To the Dev: Why is it there is slight lag in the flippers?? after i play my other pinball games, this makes me feel like a retard, as i have to plane my shots a lot earlier, and when relying on reflex i always am hitting where i dont want to or worse, lose balls. please fix this guys!
Somebody asked earlier if pinball was just luck. Watch a really good player play real pinball and you'll see that there is a tremendous amount of skill and strategy involved. But also luck. It's about managing risk, understanding the scoring, and accurately making shots/recovering when you don't. learning techniques as well, such as drop catches, slap saves, etc. Having said that, I find that in this (and Pinball FX and all other virtual pinball) that I have a much harder time making shots. I think this is due to the physics not being fine enough, but I'm not sure. It can get pretty frustrating sometimes. Still, PA is the best to date, and the games are real games and well designed (well, there are certainly bad real pinball machines - Popeye for one!)
I liked how you used the transition "Having said that," to negate everything you just stated in the first paragraph. Watch Season 7, Episode 10 of Curb your Enthusiasm (the Seinfeld Episode). Just thought it was funny
I'm finding these games unusually addicting... like a fine batch of crack. Arabian Nights is definitely my favorite, yet love them all. I've probably put 10+ hours into them so far and really get the feeling that I'm in front of the machines while playing. Excellent job developers!!! Vibration feedback would be awesome!
Hey crunc, I always thought your complaint about the physics in Zen being repetitive was off base. I never saw anything that made me think that. Ever. To be honest, I thought you were imagining it that something like that would happen. Until I played Theater of Magic. Hit the captive ball on a skill shot and see how often the ball bounces off the lower playfield numbers 2-3 times then goes straight up the right-hand loop (advancing the clock). I think what you are sensing is how flippers actually work on real machines. With most electronic pinball games, the weight of the ball doesn't affect the flipper velocity, but on a physical machine, it does. In many games, the flippers almost feel like digital devices, by which I mean they have two states, up and down, with no in between. I think they did a tremendous job with them.
I had a pretty good game of RBION going and a ball disappeared. After the ball search it launched another ball, but once it drained it put a new ball in the plunger lane, but it stayed in the overhead view and wouldn't let me plunge it! I tried using the "Call Attendant" option but all at did was put a second ball in the plunger lane, but still I couldn't plunge it. I had no choice but to quit and lose my game.
What I meant was that in simulations of pinball I find it harder to make shots consistently, or sometimes at all. For example with a caught ball (caught on the flipper) in Theatre of Magic in this game it is impossible to shoot the outer loops and trying do so results in an identical miss each time, or nearly so. On a real game these are certainly makeable with a caught ball. Of all these games I think RBION plays the best (aside from the above bug I ran into).
iOS version is great, but I was playing my best game on "Ripley's Believe it or Not" table and after multi-ball it's been stuck in "Looking for Pinballs" loop. Any ideas? Hate to lose this 24 mil score from 1 ball. Edit: Tried to shake the table to maybe knock it lose, and it's in Tilt mode too. Also tried "Call Attendant" from the menu and that didn't do anything. Seriously messed up.
So I took a look at the leaderboards... How do you guys get 85 million points?! Is there some kind of bug I don't know about? Getting over 2 mil is a record for me
Great game! Too many good things to say about it, so I'll jump right to the "other issues" (sorry, I know that sux, but I'm in a hurry): - The ball sometimes comes off the flippers at completely odd angles. I know this is tricky with programming a pinball game. I also had a ball go through a flipper once. Not straight through really. Hard to explain. - I'd like static cameras in addition to the ones provided. Can't have too many cameras! i do like the movement of the cams provided though. - The camera seems a bit too low when using the plunger. Makes it weird for skill shots. Not a major gripe though. Sometimes the ball really hauls ass on Black Hole (maybe others too). I haven't played that table in decades so it could just be me. Probably. Love the game! Love iPad pinball! These guys are doing this right and I'm sure they will address issues as they come.
Ive owned a few pinball machines in my time, and if i hit the button, the ball moves. Flippers are quiet strong, so even if the ball hits a moving flipper at full speed, the ball will fly back up the board from the power of the flipper (and slightly because of the rubber grip on the flipper) - with no lag.
I wonder if what people are seeing as "lag" is not really lag, but the impreciseness of the touch screen. It's not like having an actual button to press and it can have an imprecise feel. I see no lag when I'm just flipping the flippers and watching them (and not the ball). That's my theory anyway. Mind you, I'm playing on an iPad 2 (and sometimes iPhone 4). Maybe on the iPad 1 there really is lag. Certainly there are issues with RBION on the iPad 1 that are performance related, so it's possible. EDIT: somebody on Facebook said it better. You have to keep your fingers off the screen, so pressing involves moving them back to the screen and depending on how far off the screen your fingers happened to be, there is a kind of "delay" there. It's inconsistent, and could be seen as lag. You don't have that with a real button where you are resting on the button and the travel before it registers is exactly the same every time.
Oh, another bug I've run into in RBION, at least, is that I have completed all of the Normal goals for it, but it's not giving me the Wizard goals. I just get the normal goals, and they are all checked off. Anyone else see this issue?
Ouch! This aspect worked fine for me in RBION (just did it yesterday) although it didn't inform me about the Wizard goals now having been unlocked until that game I just completed the last Standard Goal for was complete.
Theatre of Magic Bug This bug has screwed me over 6 times now, with no way to salvage a round. It has happened all 6 times on Tiger Multiball in Theatre of Magic. The ball gets stuck in the chest and won't extract itself. Call Attendant, waiting, tilting, nothing works, so I have to exit the game completely, letting go of yet another high score run (1st ball, 1.6 billion....then bug; that hurts). At this point, I don't see much use in playing this table until this rather nasty and commonly recurring bug is squashed. Screenshot attached. You can see the ball stuck on the chest:
Ouch. It looks like you mean *on* not "in". Funny, yet not. I haven't run into that one yet. So there are definitely some nasty bugs in this game. I hope they can get them straightened out. On Facebook I see several people have noted the same bugs I've run into on RBION, so hopefully they will get on them and fix them ASAP.
I haven't run into that prob yet. Had some minor glitches in performance if I'm updating other apps while playing. Have a good solid 20 hours of game time with ToM. Playing on ipad first gen.
Crunc, same thing happened to me on TotAN with the Normal/wizard goals. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to display the wizard goals or not. all three cameras have static modes, check the options. Since the app doesn't save the camera mode like it should, I have found myself using the scrolling camera without realizing it. Interestingly, this is the only pinball app I've played with a moving camera that doesn't make me nauseous...not sure why.
