In which I write another 2,000 words about computer pinball. You have been warned. Again.

First, for those of you who don’t obsessively follow computer pinball as I do, some background. 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:

• Zen’s Pinball FX series, now on its third iteration. 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. 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…
• Farsight’s Pinball Arcade, which is the opposite of Pinball FX in just about every single way. The tables are all painstakingly-recreated licenced replicas of classic real-life tables, and the ball physics are much more fun to play with. 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.

After 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. 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. 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.

I found this news somewhat dismaying at first. 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. 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. 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. 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”. That, along with the official Best Pinball Table Of All Time Medieval Madness being in the pack, convinced me to take the plunge.

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. 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.

First, visuals. Other FX tables have a rather low and close camera that makes the table look flattened; the Williams tables on the other hand have a selection of nine different camera modes including something that’s much closer to a normal top-down camera angle, as well as a zoomed-in one that tracks the ball around the table. I played with this for a while because it let me appreciate the new high-definition table art, which is much nicer than the equivalent in Pinball Arcade. It’s to be expected because there’s five years separating the two games, but after a couple of hours with FX’s version of Medieval Madness I went back to Pinball Arcade and was shocked at how jagged and pixelated some of the art was. Zen have bolted some of their horrible “FX” onto their version of the table; the dragon sitting on top of the damsel ramp is animated and there are castle explosion effects, stun effects when you hit the trolls etc. etc., and this is all hugely unnecessary and detracts from the table, but you can turn it off with the push of a button and enjoy the unmodified¹ version of the table. Once you get rid of all of the questionable visual enhancements and find the camera angle you like best this version of Medieval Madness beats the one in Pinball Arcade hands-down.

Next, physics — and you’ll have to forgive me if this gets a little too detailed, but the ball physics are an absolutely huge part of how a virtual pinball table feels to play. Pinball FX3 has three different physics settings:

• The “original” Zen pinball physics, which is supposedly the same as what was driving the other FX tables that I’ve played.
• A toned-down version of their reworked, more realistic physics, which I shall dub Classic Arcade.
• The full-fat version of the reworked physics: Classic Tournament.

Having spent several hours playing with each type of physics, though, I was surprised to find that it was actually the original Zen physics that I enjoyed the most. The ball is heavy, but not leaden; it moves and bounces predictably, but is capable of picking up a great deal of speed if you catch it with a flipper tip or punt it off of a bumper. This felt very different to the other Zen tables, which is why I tested the Clone Wars table to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, and the ball physics in that felt much much heavier — almost like I was pushing the ball through tar. It’s possibly a question of the tables being built to different scales and being viewed at different angles that make the two feel so different, but Zen ball physics applied to these new Williams tables is actually pretty damn close to the ball physics in Pinball Arcade.

Why didn’t I get on with their reworked, more realistic physics? For both of the Classic modes the ball has been made lighter and moves around the table with lightning speed. I could probably deal with this (despite my reactions becoming increasingly shot to hell as I get older) except for the fact that making the ball lighter means it bounces around a lot more, often in very unpredictable ways. I lost count of the number of times I tried to catch the ball with the left flipper after a castle shot, only for it to bounce back up and over the left bumper and straight down the left drain — and the worst thing about this was that it wasn’t consistent. It would do this some of the time, but not all of the time, depending on very small changes in the angle at which the ball was released from the castle. The difference between Classic Arcade and Classic Tournament is that there’s somehow even more bounce on the ball in the latter mode, but both of them felt like I was playing with a ping-pong ball rather than a pinball. This may or may not actually follow the real-life behaviour of a pinball (it has been some twenty years since I had the opportunity to play an actual pinball table), but I’ll always prioritise the thing that feels more fun over the thing that feels more realistic, and so the Zen physics win out here for me.

Of course, using them comes with a catch. Pinball FX3 is stuffed full of absolutely obnoxious extras: voiceovers whenever you enter a menu, irritating popups telling me that playing this table has earned me ten experience points, the ball vomiting forth a constant stream of numbers telling me how much hitting that particular bumper has scored. My patience with all of this lasted approximately five minutes, after which I went hunting through the settings menus searching for a way to turn it off — and to Zen’s credit it’s quite easy to get rid of all of it and enjoy a relatively polished pinball experience without any extraneous bullshit. The one exception is the table upgrades and “mastery” abilities that come with playing the standard singleplayer mode that has the Zen physics, which unfortunately seem to come as a single package; playing either of the Classic modes turns them off, but if you want the Zen physics it looks like you have to live with them. It’s not too bad, I suppose; the table upgrades are simple passive score boosters (like doubling your scoring during multiball) and the mastery abilities are powerups that you can use once per game that briefly boost scoring even further, or which rewind time by a second or so to allow you to undo a bad shot. They don’t really hurt the experience by being there, it just bugs me slightly that there are some bits in my computer pinball game that are Not Pinball that I can’t get rid of.

