Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Pinball
An anonymous reader submitted a kinda "out there" link, and I'm
not sure if its just my Who fettish or what, but it's interesting me.
It's
Pinball 2000,
and no it doesn't run on Linux- it's a traditional pinball
table, but with computers and gadgets and knick knacks that make
it super high tech, as well as being modular and upgradable. See,
technology is making pinball better too!
They should port it to Linux. That would be super cool!
How do you port a pinball machine to linux?
I found a page about it at:
http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-87724/pinball.html
I've never been very good at pinball, but that doesn't mean I dont try! An old friend had a pinball game (Aztec I believe) in his basement when I was younger and despite the fact that I was never very good at it, It was a hell of alot of fun. Although I like Quake I'd probably play an old pinball game way more if I did not have to drop more than a quarter in it every time.
Pinball = a ball, two or three flippers, and a bunch of targets. It's supposed to be mechanical. It's supposed to be simple. it's supposed to be fun! This is a video game pretending to be a pinball machine... worthless.
The Quake engine is good, but the game itself is quite lacking in terms of real fun. Even Doom was more fun IMO. Some of the mods are nice though (CTF, Painkeep, Fantasy Quake...)
YOU CAN'T COMPARE PINBALL TO QUAKE!!! They are fundamentally different games. It's like saying Warlords 2 is better than Street Fighter. Huh?
Their 'revolutionary' machine isn't so new though. Video pinball has been around for a loooon time (eg, Alien Crush/Devil's Crush on the pcengine).
My favorite pinball table is The Who's Tommy. Not the original, the one made for the play. If you smash the mirror you get multi-ball, and sometimes blinders come out so you can't see the flippers. ("Plays by sense of smell...") My best score on it is about 480,000,000. (Do the zeros really matter?) Unfortunately the machine was right next to some lame Star Wars one, and all the Star Wars geeks would play that one instead, even though the table sucked.
The playfield is about 3-6 inches shorter than normal. The actual game play-- ball+flippers is *not* that much different.
What is different is that:
- the playfield can be swapped (with software and translite) easily, reducing maintenance and route costs
- it uses a monitor instead of an orange dot matrix display (DMD)
- the monitor is *integrated* into play, but is *not* a fundamental part of game play... i.e. you still shoot for physical targets and such, but occasionally there are virtual additions in the form of *overlaid video*-- you still have to hit physical targets.
- it uses the same mechanics, balls, etc...
Pinball is sucking as an industry-- the router operators won't maintain the games because it is expensive and hard to do. Hence, they don't earn well and the operators don't buy new machines-- especially when the new are not significantly different than the old.
If someone didn't step up to the plate and *fundamentally* change pinball, the industry-- as a whole-- would *die*. Gone. Finito. Over. No More Games. Nothing. What we have is it.
Williams is doing that-- and williams/bally knows damn well what makes pinball pinball-- a solid physical game.
Until you *play* one of the PB2000 machines, don't bother to comment on it...
[BTW: I own a TAFG (Addam's Family special edition) that was rescued from a bar. It was beat to shit-- and it was a tedious adn dirty job to fix it. Now it is perfect, but there is no way a route operator would do the same thing.]
bbum
bbum@codefab.com -- if anyone cares to reply (does anyone actually read beyond the first 30 comments??)
I think it was "Baby Pac-Man." It was a Pac-Man family game, with a short playfield and a video screen right above it...
It also sold terribly..(I worked in Arcades as a teenager) Played terribly too...
Give me "8-Ball Deluxe" anyday...
Factoids:
First talking pinball machine: Gorgar
First pinball machine with flippers: Humpty Dumpty
Check out http://www.xmission.com/~daina/classified/index.ht ml for the pinball classifieds. There are currently 7 for sale between $900 to $1700.
BTW: 5 pins fit fine in a 2 bedroom apartment *grin*
Tillmsn
The autoplunger is on the current game. It's modular, if you want a manual plunger, you can put one on.
All the cabinets have two extra buttons for whatever features people choose to implement.
Perhaps there's even a place to mount boxtoppers.
The new method of displaying graphics on the playfield glass is unobtrusive and will let more creativity in.
I'm so glad you could construct a coherent sentence.
Hell yeah!
Anyone else remember a pinball table called "The Machine: Bride of Pin-Bot?" The whole table looked like a metallic woman laying down in front of you, complete with Linda Blair-style rotating head and the appropos flirtatious laughter and moans of delight. It was so blatantly psychosexual it was disgusting. I got kicked out of the arcade once for shaking the machine too hard. I also entered the "Billionaire's Club" twice. What a game.
