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Feature: A pinball platformer
It wasn’t as if the tester was having a bad time. He was a pinball fan, after all. It’s just that every time he tried to reach for his coffee, the intensity of the game he was testing kept pulling his hand back to the controller. Half an hour later, he finished playing, picked up his cold coffee, and said he’d enjoyed the game. As…
Feature: Flipping out
Video: Yoku’s Island Express is a bit Metroid, a bit pinball and a bit good
The pinball platformer is an idea developers like to feed quarters into every so often. If a character is round (Pac-Man, Kirby) or can bunch up into a ball (Sonic, Samus, enslaved Pokémon), then they’ve probably been bashed about by flippers at some point. But these games tend to be reskins of traditional pinball; few reflect their source material. Yoku’s Island Express doesn’t have a…
I've been playing a fair bit of actual physical pinball lately, having discovered a half-dozen machines across nearby pubs. My favourites put their themes into motion, like the NBA table where I get to launch the ball at a hoop (aided by mystical magnetism). The selection isn't ideal, mind; I'm not much into basketball and Monopoly is so undesirable. No, digital pinball is a far…
Before my parents abandoned hope of me not growing up a degenerate and allowed me to watch murdermovies, I was fascinated by the local swimming pool's Aliens arcade cabinet and Terminator 2 pinball table - Cool Things I couldn't have. Ooh, the hours I spent watching bigger kids play or waggling the joystick as I pretended to play the demo! This... isn't quite going where…
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I'm a huge pinball fan and I get even more excited about that weird subgenre of games that splice pinball with something else. Stuff like Sonic Spinball, Devil Crush, Rollers of the Realm and Odama. The latter's "tactical wargame + pinball" is one of the best I've ever heard and even though the eventual execution wasn't great, I'm still glad that something so peculiar exists.…
You might look at Kabounce [official site] and say "That is Rocket League with cars - football with cars with pinball." No. Kabounce is clearly Pinboing with multiplayer. For those not down with the hottest fad sports of Mega-City One, Pinboing encases players in a bubble of the miracle spray bounce-o-plastic Boing® then launches them into a huge pinball table to rack up Mega-Points. Kabounce…
It takes a very special something to make me excited about a pinball game. I played Pokemon Pinball to death, way back when, but very few pinball games since have really captured my attention. Until now. Until the Aperture Science Heuristic Portal Pinball Device. It’s a Portal themed table for Zen Pinball [official site] and it looks fantastic. See for yourself in the trailer below…
Rollers of the Realm is a pinball-RPG hybrid. It's no secret that I like pinball and it turns out I like RPGs as well. If we accept both of those things, must we not also accept that pinball + RPG equals super double-good? I'll be able to find out later because the game's out today and I'll be getting up close and personal with it…
If I write an entire post highlighting a Kickstarter for a downloadable pinball table, chances are I'll receive seven thousand angry emails (92% from other members of the RPS staff), sixteen angrily worded letters and one visit from a door-to-door punchagram. However, when that table is The Pinball Arcade's digital rendition of one of the greatest and most celebrated machines of all time, there are…
I spent most of the weekend lying in bed with a maelstrom in my innards, feeling sorry for myself and occasionally checking the news on a laptop, which made me feel sorry for everyone else in the world instead. To bring the misery back home, I'd occasionally rewatch the trailer for Rollers Of The Realm, a fantasy RPG in the guise of a pinball game.…
Zen Pinball 2 isn't my digital pinball flavour of choice. I prefer the recreation of actual tables, even if sometimes imperfect, to the shiny Marvel and Star Wars licensed fare of Zen Studios. I still dabble in the lightshow occasionally though and a new Guardians of the Galaxy table seems like a good excuse to shake off the ball rust. Judging by the trailer (below),…
Feature: Pinball was my rock n' roll
A pinball table is more than balls, flippers and lights, although the uninitiated may see it as an almost literal collection of bells and whistles. I see tables in the corner of bars quite often, usually neglected and often unplugged, and was delighted to see an Addams Family machine – one of the great designs of its kind – in Larian’s studios a couple of…
Earlier this week, the Pinball Arcade finally landed on my PC, via the medium of Steam. Pinball tables were among the games that made me and the Arcade contains some of my favourites, so I'll write more about this soon. The free download contains one table, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and there are two season packs available for purchase, with more to come. Tables…
I sank countless hours into Pinball Dreams and Epic Pinball when I was a nipper, and then countless 50 pence coins into the table in the college bar at my university. I've always maintained that a good way to measure the true wealth of a man is to count the number of pinball tables he owns and I won't consider myself a proper adult until…