Other extras offered by the FX framework are more than welcome.  The table menu is a bit of a mess (FX3 has 81 tables available), but once you’ve found the one you want and get into the table menu there’s a pleasing array of options and information available. Online leaderboards integrated with Steamworks are omnipresent, which you’d think would be a fairly low bar for a pinball game to clear except for the fact that Pinball Arcade didn’t have them at all. There are table guides explaining the rules for each table that are handled with far more flair than Pinball Arcade ever managed, as well as a practice mode that offers a full hour of unlimited ballsave, and challenge modes for getting the highest score you can on a single ball, or within five minutes of playtime etc., which were interesting spins on the concept. Crucially you can instantly restart a game of FX3 if you do something idiotic like immediately losing the ball just after your initial ballsave runs out, whereas Pinball Arcade would have made you quit out to the main menu and start a whole new game. A lot of this is fairly basic quality-of-life stuff, but I’ve been playing without it for a few years now and I very much appreciated that Pinball FX3 has been put together by people who understand how videogames work instead of a bunch of enthusiasts who were rather more interested in recreating as many tables as possible than they were actually tying those tables together into a coherent product.

Oh yes, since this is nominally a review of the Williams table pack I should probably talk about the actual tables it contains. You get three of them: Medieval Madness, The Getaway and Junkyard. Junkyard strikes me as a rather generic mid-’90s offering with little about it that stands out, but it’s decent enough to play — I would take Junkyard over any of Zen’s bespoke table designs any day, and it also compares well to the average Pinball Arcade table. The Getaway is a more interesting table that I plan to spend more time with as it’s got a few intriguing features; hitting the ramp on the left hand side sends the ball spinning around a supercharger (which is very fun to watch) and there’s also a gear shifting mechanic that functions as a bonus multiplier, as well as a terrible Outrun-style minigame played via the dot-matrix display². I don’t like the dead zone in the middle very much (all that’s there is a boring set of targets), but nailing a shot on the ramp or getting the ball up to the secondary flipper on the right so that you can send it spinning around the back of the table several times is very satisfying, which means The Getaway has rather a lot of replay potential for me.

And then you’ve got Medieval Madness. God, but I love Medieval Madness. I’ve played forty or fifty tables across both Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX, and none of them have grabbed me the way Medieval Madness has; it’s a table I could play for dozens of hours. (Hell, it’s a table I have played for dozens of hours.) There’s a plastic castle in the centre of the table that is, appropriately, also the centre of the action; you have to hit the castle gate many, many times in succession to depose all of the lords and battle the King, so becoming good at getting the ball over the drawbridge is key to scoring well in Medieval Madness. However there’s a bunch of other shots: the Peasant and Damsel ramps are pretty obvious; there’s a tricky shot up to the left of the table just above the left bumper that activates the Catapult; and the Jousting lane runs up behind the castle. Oh, and hitting the posts either side of the drawbridge will eventually activate the Trolls, which I really like because it sums up Medieval Madness’s design ethos perfectly: you’ll most likely hit the Troll targets when you slightly mess up a shot on the castle gate, but where other tables would hand you nothing Medieval Madness at least progresses you towards something else. This is the main reason I really like Medieval Madness in spite of some the ‘90s humour which has not aged well at all, since no matter where you hit the ball on the table something interesting will happen. It’s not that it’s particularly more forgiving than other tables, it just knows how to grab and hold my attention better than they do.

This perhaps makes me the wrong person to review the tables in this first Williams pack, because I was always going to say that Medieval Madness alone was worth the £7 it costs and that the other two tables are essentially bonus extras. However, I was also very pleasantly surprised at the effort Zen have gone to to convince me that they can do actual real pinball properly in addition to their goofy fake stuff. While their purloining of the Williams license from Farsight may have effectively killed off Pinball Arcade I find myself concluding that, as somebody who plays computer pinball games, this is actually a good thing; once the appropriate options have been tweaked the Zen version of Medieval Madness is better than Farsight’s, and as long as they can sustain that level of quality I’d have no issue shelling out more money for future table packs that included other favourites such as Twilight Zone or Monster Mash. As for Pinball FX3 itself, well, let’s just say I hadn’t realised how much Pinball Arcade’s moribund interface had been dragging on my enjoyment of the tables until I didn’t have to deal with it any more. I still hate most of Zen’s native tables and I don’t think my opinion on that is ever going to change, but this first Williams table pack (along with the promise of more to come) is good enough that Pinball FX3 has supplanted Pinball Arcade as my default go-to option for when I want to play computer pinball.

