Sure, no problem. Actually, after playing pinball dreams for a longer time now, I have more to add to my review, and I do notice slowdowns on my 3G that cost me the ball more often than it should.
Littlewing is joining in the fray! Just in case you didn't catch this key article up front: Littlewing will be porting their old classics, Crystal Caliburn and Loony Labyrinth, all revamped for the iphone! http://toucharcade.com/2009/05/25/crystal-caliburn-and-loony-labyrinth-pinball-games-coming-to-iphone/
I don't know if the game is any good, but it is #1 in the category of "useless screen shots". There are five pictures in the app store and all of them have text covering up the entire screen. Michael
I just checked out their site and they've made a few more pinball games for both Mac and PC than when I last lost contact with the company a few years ago...but it looks like they want upwards of $30 for some of these tables (a little steep, I think).
Zen Pinball: Rollercoaster - Publisher X $4.99 10.0MB Graphics When you first load up Zen Pinball: Rollercoaster you are met with a black screen which lasts for about 10 seconds, followed by the ZEN and Publisher X screens and finally the intro screen with a small logo with the name of the game. The game then unloads you directly into the table screen with a confusing menu overlay. I have to admit, I was really confused at first, when I saw this overlay as I was expecting some sort of menu screen, hi-scores screen or even an instruction screen. Judging and playing with the menu overlay I could gather the things on top and bottom were displaying the paddle areas and the stuff in the middle controls the camera, play/pause button, a help screen and audio controls. I didn't really like the presentation of the "menu" and it seemed more like an afterthought rather than a design decision. You can see an example of this overlay in one of my screenshots above, its not hard to miss. After you hit the play button you are suddenly slammed right in the face with a massive quantity of decals, lights, flippers, wires, frames, volcanos and a whole slew of other things that are hard to make out. The first word that came to my mind was "overkill" then "whoa". Usually "whoa" comes before, but not for this table. If you tap the middle of the screen, you find a camera control. If you tap the control, and move your phone around, you can control the camera angle. If you leave this unlocked, you can control the camera while you play. Being able to get the angle you want and fix the camera, was crucial for me, since the table was hard enough to see as it was. When playing the table, the graphics move very quickly and when your ball hits bumpers, buttons and pins, lights are going off everywhere. I definitely found myself craving pinball dreams simplicity while playing this, as everything was almost overwhelming and it was frustrating to try and follow the ball through the gauntlet of decals and rails. One last thing I want to mention, and this is just my personal opinion, is that the game is REALLY dark and it almost felt dreadful to play this game. It gave me the feeling that I was playing pinball down in some dank boiler room waiting for my turn to be tied up and locked away to be tortured later if I didn't get a hi-score. Sound When you first load the game, the game is absolutely quiet until you actually start playing the table. Once you start playing, the sounds are decent. Lots of bells, dings and of course roller coaster sounds. When you launch the ball, it sounds like a roller coaster going down that first large hill. The more you work the ball into rails and ball holes, the more you amplify the "roller coaster experience" with these roller coaster sounds. All in all, the sounds in the game match the theme of the game but generally didn't match the dark gothic feeling of the visual representation of the table. The sounds in this game were the only "cheerful" element present. Handling This is a fast pinball game, the ball really moves around the table at some epic speeds and when you can really work the ball you can build up some really nice combos. The table itself is a step up in complexity from the pinball dreams tables, you have multiple gutters, some of which will repel the ball away. You can also earn "free ride" balls which, when you loose your ball, will pop out and keep your turn going. Aiming for ramps, holes, etc.. is actually quite easy, and this is where the game really shines, its a pretty decent table and even has a flipper in the upper playground which is crucial for special rails and releasing your held balls for multiball