The Pinball Thread

[m.sniffles.esq]

Good thing 99.9% of the planet uses wikipedia and not random assholes on message boards!

(or does this vicious slander come from wikipedia? I don't actually care enough to have looked. You know you can just correct it? You don't have to do it one message board at a time)

old school sys11
into it

(ps this is why I don't go near 'serious' pinball communities online or otherwise. I enjoy pinball and would like to continue. In the late '00s--early '10s I had to cover one of those convention/tournament deals lorded over by this former dot-com slime who actually owned most or all of the tables and drove this dumb-ass Ferrari or something. I seriously couldn't look at a pinball table for two years afterwards, and I think still have ptsd from the experience. The coolest motherfucker in the place was this grand champion from Sweden or someplace, who wore big-ass headphones the entire time, and never said a word to anyone, ever. Finally, I caught him sans phones, and all I could think to ask was "do you wear those so you don't have to listen to these motherfuckers?" he looked me dead in the eye and responded "Exactly". My man...)

[Austin]

Good thing 99.9% of the planet uses wikipedia and not random assholes on message boards!

(or does this vicious slander come from wikipedia? I don't actually care enough to have looked. You know you can just correct it? You don't have to do it one message board at a time)

old school sys11
into it

It comes from the documentary I mentioned a few posts back, retard. It is heavy on live interviews from higher ups in the company and people/industry vets who actually worked for Williams (and developed the platform and games), such as George Gomez, Lyman Sheats (RIP), Pat Lawlor, etc., etc.

Link: https://youtu.be/zAtVBb8rOok?si=AtuqqQvu-jX3gH5b

[m.sniffles.esq]

It comes from the documentary I mentioned a few posts back, retard.

Oh, THAT kind of old school sys11...
Definitely NOT into it

And just when you thought all the bigots were banned or found more like-minded communities. Shows to go you...

[BareKnuckleRoo]

You're sure quick to cry foul when someone matches your tone. Can't stand to get what you dish out I suppose. "Random assholes" and "motherfuckers", indeed.

Watch the documentary, "Tilt: The Battle To Save Pinball". It's fantastic and puts the end of Williams Pinball into perspective.

Thanks for this, it looks like an interesting watch.

[m.sniffles.esq]

You're sure quick to cry foul when someone matches your tone. Can't stand to get what you dish out I suppose. "Random assholes" and "motherfuckers", indeed.

Putting aside that the "random asshole" in question was myself, if you don't know the difference between "asshole" and what it was 'matched' with

just when you thought all the bigots were banned or found more like-minded communities. Shows to go you...

in case you're interested in a like-minded community

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Is... it possible you don't recognize how your posts come across...? And like, not just in this thread.

(or does this vicious slander come from wikipedia? I don't actually care enough to have looked. You know you can just correct it? You don't have to do it one message board at a time)

(ps this is why I don't go near 'serious' pinball communities online or otherwise.

...all I could think to ask was "do you wear those so you don't have to listen to these motherfuckers?" he looked me dead in the eye and responded "Exactly". My man...)

Given Austin's knowledge, there's a strong possibility he's fairly "serious" about pinball, and thus your anecdote is quite reasonably perceived as potentially aimed at him, even if that's not your intention.

Your posts have frequently been written really aggressively ever since I remember you popping up in the Monolith thread. Dialing that back perhaps will minimize misunderstandings.

[BrianC]

You're sure quick to cry foul when someone matches your tone. Can't stand to get what you dish out I suppose. "Random assholes" and "motherfuckers", indeed.

