21st Century Pinball

[nickz]

I think I like video/computer pinball better than real life pinball. Out of all of the machines I've seen, only like, 2 of them weren't broken. That and, it feels like your balls last longer in video pinball. I don't know if this is true, but it certainly feels true.

[Ganelon]

Yeah, video pinball is almost always easier than traditional pinball. Even for ports of real tables like Pinball Hall of Fame, the physics are all much more forgiving than on the real deal.

[Weasel]

I'd say it's all a matter of getting to know the table you're playing. Much like real tables, video pinballs have their own quirks to the physics that you'd need to learn. There's an arcade in Portland called Ground Kontrol, and every time I visit there, I always put a couple quarters into their Gottlieb King Pins machine - the flippers on it are a bit weak, and the targets seem to require a fair bit of force to put down, but once I got used to that, I can easily last at least a whole minute per ball, which is pretty good considering this is an old electro-mechanical machine with no ball save.

[magus]

excuse me for the silly question but...

i was playing the williams pinball collection and i couldn't help but notice how similiar the partyland table from pinball and the funhouse williams table are... is there any story behind this or am i just overthinking it?

here's a video of the funhouse table in the collection for reference
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN6htsA07qM

[Weasel]

It seems like the theme might be similar in concept to Funhouse, but most of the features are entirely different - the rollover "PUKE" lanes don't have an equivalent on Funhouse, among others.

[magus]

i was thinking along more the lines of how there is a flipper on the left side which shoots the ball in a circular loop which is EXACTLY the same for both pinball

and rudy head is the same where the clown head is in partyland even though you can't interact with the clown

there are 3 bumpers on the right in both tables too

[starscream]

I always thought that Pinball dreams was also ported to the Atari ST. That doesn't seem to be the case, but - there's a port for the Falcon:
www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-pinball-dreams_23148.html

[Weasel]

Aug 4, 2011 4:57:53 GMT -5 magus said:

i was thinking along more the lines of how there is a flipper on the left side which shoots the ball in a circular loop which is EXACTLY the same for both pinball

and rudy head is the same where the clown head is in partyland even though you can't interact with the clown

there are 3 bumpers on the right in both tables too

Okay, I can kind of see where you're going, but honestly that's a bit more of a stretch than the Steel Wheel/Bad Cats thing. Though there are other connections, as I was PM'd about a long while ago:

I do not know who is in charge of the article on HG 101 for 21st Century Pinball, but as a HUGE fan of the series, you might want to make a mention that not only Steel Wheel was loosely based off an actual machine, Nightmare was also based off the Terminator 2 machine. The IPDB article with pictures is below

www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2524

Also, Nintendo not only removed the elements from Nightmare, but they also took the guns off the side kickers beside the flippers on Steel Wheel, they are not there on the SNES version of the table.

[Weasel]

Uh, Discoalucard, will the rest of this ever get put up? I notice we've gone through the last couple of site updates with not so much as a mention...

[derboo]

No worries. The last update was posted by me during Discoalucard's absence, and I'm not fully informed as to what files we got, while this one was a post-vacation update with half of the articles formatted by me and the other half mostly constituted by Super Robot Taisen (where html-ing had started more than a month ago, but was put on-halt due to the circumstances).

[Weasel]

Alright, that works...

[Discoalucard]

Next two pages of this are up:

www.hardcoregaming101.net/21stpinball/21stpinball3.htm

The second page also has a brief write-up at the end of True Pinball, since it made more sense to play it there.

[Weasel]

hardcoregaming101.net/21stpinball/21stpinball7.htm - The text for Slam Tilt Resurrection is the same text from Platinum Pinball.

[Discoalucard]

Should be fixed now.

Oh, and this article is now completely up!

[Gendo Ikari]

Finished reading, really massive. I knew there were a lot of Pinball titles on the trail of Dreams - Fantasies - Illusions but never thought of so many, and some seem quite worth tracking down. A shame few have re-attempted Pinball World's experiment (I remember some N-Gage pinball, also considered among the best games on Nokia's phone).

So that's how UDS started, I remember them for Ignition and Airfix Dogfighter, but after the latter they went downhill and closed in a few years.