fun! If the table was less cluttered, or if the table had a better camera like say Wild West Pinball, I think the handling would have gotten a better score. All in all, the gameplay is fast, reliable and satisfying. Fun While the gameplay was fast and satisfying I really struggled to have fun with this one, and I think thats why the review has taken over a week now. I wanted to play the game enough to give a well thought out review, but I didn't find it to be as fun and satisfying as some of the other tables with a more simplistic approach to the gameplay. While a great homage to real pinball tables, it doesn't translate well to the iPhone/iTouch. Don't get me wrong though, if you have eagle eyes and don't mind the depressing dark theme you can definitely have some fun times with this table. Scores go into the millions easily, and if you're a hi-score fiend, this may be a worthy challenge if you're willing to endure the eye strain. Price I can understand why the developer would want 5$ for this game, they obviously spent a lot of time constructing the table, the camera element, placing all the decals and working on the gameplay but in the end, they stuffed the burrito too much and you find yourself sitting there with a 5$ guacamole & sour cream mess all over your shirt. For what you get, the level of polish and replayability I would pay 1.99$ at most for this title. In comparison to other similar pinball games on the appStore this one is a little expensive and I can't really justify paying the extra few dollars for one very complicated table. I did pay the 5$ though, and managed to play the game for a whole week. If I was in the Arcade I would have blown through 5$ in a few hours so if you look at it this way, good buy. In the end, Zen Pinball: Rollercoaster is an OK pinball game with a load of things to do on the table and a ton of points to score, if you have the desire to get every pinball game there is for the iPhone, go for it. I personally have a hard time recommending this without a price drop or visual improvements to the game.
What exactly do you mean by this? I can't seem to get much force from the flippers no matter what I do. Thanks, Michael
Thanks for the detailed review, dogmeat. This was one of the first pinball games to come out. I never bought it, because of the lackluster reviews, and I am glad I didn't. So many more higher quality games have come out since...glad I saved my money.
Now that I've played the game more, its not actually about holding your thumb down or anything like that, pinball dreams really does a good job at forcing you to learn the proper timing of the game. I found that when I hit the paddle at the "right" time ( usually this was 1 milisecond before what I thought the right time to be ) I could properly aim the ball. My suggestion to you is to play a few games, with the sole purpose being to figure out the timing on the paddles. Use the nightmare level since its a good one with some empty space and high ramps. Play around, and you should get it. Also, I started reviewing pinball: casino madness and my first impressions are looking pretty good, its like WWP and pinball dreams had a baby.
I'd have to agree with this. Pinball Dreams (and kin) were pretty unforgiving, which is to say accurate, so you can't get away with "soft" shots; what you see is what you get, no more and no less, like a real pinball table. Timing is a huge issue in pinball games, and some games don't get it quite right, so you learn to adjust your reaction times to compensate. Pinball Dreams forces you to unlearn that and play it the way it's meant to be played.
Its not an aiming issue (although, my aim isn't that great yet) its a power issue. Most of the time, when I hit the ball with the paddle, it goes about halfway up the screen and comes down again. Is that correct? It seems to me that the paddles should apply a bit more speed to the ball. Thanks, Michael
I couldn't agree more with what you said, this also provides a really long lasting and extremely satisfying pinball experience, once you learn how to effectively time your paddle swipes.
Right -- although the same could be said of any pinball game. The key is making sure everything is in sync, controls are given priority, and everything responds and reacts as intuitively and naturally as possible. Physics is something we all understand on a fundamental level since we deal with it every waking second, so if you're going to simulate it in a game, it should behave the way everybody expects it to. Pinball Dreams and Fantasies both got that right the first time, and the iPhone conversions retain that perfectly.