I remember when Batman pinball first hit the arcades. A friend of mine and I once put 50 cents in one of those for a two-player game. An hour and a half later, we left the table with 7 credits left on it.
My favorite moment in the Addams Family pinball game: when you got a huge amount of bonus points after a ball, and you hear Raul Julia shout, "WHO SAYS YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU!?!??"
Who here remembers Wipeout, a Gottlieb pinball game with a skiing motif -- complete with simulated ski lift and all? When you had two balls on a multiball, you could hold one on a flipper, then run the other up the ski lift to earn massive multiple jackpots. I once scored a billion points on it, then lost my high score to a power outage before the game ended. (I got it back the next weekend, though.)
Gottlieb was the same company that created Q-Bert and Mad Planets, two other personal favorites. Q-Bert was the only arcade game I ever really mastered.
Back in december I visited the HCC computer fair in the netherlands, and came across a small stand from a design and programming group called the "Lost Boys". They handed out a pinnball game for, amongst others, linux and Beos.
;-)
it's very nice, allbeit quite large, and defenitively kicks the crap out off NT's pinball
wayout
wayout@wayout.iae.nl
Maybe I'll post an URL off thos Lost Boys tonight, so that every one can email them
Alright, everyone else is talking about thier favorite games, so why not me?
... what else could you want?
... ah, what a feeling.
Elvira, IMHO, represents the perfection of the humble pinball machine. Two ramps, a lock (the "Monster Cave") and some big boobs
Pinball has just never been the same for me since then, and yes I've played a lot of machines. Riding the Monster slide until you lit ELVIRA, and then hitting the jackpot
I want one of those so bad. I've since seen an updated ELVIRA, and it just mad me sad.
who taught you to read ( or to *read extensively*)? He doesn't say anything about how it plays or feature set... only that it reminded him of baby pac man.
"New Pinball Machine Makes Other Pinball Machines Look Like Worthless Shit"
Since when is adding a screen making the board better? It just looks like a really short board with little or nothing in the way of ramps, obsticles, etc. I happen to like the Attack from Mars (or whatever it's called) in it's normal board form and this little video/pinball half-and-half game looks like it looses the fun of pinball and doesn't add anything to the videogame experience. Seems to be a big gimick to sell more machines in these days of steadily decreasing arcade sales. Unless the real thing turns out to be a hell of a lot better than the pictures on the webpage make it seem, it won't be taking any of my quarters away from real pinball games.
Posted by korto:
pinball machines were cool because tey were simple. i just hope that the gadjets don't become the star in stead of the ball and the the two "kickers"...
:-|
Posted by DonR:
Is anyone else starting to get -really- tired of naming everything _____ 2000? I mean, c'mon, get a new marketting department or something.
There used to be one in an arcade where I lived and now it is gone. :(
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
A friend of mine went to a theme park trade show
and got to play a game where you sit in a motorized chair and you are the pinball. You get to control the bumpers still, but the screen perspective is either from the pinball itself, or above it. So you can see the bumper looming towards you then smack you in the face.
While real pinball is very hard to simulate on the
computer, I'll shamelessly plug the Pro Pinball
series from Empire Games (http://www.propinball.com), which has some of the most realistic pinball play on a PC in a long time (Compared to the recent Microsoft Pinball package
of 'classic' tables, this kicks major booty).
Unfortunately, the 3 games run only under windows,
but that's to be expected.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I wonder how this thing stands up to being smashed around like the old "Gilligan's Island" machine in the bar I used to run. Man - that thing took a beating...
--
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I've played two. I've also played two "creature from the balck lagoon" pins.
It seems like they create new tables, but reuse elements of the art and back-matrix software from the previous version...
Re: P2000 - call me a luddite, but I like to go to Blackpool and play as many of the all-electromechanical pins as I can -- the ones with mechanical score displays. Cool!
Why is the loss of real plungers a "necessary sacrifice"?
I always feel a bit cheated when it's just a button.
IMHO the best pinball machine out there. Bizzare too.. this thing used to give out free games and multiball at random.
To bad these things cost over $3K a piece..
-Ex-Nt-User
Now THAT is a classic game that never gets old.
As soon as I get a house, I'm buying an air hockey board. Or maybe I'll make one myself.
--
Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
Just because you throw technology at everything doesn't mean you are improving it.
Not every thing needs to have computers in it to make it better- some things are just fine the way they are.
> Sorry, quake is better.
