Quick Look: The Pinball Arcade (Update!)

Frakes...!!!

Wait, isn't this the guy from Multimedia Celebrity Poker?

Who knew he was in Star Trek as well

TNG!

Learning about the capture stuff is pretty awesome. You guys should post a video for behind the scenes sometime. It would be super interesting!

The only Patrick better than scoops

Pinball FX2 & the Pinball Arcade on the 360 I believe also has had some updates since last quick looks. Agreed with Jeff on how good the ST TNG pinball game is, remember playing it at arcades & great fun.

The audio in this video is pretty painful to listen to.

What's up with the audio scratching in QLs lately ? got some bad mics going on or something ?

I love me some pinball and the stuff FarSight is doing is incredible, but I don't own an infernal Apple device and this thing is way too choppy with low frames on the Kindle Fire. I NEEEEEED this to come out on PC finally!!!!

I go to the local arcade bar for my pinball needs. Alcohol doesn't help.

Pinball Arcade is so fucking awesome.

I can't look at Frakes the same way ever since the incident.

The bigger benefit to pro mode (which is another $1.99 I think, on android at least) is that you gain access to the Operator Mode. Operator mode allows you to change table settings like number of balls per game, whether balls remain locked from game to game, and other stuff like that.

Oh man, my grandparents have that Genie machine at their house!

Been waiting for this to be Greenlit forever, I hope it does well because I need me some Getaway.

I wouldn't back any Kickstarter of theirs either myself; months of radio silence, in fact no response to customer service emails etc. Eventually I did manage to get a response from a Farsight staffer on an unofficial fan forum some months later.

Has Brad seriously never heard the phrases, "pinball arcade," or, "penny arcade," before?

Really, he thought that arcades were invented for video games? My word, man, read a book every once in a while.

Going by some of the Star Trek TNG behind the scenes stuff out there, like blooper reels and stuff... I think that's actually the true face of Frakes.

Lot of love for Pinball Arcade. Can't wait for the Steam release.

@frenchfriedfool said:

I can't look at Frakes the same way ever since the incident.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!

I was playing some Medieval Madness on my iPad, flipped over to the site, and saw this QL! I have spent countless hours with The Pinball Arcade. Wish they had spent more time on each table...or checked out Scared Stiff!

Jeff if you're ever in the Pittsburgh area you should check out PAPA. They have over 500 pinball machines in their building from the 50s up to the most recent machines. Pretty much any machine you can think of they have. They are normally closed to the public but twice a year they open up for large competitions. Its a blast to spend an afternoon there playing machines you otherwise would never be able to.

papa.org

savage music, totally amazing.

Pricing is a bit complicated it seems: Tables based on other properties (like Star Trek) seem to be $5 each, packs of 2 "original" tables are $5 as well and it seems only older packs offer the opportunity to buy seperate tables for $3 each.

All data coming from my Android version of the app.

Whatever you do don't turn the video quality down.

My kingdom for an emulated version of Data East's Star Wars pinball

You know, I really loved the Pinball Arcade when it came out.

It's the first digital pinball game that I have really enjoyed, and it got me interested in Pinball in general.

The physics are great, and I love that it's based on real tables rather than the made-up ones most games have, which couldn't actually exist as a physical table.

I invested a lot of money in it, buying all the table packs for months on multiple devices - I even went as far as getting my Dad an iPad and buying all the tables for him because he loved it so much when he saw it running on mine.

But then they started to break tables with each update, and they were even releasing totally broken tables at one point - I think Monster Bash was as bad as it got - that table was broken for weeks from the day it was released.

Farsight seemed like they were only focused on releasing new tables every four weeks rather than fixing the problems, or even releasing working ones - the Monster Bash problems were well known by the beta testers - but they didn't care. For months after that, every update they put out managed to break more tables than they fixed.

Then the Kickstarter tables came out and they decided to add another login system at the same time - which as it turns out, is still totally broken, so just like Jeff, I can't even access Twilight Zone. (I don't want to be signed into their account all the time)

And then there were the updates which had tables not recording scores, and over the space of several updates, it managed to completely reset all of my table scores multiple times.