The post Thoughts: Pinball FX3 (Williams Table Pack) appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Fortunately for Pinball Arcade, however, it turns out that what Farsight are good at is making computer simulations of pinball tables. I don’t expect virtual pinball tables to be any more than acceptable-looking, and since they’re controlled by all of three buttons (plus nudging) the ease of use thing isn’t an issue either.  And in terms of actually playing the thing, well, as far as I’m concerned Pinball Arcade blows Pinball FX 2 out of the water.

To recap for those of you who don’t obsessively follow virtual pinball games: Pinball FX 2 and Pinball Arcade go about their pinball in very different ways. Pinball FX 2 is all about acknowledging its status as a video game and using that to do things that wouldn’t be possible on a real table, from having little animated characters jump and/or fly around the playfield to actively yanking the player away from the table and dumping them into an incredibly bad on-rails shooter section controlled with the flipper buttons. This isn’t an inherently bad idea, but in my opinion there were slightly too many occasions where these gameplay elements had been thrown in for the sake of it rather than because they actually made the game more fun to play; I play pinball games to play pinball games, and this is something that Pinball FX’s table designers seemed to have trouble grasping. It also meant that they had to come up with original designs for each and every table that were very much hit and miss – I found that I had to play three tables to find one that I liked enough to chase high scores on. As a result while the fun tables were very fun (and the interface a thousand times slicker than the one in Pinball Arcade) I came away from Pinball FX 2 feeling rather unsatisfied – not disappointed, but because of its focus it hadn’t really done enough to scratch that pinball itch.

Pinball Arcade is a different beast entirely. PA’s major selling point is that it is offering fully-digitised versions of classic real-world pinball tables, and while this means a lot of painstaking work for Farsight in terms of stripping the tables down and converting them component by component¹ and the tables don’t have the whizz-bang pizzazz of Pinball FX’s… well, FX, it also means that the majority of the tables on offer are incredibly well-designed. They had to be in order to get people to put money into them in the first place.  As a result Pinball Arcade has a very high hit rate when it comes to table quality; I’ve bought the Season One pack which has twenty-odd tables in it, and while there’s definitely half a dozen in there that are either filler or have been included more for their historical value than because they’re actually any good, the eight or nine big-name tables that I’ve played have hooked me in for an hour or two each. They stand up to repeat play very well indeed – and again, this is to be expected given where they’ve come from.

I will say, though, that I was a bit surprised I took to PA’s tables so well since at first glance they seem rather more unforgiving than those in Pinball FX. Most tables won’t offer free replays if you lose the ball in the first few seconds of play, and the centre drains tend to be cavernous maws compared to Pinball FX’s narrow channels. They also almost never have kickback functionality (a kickback will return a ball lost down one of the side drains to play). However, this is just a form of tough love; by kicking away all of these crutches Pinball Arcade forced me to start nudging the table to save balls, something I’d previously shied away from because I saw it as cheating. Here its built into the very design of the tables, however; the people who put them together expected nudging and adjusted the difficulty to compensate.

Once I’d mastered nudging it became apparent that most PA tables are actually fairly accommodating, with plenty of extra balls and multiballs available to extend playtime, and – crucially – they’re also pretty good at telling you how to activate this stuff. The implementation of the dot matrix display that so infuriated me in Pinball FX is done correctly here as the game will pause the action after you’ve locked a ball or activated a mode so that you can look at the dot matrix and see what you have to do next. With one notable exception the ball physics on the tables is excellent; I’ve played very few real tables so I can’t really make that comparison, but as far as the game goes it is consistent and predictable and allows for accurate trick shots, which is all I really ask. It might just be a natural result of Farsight’s slavishly detailed 1:1 conversion process, but with the exception of the Clone Wars table there’s nothing in Pinball FX 2 that really comes close to what’s on offer in Pinball Arcade.

