![]() ![]() ![]() Zen have also done a rather nice thing and ported across all of my owned content from Pinball FX2 into Pinball FX3, so I also fired up the Clone Wars table for a few games to see how the reworked physics compared against the older version, and the results were somewhat surprising.įirst, visuals. Now, Medieval Madness being in the pack was useful the reason I really really like that table is because I’ve played the Pinball Arcade version of it, which allows me to do a direct comparison across the two games for the first time. That, along with the official Best Pinball Table Of All Time Medieval Madness being in the pack, convinced me to take the plunge. Fortunately Zen appear to have realised that there were a whole bunch of skeptical potential customers like me out there, which is why they trailed this table pack along with a significant rework of the physics that moved the FX engine much closer to the real thing, as well as mentioning significant customisation options in terms of camera angles and the ability to turn off their visual “enhancements”. Based on that experience it didn’t seem like a very good idea to try and replicate real-life tables in an engine that, up until that point, had been distinctly unrealistic. The ball is slow and leaden, the incessant visual effects are constantly distracting, and there are issues with the camera angles and dot matrix display that made it unnecessarily difficult to keep track of what was going on. Pinball FX was decent enough when that was all that was on offer, but I found it extremely difficult to play Pinball FX tables after experiencing the ones in Pinball Arcade. I found this news somewhat dismaying at first. ![]() This has pretty much killed Pinball Arcade stone cold dead so there was naturally some speculation around why Williams refused to renew their license, but that particular mystery was solved a couple of months later when Zen announced the first Williams table pack for Pinball FX3. Around May of this year, though, Farsight dropped a bombshell: Williams had refused to renew the license for their tables, and since Williams were by far the biggest manufacturer of pinball tables during the classic period of the late ‘80s and the ‘90s they’d consequently lost the rights to around two-thirds of the tables in Pinball Arcade. Unfortunately everything about Pinball Arcade that’s not the pinball tables themselves is an absolute car crash the game is poorly optimised and navigating to the tables you’ve bought (if you can buy them) in their atrocious menu system is a constant pain in the ass.Īfter playing both Pinball FX2 and Pinball Arcade I concluded that Pinball Arcade was by far the better option for people who liked to play authentic-feeling, well-designed pinball tables, just so long as you were willing to put up with the shit the game puts you through to get to them. The tables are all painstakingly-recreated licenced replicas of classic real-life tables, and the ball physics are much more fun to play with. Farsight’s Pinball Arcade, which is the opposite of Pinball FX in just about every single way.The UI framework they’ve built around the tables is polished but their ball physics are questionable and their table design is extremely uneven, which is why I’ve not given Pinball FX a huge amount of my time in comparison to… Zen make bespoke original tables that are usually based on some big licensed IP ( Star Wars, Jurassic World etc.) and which have all got a bunch of additional visual gewgaws where animated characters backflip around the table and so on. Zen’s Pinball FX series, now on its third iteration.Earlier this year there was something of a seismic shift in the computer pinball market, which for the last five years or so has been divided between two competitors: Again.įirst, for those of you who don’t obsessively follow computer pinball as I do, some background. In which I write another 2,000 words about computer pinball. ![]()
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