After 7 months of development and three weeks of approval Monster Pinball is finally out! Apple have approved our app http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=14332
Hey all, I just learned over the weekend that I'm going to japan for 2 weeks, in 2 weeks. I'm pretty excited, but I wanted to let you guys know I'll finish up the following reviews before I go: Pinball: Casino Madness - Divagen.com In Review $0.99 6.8MB Monster Pinball - Matmi In Review $3.99 10.4MB Who knows, maybe the deep will be released right before I leave, I can review that one while I'm on the plane
Pinball: Casino Madness - Divagen.com $0.99 6.8MB So people have been saying some nice things about Pinball: Casino Madness lately. It has supposedly gotten a price drop and update, so I decided to skip over some of my reviews to give this one a chance. Graphics When you first load up the game, you are met with a nice splash screen, almost neon lights looking sign spelling out the name of the game. You are then dropped directly into a demo of the table that mostly reminds me of the demo you see before playing wild west pinball. The camera rotates around, zooming in on key areas of the table and I think its a good way to inspect the table before playing. Looking at the table itself, it is very easy to distinguish the different areas, decals, and get a sense of what the table is all about. The table and table graphics themselves, are all 2d, or some sort of flattened 3d, but I'm fairly certain it is 2d. You'll find a nice roulette table smack dab in the middle of the table, with cards, chips and other gambling related decals strewn about the table. Aside from this, there are several ramps for the player to aim at, one of which, leads to a secret area with a mini game. When you hit the screen with your finger the first time, you are presented with a nice interface that "slides" in from the sides of the screen reading New Game, Options and an icon that, at first, was hard to tell what it did, but hitting it once changed the rotation of the screen, nice! The table features an LED style score overlay at the top of the screen which displays various status messages and of course, the score for the game. When playing the game the graphics light up when hit, paddles are easy to see as they are the brigtest possible yellow a human can see and generally, this game makes it very easy to see whats going on. I don't know what the framerate of the game is, but while playing the ball and camera move in synchronous smooth motion and I didn't experience any choppiness, save for the choppiness that happens in all games when you go through tunnels on a train and it has to reconnect to 3G. Sound The game features a fast paced new agey sounding soundtrack which is comprised mostly of a light backbeat and some simple instruments at the top level making the soundtrack sound like fast paced trancelike elevator music. All in all, the music sits in the background and you will find yourself rarely taking notice of it, which is good. The sound effects in this game seem to be lacking in the "ding-ding" sense of things. While the sound effects definitely remind the player of a pinball table they are mostly "thud" and "thunk" sounding. When you expect a "ding" sound effect while hitting a pin, you are met with a "thunk" and I really found that this took away from the pinball experience as a whole. So much so, that I found myself getting bored with playing the game, since there was nothing fun about the sounds, nothing "satisfying" like I describe with other games. In the end, the sounds in this game aren't bad, but they aren't really that good either. It is sufficient to say that they "fill the need for sound in the game" and nothing more. Handling Let me start off by saying the game has good presentation value, the game loads very quickly and the interface to actually get you into the game is somewhat polished. When you actually start playing the game, it seemed like some funny stuff was going on behind the scenes. The ball moves around at about a medium pace, when you hit the ball with your paddles, its not very hard to AIM or put force into the ball. What I did find though, is that the ball physics when you're not hitting the ball are inconsistent. You hit the ball, expecting it to go up and to the left for example, but halfway up it turns to the right for no apparent reason. At some points, you want the ball to "bounce" off something it had previously bounced off, yet it doesn't. I won't go too much into the problems that I faced while playing, but the fact that this happens at all, really killed the game for me. I also found that certain skill shots didn't always work. Sometimes the ball would hit the entrance to a ramp for example, only to be repelled away by some invisible force. Either the graphics and physics aren't synching up or theres a physics problem with the game itself. Another point of confusion was trying to actually get the ball on the playing field. One would think you take your right thumb and roll it along the bottom right of the screen ( where the ball is ) to launch it, but upon inspecting the instructions I found its the opposite. You have to roll your thumb along the top of the screen to actually get the ball on the playing field and this didn't make much sense to me but once I understood this, getting the ball on the table wasn't a problem. One last thing to mention is