Classic mode Arcade is most similar to a real life arcade setting where you’d find a pinball machine. Stock settings and normal incline. It is similar to Pinball Arcade with one key difference, ball spin. Pinball Arcade physics never had real ball spin. So it didn’t behave the way a real machine would. Zen’s Williams collection does.
Tournament mode is like a real life tournament. They set it at steeper incline and change settings to shut off all of bonus features. The idea is for shorter games and harder play. There are still tournaments throughout the country.
If anyone is close to Palm Spring or sounthern California, Pinball Madness is happening the following weekend starting on Oct. 19th. Probably over 800 pinball machines set to free play. Plus tournaments you can enter. Also has over 200 80’s arcade video games machines.
Oh for Switch in handheld mode they recommend taking off right controller and flipped with left on bottom. You can then launch ball with button and flip using touch screen on controller buttons. The “-“ button flips the screen.
I’ve been also using a little stand in vertical mode with both controllers detached, one on each hand.
I have a gaming monitor arriving today that flips to vertical so that should be my main way of playing at home.
Switch is 60fps in both mobile and docked. 720p mobile and 1080p docked. They had an update last May that upped mobile from 30fps to 60fps. And docked to from 720p to 1080p.
As @iamoneagain notes, it’s 60fps now. They did have to notch back the lighting for the Switch version to get there, though. Some say it’s really noticeable compared to other versions, but obviously that’s the price of portability.
Ah, I was wondering how they achieved that. Read old threads when fx3 first came out and they thought it might not be possible. Wondering if lighting is improved when docked.
You can see it in comparative screenshots. It’s definitely not as nice in the Switch version.
I always play TPA in DX11 mode with the room lights at like 25% and the machine around 50%. That’s one reason moving to the Switch version of these tables will be a major step back. Even just playing them on PC will probably be noticeably different because again, in comparative shots you can see that Pinball FX needs to add the ability to change the room lighting.
Pinball is so much about the way the room and tables are lit to help you see the available shots as well as for the ambience of the experience. I hope the FX guys see fit to add at least a room lighting slider down the road.
One other notable item… the tables are censored in Pinball FX. If the dot matrix display or the art has anything untoward in the original version of the machine, it’s removed. That’s so they can maintain the E rating. I’d expect that will work against certain tables ever being put into Pinball FX3 ever.
FFS, can we please just get an accurate recreation of these tables without bugs? This will be the fifth time I’ve bought them (Williams Hall of Fame [Wii, Xbox 360, PSP] and Pinball Arcade [PC]), and something is always off.
It’s because Pinball FX is rated as a whole and not the machines themselves and they’re determined to keep the rating.
This is what you get when a license holder takes their ball and goes home from one creator and gives it to another that has very specific ideas about how to sell their stuff. As much as people want to throw Farsight under the bus, they probably did the best we’ll ever get for recreating the tables legally for us to enjoy at home.
My understanding is that the PC version does have a switch you can flip to have the dot matrix display running in the non-Family Mode, but the artwork they censor to cover cleavage and the like won’t change.
I can’t imagine the young 'uns are all that keen on fantasy pinball either. It’s not a young person’s game. Though maybe with the Marvel licenses and so on. Even so, I can’t imagine a T rating would make any material difference to sales.
Pinball Arcade made changes to their tables due to licensing issues, not ratings. The two I can think of is World Cup Soccer and The Adams Family with artwork. I believe other tables were missing certain licensed music as well.
I think Zen’s versions even with censorship are the much better versions. Pinball Arcade had some low res artwork on older tables, lots of bugs never fixed, no ball spin, and horrible menu selection. I really don’t think I’ll go back to playing those games again. Playing the real pinball machines was a real wake up call to how different Pinball Arcade was and how much easier it is.
The Zen ones feel right to me. I’ll play each one at the Pinball Madness event next week to see if that’s really that case.
I’ve always played The Pinball Arcade on PC with DirectX 11 support and when I’ve gone and played the real thing, it felt right. I actually could tell my game was improved thanks to all the time spent on the digital version. That’s especially true of things like FishTales, Black Knight 2000, and many more I put a lot of time into. Ghost Busters, which a friend of mine owns, is really good at replicating that table and its quirks.
On other platforms I think they were less faithful sometimes and certainly graphically downgraded, but on PC they are often right on.
I was playing on a pc directx 11. It definitely helped with knowing the rules and improved game in real life. What is didn’t like was the lack of ball spin. That gives the game a sense of randomness. Ball doesn’t react exactly the same each time even when hit at exact same time.
In Pinball Arcade if you got your timing down, most ramps shots were so easy to keep hitting. On Fish Tails I could constantly hit the boat shots over and over. Not finding that the same with fx3.
The biggest disappointment in PA was with The Twilight Zone. The game is so much fun in real life and not sure what subtle changes caused it to kind of be a bore.
Even so I preferred PA over Zen’s original tables. Don’t really care for the digital extras and the physics too floaty. Also just found real pinball’s rule set more enjoyable.
We’re definitely in agreement with the last bit there. I tried to like Zen/FX and I did play some of them quite a bit, but eventually I just couldn’t stomach the way the ball moved or the digital crap. It just wasn’t pinball for me because I’d still be playing real machines and be saying, “It doesn’t work like that!”
I understand the spin is different but I think older tables like the Williams ones depicted here don’t have nearly the spin on the ball that you get on say a modern Stern table. I can hit those boat shots pretty magically on the real FishTales and man, High Speed and Black Knight 2000 which I’ve played a ton IRL feel just right in TPA.
Twilight Zone is weird… because I was never a huge fan of the real table so when I played it in TPA, it felt the same to me and, well, not great. Addams Family is awesome on a real table or in TPA by comparison.
Which is a no-go for me. I simply can’t adjust to using flippers on a touch screen. I need some sort of tactile resistance where I can rest my fingers, like a flipper button.
Aw, man, that’s why we can’t have nice things. Kids ruin everything! Do you know any specific things that have been censored?
