Slashdot Mirror
What Pinball Looks Like When the Stakes Are High
siobHan writes "The PAPA World Pinball Championships recently concluded in Scott, PA (near Pittsburgh), as covered on Slashdot already. The organizers recorded full 1080p/60 HD video of the playfield during the final games, and have uploaded the entirety of the crucial deciding game, with commentary (direct link to just the video). The winner of this game received $10,000 for his skillful play."
I knew I had my 20" monitor oriented vertically all this time for an eventual reason - to play this video optimally.
Better known as 318230.
What Pinball Looks like When...High:
BEEB BEEB BEEB...LIKE WH0A...NOM NOM NOM NOM...O NOES...
o....when stakes are high...
"I mean if Pacman affected our generation as kids, we would all run around in darkened rooms eating pills and listening to repetitive music."
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Ah, Space Cadet Pinball, how I miss you... Okay. Good. The nostalgia passed pretty quickly. I'm sorry you had to witness my moment of weakness there.
Memories of misspent youth and quarters.
I could pop a quarter in an Eight-Ball Deluxe machine and play all day. I was able to hit most of the specials and rack up credits for free play. Sometimes I even left a few on the machine when I had to go.
Pinball Fantasies is the best software pinball game that I've ever played. Stones'n'Bones kept me busy for weeks in all its 320x400 pixel glory, scrolling with silky smoothness on a 386 CPU, and awesome tracker music that never got old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Fantasies
Some brazilian guy is currently building a full size replica of the "Party Land" table. It looks pretty good already!
Granted the time at the tournament would make it look good but if you average all the time spent getting there. The payoff is recognition amongst your peers more than monetary rewards.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I noticed something very strange: It's all men. Where are the women players? In the audience? At least, why didn't the audience bring their wives and girlfriends?
There is only one pinball manufacturer in the world right now, and they didn't get there by being the best engineers, artists or designers. They got there by being/having the scummiest lawyers. Now we're stuck with horrible designs, bad gameplay, and most of the best IP buried in an unmarked grave in wrigley field.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
There were two:
The arcade at Dixie Landings in Walt Disney World. They had an entire wall that was nothing but pinball machines...at least 20-30 in a row. The second was at a place in Gaithersburg, MD that shut down about 12 years or so ago, called Sportland America. They too had an entire wall of just pinball machines, although they had closer to 40 or 50 of them.
Such good times. I miss pinball machines :(
Living With a Nerd
If you are in the twin cities area, go to the MN State fair. There's a room with nothing but pins. This is a welcome change from the increasing numbers of shooting gallery & ticket redemption machines invading the fair.
What it looks like is unfortunately amazingly boring. Most of the game is the player holding the flipper up so the ball stops, releasing, then making a good shot.
The shots take skill, and there's always the trick of using the right amount of tilt etc, but I find it near unwatchable.
It's turtles all the way down.
It's hard to reproduce pinball in a video game, but Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection on the Wii comes really close. The Wiimote and nun-chuck are perfect for the flippers and nudging the table, and the physics are lifelike.
http://www.vpforums.org/ is the site you seek.
Golf
Bowling
NASCAR
Pinball
Tennis
Bicycling
Sailing
Swimming
Gymnastic Ribbon (WTF is that)
Water Ballet
looks pretty much the same as when the stakes are low.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
If I had mod points left for today you would get one. I literally played this game so much that I developed blisters.
I think it tolerates a bit of a nudge before it shows TILT. The mechanism is usually a plumb bob that hits a metal ring and completes a circuit if it's hit too hard. When the guy waits for a while, the synopsis says he's waiting for the tilt sensor to come to a rest. The finesse to hit it that hard and not trip the sensor is probably why it refers to it as "$10,000 for his skillful play."
"The winner of the $10,000 prize purse at the World Pinball Championships has requested his entire winnings in quarters."
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
Wasn't Pinball Fantasies but its predecessor, Pinball Dreams that got me into pinball. That and a table at university - Fire! by Williams. Just about a couple of decades then go by without me playing, and then Pinball Dreams comes out on the iPhone. I liked playing so much that I bought a real table, Gottlieb's Surf'n'Safari, for the home.
It's a massive hit - my wife likes it, my kids like it, I like it...it's great. Pinball Dreams is where it started for me though - the Nightmare table is massively playable and the music great.
Cheers,
Ian
They're both by the same developers. They also had a third pinball game, Pinball Illusions, which was also great.
It has always surprised me that those guys could do excellent pinball games and pretty much all other pinball games to this day (except Metroid Prime Pinball on NDS) have sucked big time.
Sure, they looked great and had all kinds of whizzy effects, but the physics just feel wrong in most pinball games. And since it's essentially a game about physics, that's a pretty big problem.
I've always wondered what the technical difference is between a good pinball simulation and a bad one. The physics are pretty straightforward, so it really can't be sloppy calculations. Could it be resolution of dimensions or time? Or perhaps they precalculated a lot of stuff for precission? Why is it so hard to create a pinball game with physics that feel right?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Pinball machines give you a certain number of warnings when the sensor goes off before you actually lose your ball. Notice that the display says "danger" when he does it and it also seems to give an auditory warning, but I can't make out what it says.
You know, thanks to the Source engine (and consequently Havoc physics) being available for making mods for free to anyone who owns a Source engine game, I'd wager that it could be used to make a pretty realistic pinball game with the built-in physics. I wonder why anyone hasn't done it yet. =|
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Check the pinball 101 pages on http://www.flippers.be/ that should teach you most you have to know when buying your first pinball machine..
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
As an Easter Egg in Pinball Fantasies, the developers gave some technical info about the game code on the table score boards. If I remember correctly, the ball physics are updated 200 times per second, rather than at the monitor refresh rate.
I did a RAM Scan of the Amiga version, and there's a full-sized 2-color bitmap for the physics. It's rather strange, and appears quite sophisticated. Any line only 1 pixel in width was for the table angle, and 2 or more pixels was a border. Different cross hatching patterns defined the steepness.
Because it's a very hard problem, much harder than physics in your typical shooter. Usually in a shooter you don't have to model physics at a very high level of detail. You can fake a lot of stuff -- bounding boxes for collisions can be fairly loose, the player will tolerate some degree of objects interpenetrating, the designer can tweak the amount objects bounce until it looks good, but isn't necessarily correct from a physics perspective.
In order to make a pinball sim feel right, you have to have a pretty tight physics model. There's a lot of fairly complex geometry that has to be modeled at high resolution, including collision bounds. You have to worry about the elasticity of collisions, especially between the ball and the flippers. It should be possible for the player to do a live catch, where the kinetic energy from the ball is transferred to the flipper and the ball just stops and seems to hang there for a moment.
Then there's the problem that the physics of a pinball machine don't always look right. I often see the ball do wacky things in a real machine that I'd never believe in a simulation. The live catch is one; it just looks wrong. Another is when the ball takes a wild bounce, goes airborne, and lands square on a wireform or ramp. It's possible, it happens in real pinball, and you can hardly question the accuracy of the physics in a real machine. But when you see something like this in a simulator you think, "Oh, yeah, like that's ever going to happen!" and you complain about the bogus physics engine doing impossible things.
Finally you have the problem of player interaction with the machine. There's just no way to effectively model nudges and slap-saves, primarily because there's no real input device to sense them.
Now I'm craving a game of pinball. Fortunately I have a couple machines in the basement and can satisfy that craving. :-)
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Because wide-screen monitors permit you to to view 2 vertical windows simultaneously?
Because with vertical content, it's preferable to scroll vertically rather than horizontally?