Now to put the boot in: while their table simulations are excellent everything else in the Pinball Arcade is bloody awful. Here, look at this. This is one of Pinball Arcade’s high score tables. It looks like it dates from the mid-nineties when Windows 95 had just come out and everyone thought Arial font was really cool. The entirety of the UI is done in a similarly ugly fashion, and the general ineptitude on display here isn’t just limited to the game’s looks: there’s no integration with my Steam friends list for Friends Leaderboards, and if you want access to global leaderboards you have to make an account on Farsight’s own system. This is something that just worked in Pinball FX 2, as it’s worked in Spelunky and Droplitz and a thousand other games I could name. Shit, Droplitz is five years old now so it’s not like this is a particularly new thing; it’s the minimum bar I set for any game with high score tables now and Farsight have failed to clear it in spectacular fashion.  Browsing the tables themselves is done by scrolling through a vertical list rather than Pinball FX’s grid layout, which is a bit of a pain when you’ve just bought 20+ tables in one of the Season packs. And as for actually buying the things Pinball Arcade represents the most inept implementation of DLC I’ve ever seen on Steam.

With every other game I’ve played, if you want DLC all you have to do is buy it through Steam’s store page like a regular game. This is a two or three click process, which is a good thing for developers because if we had more time to think about just what we were about to spend our money on we might have second thoughts. If you want your DLC to be a success you have to make buying it as quick and painless as possible.  Ease of use is probably the most important factor in the success of digital distribution, and it’s something that Farsight have almost totally ignored. The only store-integrated DLC that Pinball Arcade offers are the season packs, which cost £23 and £30 respectively and contain 20-odd tables each. If you want just one table I have some bad news: unless that table is Tales of the Arabian Nights, which is free, you’re going to have to jump through some additional hoops. In order to find out how much it costs you have to scroll through that vertical list of tables to find it. Then once you’ve clicked “Play” you’ll be confronted with three options: play a score-limited trial run, buy the season pack which contains the table, or buy the table as part of a two-pack. Table pack prices range from £4 to £7, tables will invariably be bundled with another one you don’t care about, and even if you click the “Buy” button you’re forced to suffer a final indignity: paying for it with Steam Wallet cash. For those who don’t know, Steam Wallet is a way of exchanging real money for credit on Steam; it’s most often used trading for hats/cards on the Steam Market, and you can only buy Steam Wallet credit at specific price points, almost none of which correspond to the price of a table pack. Unless you’re lucky or you want to buy more than one pack you’ll end up with some spare cash rattling around in your Steam Wallet, and while you can use this as partial credit on your next Steam purchase it’s still incredibly goddamn annoying, especially since this game’s entire business model is based around DLC. You’d think that after spending so long trying to get their game onto Steam Farsight would have taken full advantage of its features rather than carrying out a half-arsed implementation and calling it a day.

Now, the good news is that in my opinion the Season One pack offers excellent value for money². Yes, it’s £23, but it’s got twenty-one tables in it, at least five of those are all-time classics (Theatre of Magic, Medieval Madness, Bride of Pin*Bot, Monster Bash and Twilight Zone) and that’s just the stuff I’ve had time to play. The only genuinely bad table in there is the Star Trek: TNG one, and that’s because of a strange quirk in the table physics that will unfailingly send the ball screaming down the left drain if you try any shot at all on the centre ramp. The free Tales of the Arabian Nights table is also one of the better ones and Pinball Arcade is far less stingy with its trial sessions than Pinball FX, allowing you enough time to get a good sense of how each table will play before it asks you for cash. UI and payment woes aside this is the pinball game I’ve been waiting for the last decade and a half; it doesn’t matter how ineptly Farsight have built the surrounding infrastructure when the core game experience is just so good.

(If you like pinball, anyway.)

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The post Thoughts: Pinball Arcade. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

In which I write 2300 words about computer pinball. You have been warned.

Long-time readers of this blog will have probably noticed that I like pinball computer games. It’s a hankering that I picked up after playing the free Space Cadet table that came with Windows 95 for far too many hours, and it’s one that’s been tragically underserved during the last decade and a half as pinball fell out of fashion in both its physical and virtual forms. That the genre has undergone a mini-resurgence on XBLA, PS3 and tablet devices is rather meaningless to me since I own none of these things and don’t ever intend to, but I have been watching the attempts of these console pinball titles to make the leap to the PC platform (in this case meaning “Steam”) with considerable interest.  First there’s Pinball Arcade, whose main selling point is that it features faithfully-recreated digital versions of classic pinball tables you might have seen in bars and arcades during the 80s and 90s. Pinball Arcade has been languishing on Steam Greenlight ever since its inception and only just managed to get greenlit a couple of weeks back; it’ll take a few more months before the developer – Farsight — is able to complete a Steam-integrated version of the game.  After all the hassle Farsight went through to get their game onto Steam I greeted the news that Pinball Arcade’s main rival, Pinball FX 2, was lined up for a Steam release this week without having to go through any of that Greenlight shit first with a rather sardonic smile. The system works, guys! Not only has Pinball FX 2 totally stolen Pinball Arcade’s thunder but it’s going to have several months all to itself to corner what is an admittedly rather niche market, and it’s entirely thanks to Valve’s ridiculous two-tier system where if you’re not a developer/publisher who is “known” to them you have to jump through the Greenlight hoops in order to prove you’ve got what it takes.