I have to respectfully disagree with this. I just can't get into computer shoot-em-up games, no matter how complex they are. Quake is better than most, but there is nothing like a shiny metal ball, an angled table, and a couple of flippers. Video games can never replace the tactile experience of a good pinball game. For me (and I understand this is a personal thing) there is no comparison.
Eric
I would just like to take this opportunity to point out that I live exactly 45 second's walk from a Dr. Who pinball machine. Awwww-yeah. =:)
Sorry, quake is better.
Go play it. And while you're at it - get Star Craft running *well* under linux...
--
Video games can never replace the tactile experience of a good pinball game
I started off playing video games, played them for about a decade before even touching a pinball game.
I've found pinball to be a much more enjoyable game. In fact when I think about it I guess I never enjoyed playing video games at all, they were just a way of passing the time.
Perhaps its something to do with being a programmer. I've never understood how people could be satisfied with just using their computers to play games (or use office applications). I've also noticed that pinball was preferred over video games by computer graphics majors I studied with.
I remember putting more money into this machine than any other coin-op. I often hear people mention this game on the "classics" list, does anyone know if there has ever been a video game adaptation?
When I first started reading the into blurb I thought it said a video screen had been shamelessly integrated into the game.
I wish they had the honesty to actually say that. (The word was seamlessly.) But pinball is about physics and mechanics. The "subject matter" of a pinball game is laughingly irrelevant, and all the best pinball designers know this. Sure, it should attract the eye across the game room -- that's why they usually feature impossibly busty women. But to become a popular machine, they have to have game elements that challenge the intuitions of kinetics and the skills of rhythm and timing that real pinball players have developed.
And the other big tragedy with Gameworks is that they buy the classic machines, put the logic boards in custom cabinets, and THROW AWAY the original cases! That's practically SACRILEGE!
Granted, you haven't LIVED until you've played Robotron on a 21" monitor...
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
One of the best games at the moment is Tokyo Wars, where you are a tank in a team of four, and go around shooting the other team in an urban setting. Lots of fun, especially with four players.
And as for high-tech arcades, the Timezone arcades in Australia (or Perth at least) don't need to have coins put in, you simply swipe your "Powercard". It's done by having card readers on all the games networked to a central computer where they deduct the cost of the game from the account. You just go to the desk with a $10 note and they swipe your card and off you go. No need for change.
Here in KY, I bought mine for about $1300, and
it's in excellent shape! Doesn't give out free
games or multi-balls thou, you have to earn them ; ) If you are handy with electronics, you might want to check out an auction. You can pick up some real steals if you don't mind a little elbow grease. I bought mine from a vending machine operator who controlled alot of the routes around here. Too bad he got locked up for selling Slot Machines. I would love to get an Addams Family.
Although then I would probably have to stack computers on top of it to make room!
Having played pinball since 1983 or so (which hardly makes me the longest or oldest player out there), I view the Pinball 2000 with a mixture of opinions.
First of all, I really hope that P2K (if you don't mind the abbreviation) helps the pinball industry get out of the slump that I've heard it's been in of late. The last thing I want is to see pinball machines go the way of the DeLorean and the Amiga.
However, I hope that the modularity and the amount of change that this project represents doesn't kill off a lot of the creativity and innovation that has been evident in some of the best pinball machines made in the last 25 years (sorry, I'm not as familiar with the electromech era as I'd like to be).
I can't help but think that a lot of the machines made in that era have features that could never be done with Pinball 2000. Sure, there are the obvious ones like the nearly vertical second playfield in Banzai Run, and the subterranean reverse-angle playfield in Haunted House and Black Hole (I seriously doubt they allow the depth in the playfield necessary for that), but also simple stuff like the top-of-the-backbox attention-getting gimmicks like the flashing red light on the top of High Speed, the 3 of them on F-14 Tomcat, the fan that blows air in your face on Whirlwind, the Dalek on Dr. Who, etc., as well as the extra flipper button that was used for various effects like the magna-save on Black Knight and Black Knight 2000, and the weird in-outlane combo on BMX and Dungeons & Dragons, and especially the really fun tricks like the shaker that made Earthshaker live up to its name. Also I note with some sadness that the P2K chassis has a plunge button, not a real plunger, so the real plunger may in fact be gone forever.
I really hope that Pinball 2000 does in fact take the pinball experience to new and greater heights, but I'm very concerned that it may kill off the very creativity that has kept pinball going (and that has largely disappeared from the video game industry) for years and years.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Last I heard (from a *very* reliable source) Pin2000 was running on a Xinu kernel with all of the unnecessary stuff ripped out. Supposedly Linux was considered but they found that Xinu could do the limited job just as well.