn't want to lead with those.