Anyway, that’s Valve’s (and Farsight’s) problem. As far as I’m concerned as a consumer it just means I get two modern pinball games on Steam instead of one, and happily they are taking rather different approaches to digital pinball. Where Pinball Arcade limits itself to currently-existing real-world tables, Pinball FX 2 offers a range of brand new tables designed specifically for the game and which attempt to take advantage of the fact that it’s a simulated version of pinball by doing stuff that would not be possible on a real-world table, effectively hybridising it with a conventional video game. Little animated figures strut around the tables, gunships swoop and soar, and ramps appear out of nowhere for you to try and pull off trick shots. It’s a fairly neat idea, but as with all innovative approaches to older concepts it runs the risk of falling flat on its arse in terms of implementation. How does it actually play?

That’s a tricky question to answer. Pinball FX 2 – and Pinball Arcade – are both sold almost entirely as chunks of DLC. There are currently 28 tables for Pinball FX 2, and you can download and boot up the game free of charge to trial all of them for a limited period of time (typically a couple of minutes each), but if you actually want to play them you’ll have to fork over some cash for one of the table packs¹. Said packs contain 3-4 tables and cost £7 each, which isn’t terrible when you consider how much 3-4 tables used to cost you during the Windows 95 era, but it does make buying all of them prohibitively expensive. I sprang for the Star Wars pack of tables based largely on this glowing Eurogamer review of the Empire Strikes Back table, with the intention of picking up some of the other packs during a sale or something. Consequently this review is of the Star Wars pack for Pinball FX 2 only; I can’t comment on any of the other tables. They could be amazing. They could be awful. I just don’t know.

The Star Wars pack contains three tables: the aforementioned Empire Strikes Back table, a table based around overdone fanboy favourite Boba Fett, and a Clone Wars-themed table to round things off.  Based on that Eurogamer review of ESB and the fact that it completely ignored the other two tables in the pack, I was kind of expecting Empire Strikes Back to be by far the best of the three. As it turns out this was incredibly stupid of me, because I forgot that a) I should never trust game reviews generated by mainstream gaming publications² and b) if you read between the lines you can tell that the author of the review has a raging hard-on for Star Wars which is entirely clouding his judgement. When the first actual things about the table it bothers to mention are voice samples from the movie (except they couldn’t afford to license voice samples from the movie so they’re delivered by character soundalikes that sound nothing alike), the Imperial March and the little animated Darth Vader that pops up every now and again it should perhaps be obvious that you’re not getting a completely unbiased view of things.

Now, I don’t particularly like Star Wars all that much, and if you ask me Empire Strikes Back is a bloody awful pinball table. The play is based almost entirely around missions which are supposed to ape scenes from the movie, but your objective during these missions – the thing you actually have to do on the table to score the points – is never clear. There are some lanes which flash and I try to hit them, but doing so never seems to produce any appreciable effect. I got a little Tie Fighter to appear once along with some ramps so that I could dodge through an asteroid field, but even after doing this three or four times nothing was visibly happening on the table and the mission failed to complete. The one mission I did understand was the one with the AT-AT walker where I had to get the ball around the back lane to match up with the speeders wrapping their legs in tow cables, but on the whole it’s a fairly confusing experience and it’s entirely down to the method Pinball FX 2 uses to communicate feedback. This is via a small dot matrix display in the corner of the screen that’s supposed to mimic what you’d see on a real pinball machine backboard, except unlike a real pinball machine backboard you can’t keep track of it in your peripheral vision. You have to physically shift your eyesight to the top left (or, after I moved it and made it bigger in an attempt to get it to work, the bottom right) in order to figure out what’s going on, and while you’re taking your eye off the ball to do this you’ll mistime a shot and it’ll rebound down a drain. I guess I just find it utterly baffling that a game which is consciously trying to move away from the limitations of physical pinball chooses to communicate information to the player through this awful, antiquated and wholly inadequate analogue of a physical pinball machine.

