Ooh, and here's another good one
Jun. 1st, 2019 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinNight Mission Pinball, a 1982 release from subLogic, as played by ILLSeaBass:
Once again, I'm showing an Apple II video because I can't find one of the Atari version that shows the artifact colors correctly. The Atari version basically looks like this, just with slightly fewer colors. Like seemingly all of these pinballs, this one was yet another GRAPHICS 8 game with composite artifacting, probably because it was yet another port from the Apple II, and this was the most direct way to port Apple hires games.
This was written by Bruce Artwick, the author of Flight Simulator. As such, it's not so surprising that it has an aviation theme (World War II bombers) and really, really good physics. Seriously, for sheer feel this one blows away all of the other early 1980s computer pinballs: I could tell that after playing it for just a couple of minutes. The sounds are a bit annoying, though. (I didn't initially notice because with the Atari computer emulator I use on my Mac, I seem to have a choice between a version with broken sound and a version with malfunctioning keyboard interactions, and for most programs I choose the first.) It's another one that uses a two-joystick scheme with the fire buttons operating the flippers.
I think the layout of this one is original. I'm not a fan of the seemingly haphazard arrangement of pop bumpers in the upper middle, which remove opportunities for ball control and introduce a powerful chance element into the game, but otherwise it's pretty good. Reminds me just a little of the early Stern table Flight 2000, though it's not the same.
There is apparently a backbox/physics-tweaking mode that allows adjustment of a huge number of parameters, much like the parameter editor in Flight Simulator. I haven't played with that yet.
Once again, I'm showing an Apple II video because I can't find one of the Atari version that shows the artifact colors correctly. The Atari version basically looks like this, just with slightly fewer colors. Like seemingly all of these pinballs, this one was yet another GRAPHICS 8 game with composite artifacting, probably because it was yet another port from the Apple II, and this was the most direct way to port Apple hires games.
This was written by Bruce Artwick, the author of Flight Simulator. As such, it's not so surprising that it has an aviation theme (World War II bombers) and really, really good physics. Seriously, for sheer feel this one blows away all of the other early 1980s computer pinballs: I could tell that after playing it for just a couple of minutes. The sounds are a bit annoying, though. (I didn't initially notice because with the Atari computer emulator I use on my Mac, I seem to have a choice between a version with broken sound and a version with malfunctioning keyboard interactions, and for most programs I choose the first.) It's another one that uses a two-joystick scheme with the fire buttons operating the flippers.
I think the layout of this one is original. I'm not a fan of the seemingly haphazard arrangement of pop bumpers in the upper middle, which remove opportunities for ball control and introduce a powerful chance element into the game, but otherwise it's pretty good. Reminds me just a little of the early Stern table Flight 2000, though it's not the same.
There is apparently a backbox/physics-tweaking mode that allows adjustment of a huge number of parameters, much like the parameter editor in Flight Simulator. I haven't played with that yet.
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Date: 2019-06-01 04:40 pm (UTC)The Atari port has a couple of truly odd Easter-egg-like features. The game uses the joysticks only for their fire buttons (edit: and to pull back the plunger to a precise value), but if you actually move the left joystick, you can change the screen border color (which was a separately controllable color register in GRAPHICS 8). Also, the OPTION key puts the whole screen into the four-color GRAPHICS 7.5/GRAPHICS E, with the same pixel data, which looks awful but is a mildly interesting trick for nerds, I suppose (then the joystick affects the screen background color).
The operator screen is literally accessed by typing "FIX" (this is the same as in Flight Simulator, a detail I'd forgotten). This can be hard to discover if alphabetic keys are mapped to the joystick.
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Date: 2019-06-02 02:38 am (UTC)The physics on Night Mission really is excellent for the era. The flippers have real punch to them, you can aim with some precision, the ball rolls and settles down instead of jittering like a Ping-Pong ball when its energy is low, you can usefully trap the ball and I've even managed a flipper-to-flipper pass. I don't think it can do live catches. All the physics parameters like the gravity, the coefficients of restitution and the maximum ball speed are adjustable, but the defaults are good enough that I don't have the urge.
Another quirk is that the game requires you to insert virtual quarters to get credits (as if you were playing a MAME ROM of a real arcade machine), and there are replays and specials that just give you more credits--like a real pinball, but it's hard to see why one should care when you're not playing with real quarters. Real pinball machines since the late 1970s or so usually have an operator setting that switches specials and replays to award extra balls instead of free games, for compliance with particularly restrictive local gambling laws. Commercial simulations like Farsight's or Zen's will often go with this setting to make it interesting for home players. Unfortunately, this is one setting that Night Mission doesn't have.