Crush Pinball
Oct 6, 2007 19:16:09 GMT -5
Post by johnh on Oct 6, 2007 19:16:09 GMT -5
Note: Please don't take my previous comments as criticisms of the article itself, which is, by and large, awesome. These article threads often get used to talk about the games themselves, and that's what I'm doing. No offense towards the author is intended.
I don't see that at all. I mentioned that their physics aren't perfect, and also that no pinball video game's have ever been to this day. I have never had any problems with the games' physics at all.
While many of my other complaints could be taken as matters of taste (and understand that despite those complaints, I -have- played a great deal of the Crush games, they are generally quite good despite the impression you may have gotten from my words), the physics one still sticks out to me.
It's not just that it's difficult to make these shots, it's that it's impossible to make many of them as straight shots off the flippers. I have never intentionally hit like half the targets on the Alien Crush table, and a like number of the targets in Devil's Crush.
Random ball bouncing tends to hit them eventually it is true, but the thing is that playing pinball well is about ball control, because every missed shot introduces chaos into the game, chaos that could potentially result in an outlane drain or a SDTM. If half the targets can only be hit by such random ball action then it harms the ability of the player affect the game, even if he's very skilled.
This problem far from only affects the Crush games, it is true. In fact, I can't name a single video pinball game that doesn't fall prey to it, and that includes Visual Pinball recreations of classic tables (which, I believe, are usually subtly reworked to take this problem into account).
One further, unrelated question: Scoring the extra ball by hitting the pterodactyl in the blobs-and-skulls bonus round in Alien Crush produces a certain tune that would be very familiar to Compile fans. Is it possible that Compile played some role in the game's production?
zzz said:
I don't see that at all. I mentioned that their physics aren't perfect, and also that no pinball video game's have ever been to this day. I have never had any problems with the games' physics at all.
While many of my other complaints could be taken as matters of taste (and understand that despite those complaints, I -have- played a great deal of the Crush games, they are generally quite good despite the impression you may have gotten from my words), the physics one still sticks out to me.
It's not just that it's difficult to make these shots, it's that it's impossible to make many of them as straight shots off the flippers. I have never intentionally hit like half the targets on the Alien Crush table, and a like number of the targets in Devil's Crush.
Random ball bouncing tends to hit them eventually it is true, but the thing is that playing pinball well is about ball control, because every missed shot introduces chaos into the game, chaos that could potentially result in an outlane drain or a SDTM. If half the targets can only be hit by such random ball action then it harms the ability of the player affect the game, even if he's very skilled.
This problem far from only affects the Crush games, it is true. In fact, I can't name a single video pinball game that doesn't fall prey to it, and that includes Visual Pinball recreations of classic tables (which, I believe, are usually subtly reworked to take this problem into account).
One further, unrelated question: Scoring the extra ball by hitting the pterodactyl in the blobs-and-skulls bonus round in Alien Crush produces a certain tune that would be very familiar to Compile fans. Is it possible that Compile played some role in the game's production?