Even discounting this, though, I think Empire Strikes Back is just fundamentally not a very fun table to play. It seems to have been put together in such a way that you’ll miss all your shots unless they’re dead-on and there’s about a zillion obstacles to getting into a nice smooth rhythm with the flippers, and so I haven’t spent a huge amount of time with it. The Boba Fett table is a bit better with much improved on-table communication, and any time you absolutely have to read something off of the dot matrix it’ll stop the action to give you some time to assimilate that information. This table has missions that are based around first opening up access to either the Empire or the Hutts by getting the ball down a particular lane five or six times, and then accepting bounties from them in the form of “Job” targets that you can hit for big, big points. It’s understandable, it fits the theme, and the table even has some nice touches like the little Boba Fett flitting around the playfield grabbing the ball out of the drain with his grappling hook and yanking it back into play whenever ball save is activated. I certainly liked it a lot more than Empire Strikes Back. The only problem with it is that when you don’t have a bounty activated there don’t seem to be a huge number of point-scoring opportunities available, and opening up those bounties can be annoying when the table suffers from the same finickiness of design as ESB. Still, Boba Fett is not a bad table. It’s just an almost perfectly mediocre one.

As surprising as it was, then, I found myself spending most of my playing time with the Clone Wars table. It’s surprising because it’s the table I would have expected them to spend the least amount of effort on, being based around an animated series ostensibly aimed at children, and yet the end result is legitimately fantastic. Perhaps it’s because the table designers didn’t feel so constrained by the licensed property this time around and could fit the theme to the design rather than the other way around. Perhaps it’s because they could actually afford to license voice clips from the series this time around, as well as getting in the guy who does the opening narration to each episode as a very helpful table announcer (so for example you might not have much idea what the ramp saying “T6” does to start with, but when the announcer says “T6 multiball!” to coincide with multiball mode being activated you can probably put two and two together). Perhaps it’s because it doesn’t rely anywhere near as much on the dot matrix display as the other two tables. Whatever the reason, the Clone Wars table ended up almost single-handedly justifying the £7 I spent on the Star Wars pack.

It’s a reasonably simple setup that’s almost entirely based around ramps and lanes. Hitting a lane correctly will automatically dump the ball back into a position where you can hit another lane, and so if you’re good enough you can chain together a lot of awesome shot combos. Unlike the other tables the lanes actually do obvious things this time around, like activating multiball or hurry up modes, and there’s also a slightly larger margin for error because 90% of the time you’re playing the ball is in a lane rather than bouncing around near the drain because your shot was off by a couple of degrees. Clone Wars is far less dependent on the mission-based gameplay of the other tables, too; it’s there, but you can score big points without it if you don’t want to jump through hoops and just want to hit accurate shots. There’s an upper set of flippers which (for once) are actually in sane positions to hit two of the more important lanes in the game if you can set them up right. Basically everything about the design of this table just seems to have gone right where the others went horribly wrong, using Pinball FX 2’s nature as a computer game to aid the gameplay rather than wasting the player’s time with a bunch of flashy gimmicks that don’t actually add anything substantial to basic pinball formula. And as the icing on the cake hitting the Gunship ramp makes a noise very similar to the sound effect for hitting a reflex shot into the launch ramp on the Space Cadet table. I’ve already sunk five hours into it and I can see myself spending many more trying to beat my high score – which, in the end, is what pinball is all about.

I suspect that the Star Wars tables are not all that unusual in terms of how these DLC table packs are put together; you’ll get one good table, probably, and then the rest will be middling-to-bad depending on your personal tastes. Is £7 going to be worth it for that one good table? I think so – but then, as we’ve already established, I really like computer pinball. For others who are quite not so obsessive about the concept your mileage is most definitely going to vary, and to make matters worse I don’t think the trial periods you’re allowed before buying a set of tables are long enough to really give you a good impression of how it will play in the long term. I’m certainly not happy with the idea of forking out for another set of tables when they might all be riddled with the same flaws that afflicted two-thirds of the Star Wars pack. It pushes the rest of them into definite “Wait for a sale” territory, which is bad news for Pinball FX 2 because I’m pretty much their target audience. Good news for Pinball Arcade and Farsight, however; even though they’ve been pipped to the post through no fault of their own there’s still plenty of room for them to shine.

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The post Thoughts: Pinball FX 2 (Star Wars Pack). appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.