the mini game. There is a mini game you can access if you hit a certain ramp. Its basically a mini pinball table where the goal is to light up all the numbers at the top of the mini table, each time you do this it resets the 15 second timer and you get another chance to light up the numbers again. In the end, the game handles fine but there is some funny business when it comes to physics and for a player like me, this is unacceptable when trying to play a skill game, aiming for a high score. Fun I've played this game for several days and I just cant seem to get into it. Aside from the problems with the ball physics, the table itself just seems very ordinary and there really isn't anything about it that gets you hooked on the game. The game has 2 ramps and a few skill shot areas. One of the ramps rolls the roulette table for you and the other takes you to the minigame. After getting to the mini game I found it to be really boring, as it was literally just lighting up a bunch of numbers over and over before a timer runs out and I found that 6/10 times trying to get to the area, your ball would be ejected directly into the exit hole before you had a chance to swipe at it. Rolling the ball up the other ramps/skillshots/etc.. gives you some points and begins to trigger other modes in the game, but you sort of feel like everything on the table is the same and that you're just doing the same thing over and over. Its this lack of diversity in sound, things to hit, things to roll up, etc.. that really made this game "not fun" and just "standard" in my opinion. Let me tell you this though, I'm not big on gambling and casinos so it is possible that someone who loves gambling/casinos/cards/etc.. may really be interested in this. Price The game is only $0.99 at the time of this writing. Overall the game isn't that bad but there are certain things about the game that really kill the entire experience, specifically the ball physics. And while the problems with ball physics don't plague the game at all times, the fact that there could or could not be a chance of the ball having a problem due to this makes it hard to pick this one up for a second and third round of play. I think it's fairly priced at $0.99, if you want to just check it out or you absolutely need every table on your iphone. In the end, Pinball: Casino Madness is a fairly priced 2d pinball simulator for the iPhone. If you can forgive the occasional physics problem and lack of true pinball sounds and have a soft place in your heart for gambling/casinos you should check this out. If you're a pinball player and have some of the other games like pinball dreams, wild west, monster pinball, etc.. You probably won't find much enjoyment out of this one.
It's good time as any to unearth this thread. It seems like the idevices have now more pinball games than any other gaming machine in recent years, which is a good thing in my book since pinball (real or video game) accounts for some of my favorite pastime. Right now Pinball Dreams is still my favorite with Fantasies being a close second, mostly due to the flipper orientation making it much harder to play the latter than on the original Amiga version I had. That and I actually like playing all of Dreams's tables while Fantasies I mostly stick to Partyland and Stones'n'Bones. They're both still great pinball games. As crazy as it may sound they were partly the reason I finally got an iPod Touch... yeah. A good third place makes Monster Pinball, which I wasn't so keen on in the beginning but I've grown to like now, which is a bit different but quite enjoyable. Still waiting on some game music there. Sure, I can listen to my regular music but the game's sounds just don't seem to mix very well with it. Casino Madness is actually fairly competent and at times quite fun game of pinball even with its slightly wonky physics. I still would like to see a non-zooming option, but it's not as bad as I first thought so I can live with it. Even with its flaws I find this one to be a much better pinball game than either Wild West or The Deep, both of which don't do anything for me, as besides their good looks their tables feel lackluster and I find the gameplay quite boring. I did try the Lite version of the horrible Freeballin. Now that's a game that just makes me want to gouge my eyes out. I never was too big on such themed pinball games, even if I found Sierra's old 3D pinball games competent. Anyway, there just wasn't anything to entice me to ever come back to it or even purchase the full game. Boring, overly repititous, bad table design, grating sound... you name it! Edit: Doh. Guess I missed the the Zen Pinball review on my first skim through this thread. It seems like it being too dark is often mentioned in its reviews. You'd think such a table would be all bright colors as are usually featured in theme park/fair pinball types. I'm not sure whether I should finally go out on a limb and buy it. I really wished there was a lite version. Seeing as how long it's been out, I don't think there will ever be one.
The graphics should be improved? Come again? It's a direct conversion port of the original so those will never change. Besides, it has some old-school charm to it, and I think a 2D presentation just works better for this type of platform. Same goes for the music. Sure, I'm a bit biased because I loved the originals, but it seems like you're being awfully harsh on it.