This was the first game since XBLA launched where online leaderboards had actually meant anything to me, and it's the first game my Dad had any interest in playing in probably a decade (the last time was one of the Tiger Woods games on the original Xbox, and PSO on the Dreamcast before that) and it was great fun competing over the high scores - especially when new tables were released and we were going back and forth as we learnt them.

And then our scores were wiped. The first couple of times we put up with it, because the tables were still fun to play. But after it kept happening for months, we just got sick of it. He still plays the game and I'm still buying him all the new tables, but they killed any interest I had in it after that.

And on top of it all, even when several tables were still totally broken, they started adding "Pro Mode" to them, which was another way to squeeze money out of you for options that should have been available to begin with. It basically adds a debug menu - the options were already being emulated, but they decided that it was something they could charge for. Because of this, I am now sceptical that they even needed to do the Kickstarters in the first place, and weren't just trying to grab some extra money for tables they had already licensed after seeing how well Double Fine's Kickstarter went.

It's a shame that they had such a great product, and then managed to ruin it.

Maybe they have fixed most of the tables now, but I don't care. They have lost my trust, and I won't be giving them any more money.

@brad About the illegality of pinball, there's an issue of Kill Screen that has an article about it (and the process of making it legal again in New York, if I'm not mistaken). And I believe that All Your Base Are Belong To Us, by Harold Goldberg, has a chapter devoted to this subject.

I've been on a Next Generation binge since i discovered the episodes on Netflix lol this is perfect timing

Pinball Gambling: It was my understanding that pinball machines of ol had the ability to win a "free game" and the player was allowed to cash out on their free games.

Every time I go to a place and try to play a physical pinball machine I'm terrible. How does one get better at pinball in general? Do you just invest hours and hours into each machine figuring out the objectives, ball handling, and all that?

I used to go to shorty's all the time when I lived in Seattle! That place is the best...

Would you guys consider pinball machines as video games they do have some video on them they are games and they are all ways in arcades but im not really sure and could use a second opinion.

@00: I hear ya about the Farsight frustration, man. I picked up the game for 360 and played the living shit out of it when it was first released. I bought every table that was available and had a great time playing all of them.

Then when we were supposed to get more DLC, there were months and months of delays and silence and mounting anger on their Facebook page. Problems with publishers, litigation, unhappy customers feeling left out. It's just a giant clusterfuck, and it takes away from the awesomeness of The Pinball Arcade, unfortunately.

All I wanted from the beginning was to play Attack From Mars on 360. That's it. The entire reason why I bought this game was the promise of Attack From Mars DLC in the future, and now I don't know if it'll ever happen. I'm more bummed out than angry.

I just watched Best of Both Worlds last night at my local theater and saw this pinball machine in the background during one of the behind-the-scenes parts. I leaned over to my friend and said that was the best pinball to ever be released.

Why can't I find this on XBL? I see the main program but no TNG table... :(

Is the reason why the audio is so wonky because Drew is out of town?

I've spend more money on buying virtual pinball tables than I ever have on real pinball.

All this Black Knight talk reminded me of this amazing remix by Giant Bomb user @dain22.

Theatre of Magic is the best shit ever. If I only had the money...

It's like how Brent Spiner is this huge joker that wanted to be a comedian and he ended up playing a android that doesn't understand humour. From his character you would think he was really serious but in reality he is the opposite.

I am so glad that this game came out, I had a fun time playing it at MGC last year.

@benny rad

@milkman disgusting

Long Story short, The publisher that Farsight studios was working with went bankrupt.They are working with the bankruptcy court to get it sorted out and continue to update it.

I don't get why this got only 2 stars.

There were two star trek pinball tables at Cali Extreme last year

Gotcha. I just read on their Facebook page about this so it looks like I'll need to hunt this down on the PS3. I just can't play these games on portable systems for some reason. But thanks for the response!

Oh, shit, that was amazing. FM synthesized guitars with 70's style chorus over it? This is what video game music should've evolved into after Sega Genesis and Adlib, not the dumb CD Audio stuff (though I think the Sega CD was capable of the best of both worlds - Silpheed used a CD audio backing track which it played the regular Genesis FM synthesizer chip over, which if it had seen more use could probably have been capable of something like this).

@charaznable: same boat. backed both their kickstarters too. someday we may get 360 versions :(