FarSight brings "The Pinball Arcade" to all major plaforms

[maink]

the ps3 demo for pinball arcade has finally arrived

[katschunka]

Pinball Arcade physics definetly need improvement

First of all, please excuse my poor english. I got Pinall Arcade last week for PS3 and played it for a pretty long time already. I must say there are many bugs in that game. sometimes the game will not start for some tables i. e. the ball does not come to play. The other big issue is the tables physics engine. Sometimes the ball travels right through the flippers especially if the ball moves at high speed and the flippers are moving when it is near them. It happens often if you try slap saves but not only in that case. There are some other odd behaviors that the ball is showing. If I have to name the problem then I would say that the physics engine has not enough performence to simulate the ball physics continuously enough to avoid such odd effects.
It is a pitty that the experience of playing such awsome tables is spoiled by such insufficiencies. I regret that i spend the money for that game. Zen does a much better job. Thank you ZEN. I hope that Zen will get the licenses for some original tables eventually.

[chiralfox]

In my opinion, Zen and Pinball Arcade target slightly different audiences that have quite a lot of overlap if one were to draw a Venn diagram. I find it curious and inaccurate that some posts in this thread talk about problems with the physics in Pinball Arcade. The game is not without its issues; poor collision detection is certainly a huge problem when it loses the player a ball. I have experienced that bug myself on a fair number of occasions. However, collision detection and ball physics are, in my mind, two very different things.

Certainly, Zen has no issue with collision detection. Neither Zen nor Pinball Arcade get ball physics exactly right. Flippers in both games are unrealistically bouncy. Flipper movements that wouldn't kick a ball away like a full-on hit often do exactly that. Nudging in both games could be better, although for quite different reasons. I think anyone that says that any digital pinball game has "perfect" physics is either looking specifically for a game that isn't realistic or hasn't played enough real pinball to be familiar with how on location tables play.

I own many different versions of digital pinball (PBFX2, Zen, Marvel, Pinball Arcade on PS3 and iOS), and they're all good in their own right, depending on what kind of mood I'm in. But damn it, nothing, NOTHING is better than playing a pin on location. Well, provided everything works correctly!

[s-carnegie]

I agree, its been a while mainly because there so few around any more. I wish I could find a paragon table some where. Wide table from 77 or so. Bang special all day long with one quarter.

[katschunka]

@chiralfox: Sorry to disagree but collision detection is part of the physics engine, especially in a pinball game where nearly the whole gameplay is about collisions basically. Please refer to the Wikipedia page about Physics engine. After reading that artice i guess Farsights problem is that they use discrete collision detection. And yes, I played a whole bunch of Pinball Tables. I played all the awsome ones by Williams back in the nineties like Funhouse, Earthquake, Whirlwind etc. among others. The first table i played was Centaur by Bally.

[LumaFan")]

No threat to Zen, Zen already has a wide fan base and stabilized in DLC and tables. They got more experience on the market.