Putting aside that the "random asshole" in question was myself, if you don't know the difference between "asshole" and what it was 'matched' with

just when you thought all the bigots were banned or found more like-minded communities. Shows to go you...

in case you're interested in a like-minded community

Do you even read your own posts? They make no sense to me. Someone gives you a legitimate link with comments from the designers of the pinball tables and you basically reply by calling everyone bigots.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Sorry, I was going to say:
"spent way to much money developing and producing vs what they sold as they were generally disliked. Therefore they shut down pinball operations due to it having no more money and it was dragging the entire company into a fiscal bog from which they would never escape, and pivoted towards more fruitful endeavors" or copy/paste the entire wikipedia entry, but I thought "bankrupted themselves" got the general point across

I guess if I was really concerned with brevity, I should have just said "People hated them for various reasons, and were real fucking annoying about it". my bad

Pedantic posts about minutia that ultimately doesn't matter = old school sys11. Into it

Look, if you can't stand being corrected when you waffle a bunch of nonsense ("PB2000 destroyed Williams" is almost the opposite of "PB2000 was fairly successful, but the company's bosses saw more profit opportunities in gambling machines"), don't post on message boards. Making mistakes is something we all do, the difference between an adult and a manchild is how you deal with these mistakes. Don't be a fucking manchild.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Anyway, who else is coming to UKPinfest? I booked my room and bought a VIP ticket a couple of days ago

[m.sniffles.esq]

love it

[Austin]

love it

Being a man-child?

Cool.

[NightBeast]

Was Zen’s Williams Volume 7 ever released on Switch via FX3 or FX? I see all other volumes available but 7. Very odd.

[m.sniffles.esq]

Was Zen’s Williams Volume 7 ever released on Switch via FX3 or FX? I see all other volumes available but 7. Very odd.

It was.
I'm going to take a stab and say they lost the rights (much like how they had Marvel rights for everything but Switch, and/or were selling a Cyclone table but apparently never had the rights at all. And just deleted everyone's copy and replaced it with Road Show. Whoops...)

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Daaaaaamn, an Evil Dead pinball table - fuck... all the callouts were done by Bruce Campbell himself!

https://youtu.be/aReP5_JHVa8?si=iCJab1xV5TiarVly

[m.sniffles.esq]

Ars article on Steve Young

(if you've ever needed a part, you probably went through him)

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Great read, thanks!

[Jeneki]

Stern Dungeons and Dragons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHM0D6kHouY

Looks like they're leaning on the rpg side, with character stats, equipment, quests, etc. Looks neat for those who buy one for home, but I'm not sure how much that'll impact one-off play at a business. Also a bit curious how well that animated dragon head will hold up after getting thwacked with the ball over time.

[Daytime Waitress]

Woke up to a new "deluxe" table on Zaccaria, along with a bunch of "refreshed" artwork which aims to unify the look of the retro tables.

Except it's AI-generated and so not even uniform on each table, let alone across the board.

Into the bloody trash it goes, then.

[m.sniffles.esq]

Woke up to a new "deluxe" table on Zaccaria, along with a bunch of "refreshed" artwork which aims to unify the look of the retro tables.

Wait, can you toggle these, or are they forced? (Sorry, I'm nowhere near my xbox to look) I only have the solid state pack, but it would be odd if they just updated them needlessly and gave the customer no option to revert.

[Daytime Waitress]

Woke up to a new "deluxe" table on Zaccaria, along with a bunch of "refreshed" artwork which aims to unify the look of the retro tables.

Wait, can you toggle these, or are they forced? (Sorry, I'm nowhere near my xbox to look) I only have the solid state pack, but it would be odd if they just updated them needlessly and gave the customer no option to revert.

None that I could find.

But I do have to offer a correction - it's all across the Retro, Remake and Deluxe tables: all the Zaccaria tables that they were "reinterpreting" anyways.
So technically they're not defacing any of the original artwork, which is a small victory?

But everything that Zaccaria didn't originally produce has been replaced with this garbage.
Even the "10,000 hours in MS Paint, my first upload to deviantart" Spooky deluxe table graphics have been replaced with shit that wouldn't look out of place in a popup ad for a Korean mobage.
That stuff was garish and amateur as all hell, but you could tell that someone was having a crack at it (or at least cracking one off to zombie booba ).

