| Title | Pinball junkies beware! Pinball Arcade belongs in your collection. |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game reviews |
| When | April 9, 2012 |
Okay, let's address the elephant in the room first. Is Farsight Studio's Pinball Arcade better than Zen Studio's Pinball FX 2? No. Is it as good as Pinball FX 2? Not quite. Is it a must-have for pinball junkies? Absolutely..
Read the full articleI was sold when you said it had Theatre of Magic. What a great table.
Pinball Arcade is for people who like pinball. Pinball FX 2 is for... I don't really know who it is for. People who don't like pinball? Maybe people who like the notion of playing pinball, but not the way pinball actually plays? It's a mystery.
I enjoy them both. It depends on what you want at the time.
I couldn't stand Pinball FX, but I love Pinball Arcade
I love Theatre of Magic & Tales of the Arabian Nights, but I'll admit that I've never once seen Black Hole look anywhere near as appealing as this virtual version.
All four of these tables are a lot of fun but I'm entranced by Black Hole. That table ate so much of my money in the early '80s. I never managed to gain skills, due to it's challenge - and that it was .50 a game. Now that I don't have to worry about losing money, I've already put a few hours into that one alone.
I hope they can eventually put FunHouse into this new version (even though they already had it for the Williams Collection), which is simply the greatest table ever created.
For what it's worth, I also love Pinball FX. Sure, it has too many 'action figures' walking around but the tables themselves are quite fun (and many are stealth remakes of classic tables).
This has also been out on iOS for a while, and it's quite good on the iPad. I can hold it vertically to better simulate the table orientation, and it's great to play old classic pinball games at the airport or DMV or other places that _used_ to have real tables but no longer do.
Aargh. Europe isn't getting the Vita release for another month. Guess I'm stuck with the iOS version for now.
"These tables love to swallow your balls."
I've been playing Zen 2 quite a bit recently and just downloaded Pinball Arcade to try since they have just released Twilight Zone (My all time fav). I found the opposite to be true with the ball physics; TPA seemed like the ball was kinda slow and floating way too much (compared to Zen), and Zen offers way more views (unless the demo for TPA was limited in that regard). I really like view 3 in Zen how it follows the ball and lets you see more of the table up close, TPA's fixed views didn't let me do that. I think I'm biased from playing to much Zen but I overall didn't like the feel of TPA.
It is nice to see the old table, but it's the physics that lets down Farsight. Sure it's clear that the ball has more mass, and that's good, but after that the Farsight physics are nowhere near as good as Zen's.