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One other issue with the Pro Pinball games is, while the physics are pretty much the best anyone has done in the digital realm, they are still “off”. Now I’m 50/50 between the two, because while FarSight’s tables are based on the real thing and have the great sound and personality, but awful physics–I appreciate I can drop catch and juggle multiballs properly in the Pro Pinball games, at the cost of more pleasing aesthetics. The Williams stuff from back in the day sounds so much bigger and has so much personality in comparison, I found them far more fun in digital form at first than I did the Pro Pinball games. I haven’t put enough time into BRUSA but the sound is a serious issue for me in Timeshock, and the voices in Fantastic Journey are… laughable at best. For me the biggest point of contention is the sound packages. However, they lack in certain areas of aesthetics. The physics are considerably better than anything FarSight has churned out. I think that’s more appealing to a lot of people. My guess is a lot of the casuals don’t talk about the Pro Pinball games because with the Pinball Arcade (and the Williams/Gottlieb Pinball Hall of Fame packs before that), there’s subject matter that’s recognizable, popular tables one may have experienced when they were younger.
The main diamond modes were pretty varied and generally quite good. The color DMD was great and had promise but ultimately was vastly underutilized. I got pretty far in it, but don’t think I ever completed the first ? adventure mode. Fortunately, there’s finally a video of someone doing well on it on youtube, so I can rest easy knowing the end of the game now. I did play it a fair amount, certainly more than BRUSA, and even within the last few years I dusted it off and had some goes on it. There’s lot of interesting (and hard) rules in the game (particularly the finishing bonuses for the adventure modes), but the basic geometry of the shots never worked for me that well. I never got close to finishing it though I choose to believe I was probably the first one outside of Cunning to finish Timeshock.įJ… This one seemed rushed to me or something. A competent game, but one that I did not enjoy playing. It seemed hard, probably went more brutally hardcore rulewise than did Timeshock, didn’t shoot as well (to me), and just simply lacked fun. Really loved a lot of the more imaginative things they did like the souvenir matches which I thought was a really great rule.īRUSA fell completely flat to me. To me it seems impossible to “get” by casuals, but I have no evidence one way or the other.
Timeshock honestly to me lacks in music and speech, but the rules are so good it’s hard to hate the game for those things. It was BTFO by Timeshock, though, truly the pinnacle of the series. It was really the first video pinball with serious hardcore pinball rules. Biggest bummer was unlabeled inserts, but I guess you got used to it pretty quick.
I really liked it, and it just kind of grew onto me as I played it, after reading about the mixed reception by critics.) What’s everyone’s take on the series, if any? (Oddly enough, I grew up with Fantastic Journey as my first table throughout my younger years. They’ve yet to do DMDs, motion blurring, and more refined physics than that of FJ and BRUSA.) (Currently, all the camera views are in, as well as cabinet support. The quality is astounding, even though it takes a long time for the additional features and tables to be finished. They’re probably not even aware that the Timeshock is graphically (and soon, physically) remastered by the very same development team. Pro Pinball sold 3 million copies in the 1990s, and the odds of people remembering the game(s) are very low. Point #2 is probably more on the nostalgia factor. Whereas Pro Pinball Ultra, on Steam, is $15 for just Timeshock, and that may seem off-setting for some. It might just be that most just want to go for products available with a “cheap” price tag ($30 for 10-20 tables is a steal, even more so on a major sale).
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70+ games in each title, free to try out, and very cheap to afford multiple tables, bundled or not. It might be that both Pinball Arcade and Zen have much more to offer than said series. They’re both great games to play, but I just don’t get why Pro Pinball seems so underrated. It just baffles me as to why these games (The Web, Timeshock, Big Race USA, and Fantastic Journey) never receive as much credit in digital pinball as, say, Pinball Arcade or Zen Pinball.