And you're spot on: not having the option is bizarre.
Going in this direction at all is bizarre.

Eternal Early Access with no justification.
Constant radio silence on Steam while they milk the license holders along with At Games' "Legends Pinball series" (including Taito).

You wouldn't think they could get any worse at customer relations, but here we are.

[m.sniffles.esq]

You wouldn't think they could get any worse at customer relations, but here we are.

To their credit, they didn't just swap a table that people paid for with a table that they didn't, and just pretend the whole thing was a mass hallucination on the customer's part (aka: pulling a zen)

[IrkenLurker]

Anyone try out the new Dungeons and Dragons pinball yet?

Over here in San Jose, CA area, the local arcade just got it a week ago and they did an official launch party thing. It seems pretty cool, you save your progress and go through various missions, battles, and other neat stuff. I'm horrible at it, though.

I'm one of the few people who bought a ton of tables for Pinball Arcade before their licenses were removed, so I play a lot of that on my Vita and it's cross-buy with PS3 so at least I have the option to play it on the big screen. There were tons of great tables like Bram Stoker's Dracula, Terminator 2, Twilight Zone, Addam's Family, and more. I still can't get into the physics on Pinball FX for their Williams tables, but Zen Pinball 2 on Vita/PS3/PS4 is a favorite of mine, especially with the Aliens vs. Pinball and Bethesda packs. I've kind of been playing Skyrim and Epic Quest on Zen Pinball 2 as a way to get a sense for what they were going for in DND pinball.

[Austin]

D&D is really refreshing. We’ve had them on location nearby for about two months now, so I’ve sunk a lot of time into it. Looking forward to future code updates on it, there’s still a ton of stuff that is missing.

[Jeneki]

There's a couple D&Ds in my area. I was able to hit all the shots after minimal time; it's a very smooth feeling machine. It has some neat ideas with the adventuring, fighting, collecting treasure, etc, which makes more sense after watching an instructional video to understand what the different color shots do.

The only issue I saw on D&D was on the ramp shot from the upper flipper, with a solid fast hit I've seen the ball launch out of the wire ramp and out of play. This seems to be a common curse in newer games due to how powerful modern flippers are. For example I've also seen this happen in Barry O's Barbecue Challenge with the left ramp that feeds the right flipper, a solid fast shot sometimes jumps the wire right at the end and goes down the outlane instead.



New stuff announced or shown at the Texas Pinball Festival a few weeks back:

Portal (Multimorphic P3) - Some neat engineering on this P3 kit, but something about it looks really fragile. Would love to be proven wrong here. I've yet to see a P3 in real life anywhere yet, and looking at Multimorphics webpage I only see a handful of locations listed world wide (no idea how up to date that is though).

Merlin's Arcade (Turner Pinball) - The theme looks like a mix of Knights of the Round and 80s Arcade references.

Harry Potter (announced by Jersey Jack as upcoming)

Medieval Madness Merlin Edition (Chicago Gaming Company) - New fancy pants edition of Medieval Madness.

[Jeneki]

Posting some funny places for the ball to get stuck


You know you are plunging too soft when the ball goes up a bit and gets stuck on the launch switch. (Vector, Bally 1982)


The true skill shot is to get the ball to stop a centimeter from the skill shot. (Mustang, Stern 2014)

[m.sniffles.esq]

You know you are plunging too soft when the ball goes up a bit and gets stuck on the launch switch

Or that switch needs some wd-40...

(I have never seen that)

[Jeneki]

Some more new reveals:

Dune (Barrels of Fun) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLZN8sdEbxc
Kong (Stern) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJaU3T2a65o

[Jeneki]

Harry Potter (Jersey Jack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbMyqQHSmJ0

[Austin]

Harry Potter (Jersey Jack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbMyqQHSmJ0

JJP released a top-down gameplay video of it today. Looks good! https://youtu.be/FmMcC_rvNj4?si=TjKakQi8U7jWUBCl