Nova, by Starman, for Visual Pinball
One of the most unique pinball tables ever, this one only exists as a virtual table, can you
imagine trying to build this in reality? The head image at bottom center is both the ball launch
and an in game catcher that allows re-launch, while the figure 8 (guitar) shaped layout allows
play in two sections. The only straight lines are the flippers. When I saw this machine,
I knew something new was occurring. Best scoreboard ever! This dude calls himself
simply "Starman", and I think he's proof that aliens walk among us - this is not a
humanoid design; if so, show me some others that are similar.
Like many of you, I grew playing pinball in bus and train stations, airports, bowling alleys, pool halls, boardwalks, and arcades. If you learned how to play a table, you could play as long as you wanted with the entry cost of one coin, or slugs as one current video table requests, "Insert slug now.." I once won 42 free games on a baseball machine (the Williams one with the wooden bat you swung to clobber a pinball into either an out, a hit, or up a ramp and into the stands for a homer). I didn't have time to finish them, so I turned them over to a bored traveller, and I'm sure he did the same, all on my quarter - hours of free entertainment, during which other players of skill could add more free games to the total.
Thankfully, we now have two excellent pinball table designers, both freeware, for Windows: Visual Pinball and Future Pinball. VP has been around longer, so there are more tables already built for it, but it's harder to install (there are 3-4 sections from different developers: the main VP design/player program, a huge VpinMAME library that emulate actual machines, and a libraries of scripts and fonts, many of which will come with each table. Then they force you to load the actual pinball machine code, the ROM contents, now converted into dynamic computer files, which will allow the setting of DIP switches that control number of balls per game, score levels for game credits, difficulty level (easy or difficult are the only two choices), and on then next "boot up", those setting for that table will automatically be applied just like real DIP switches on the bottoms of pinball machines.
Triple Strike (Williams, 1978) by Rawd in Visual Pinball
Original table by Steve Kordek for Williams, 1975
Even the backboards are realistically treated as translucent glass to allow lights to show
through realistically, as well as on the table, where you can see them reflected in both the
table top and the actually pinball itself. Some, like this one, go so far as to make the
reels on the scoreboard really 3-D with shadows and all so they look authentic,
while others go digital scoring, like the Bow & Arrow updated by Salas below.
When I was a kid, my best friends dad was restoring an early flipper table, probably from 1950-52, so I got to see firsthand how it was made - nothing but wires and lights and with electricity actually did 'computer' programming: "if the bumper is not lit, score one point, if it is, score 10 points". I'm still amazed they could do all that with primitive circuitry, and add the complexity of maybe getting a range of playing cards illuminated, or a rack of pool balls, then when complete, kick in special extra ball or free game targets. Remember, tv was just being invented, computers were a concept, yet we had machines making decision during real time game play, and adjusting both play and scoring on the fly. Throw in fun as well, and you can only say one thing: "Excellent!"
Getaway: High Speed II, by Uncle Reamus in Visual Pinball
Original table by Steve Ritchie for Williams in 1993
Modern machines feature multi-level action often augmented by film, dot-matrix video game insets,
pulse pounding sound and music like Getaway above, in which you just committed a robbery
and are now in a high speed escape from the police, who are driving after you and also using a
helicopter and megaphone. When the action and score reach a threshold, the police flashers go off,
and real machines had the blue ones on top of the backboard, which had to be disabled in most pool
halls as patrons would hit the floor or go up against the wall! Now that's pinball action..
You can easily customize anything, so I lower the tilt sensitivity, and change the flipper color,
esp if (as here), it's the banana yellow 'trademark' Williams flippers - they are ugly and
never fit the table design, mine do! Getaway makes all top lists, always in the top 25.
I find it not a coincidence that just as we had perfected this on pinball tables, computers sprang into being - we can now program all this onto a video screen. Don't forget the first computer game simulation was ping-pong, called simply "pong", but pinball simulations soon followed, looking like pong on top of a pinball table graphic, very unsatisfying vs the real thing. But free..
NOW the sounds and video are so real you can't tell the difference, only for me, since I have a digital projector, I'm playing computer games, and watching tv and movies, on a wall that gives me an image currently around 110 inches (about 9 feet) - it's like being about two-thirds of the way back in a movie theater, and often during sports the players will be life-sized when they telephoto in, especially during baseball, golf, hockey, and basketball. Watching hockey or basketball is like being about 25 rows up in the stands at half court, and hockey is the best, you can clearly see the puck everywhere and pick up the peripheral action as well (there is nothing like a pro hockey game in the flesh, it's a whole new paradigm: a dozen guys skating 15-18 miles per hour, and backwards, all constantly avoiding contact while passing this tiny rubber disk around with sticks? You get a new understanding of "athletic" from seeing this live.
You can pick up both Visual Pinball and Future Pinball free online (then send the authors a donation via PayPal), and after that, hundreds of individual tables, one at a time. FP will be easier for the avg user to get started on, then once you have that down (two hours?), go to VP Forums, and go through the initial setup info then install the components in this order: Visual Pinball itself, then the VpinMAME machine emulator program and it's folders (allow defaults paths always, VP expects tables and fonts in their folder together, VpinMAME in its root folder, and the ROM codes for each table in a subfolder from there - like I said, this one is a lot trickier to get working - but it's worth the effort, those tables are more plentiful and more realistic.
Startup paralysis (this took me awhile to figure out, no one simply listed it anywhere that I saw):
most of the ROM based tables will require you to press the F3 key to "reset" the ROM on initial play, to write its original code out recording the machine settings (if you ever change them, like # of balls or the free game score, you need to use F3 again to have them saved). Future Pinball doesn't use ROM files, it imbeds that code in the table code, so the table code is bigger (these are the size of music files! they are tiny - 400 tables is about 6-8 gigabytes, about like 400 CDs of music or 2000 long songs - each one downloads in less than 1-2 seconds; you can get 50 a night with ease, which makes this even more fun).
THE goal is always, as a designer stated in a VP Forum discussion, "to create and play a realistic pinball simulation, even down to inserting coins and pressing a start button, and NOT to have the look and feel of playing a video game". This revision of a table [see photos below] whose original version was totally realistic, was done by J.P. Salas, a Spaniard doing networking work in Norway (with Visual Pinball his nighttime hobby, only he finally retired this summer after building 30-40 great tables) - JP actually improves on the more realistic one, creating a more artistic table than first built, and with far better sound, as if he went into the heads of the original table design team and did a decades later update for them.
The lighting on the Salas revision is incredible, remember it's all pigment like a painter would use, so you have to blend colors to show the gradient of light, and use dark and light versions of a color for unlit and lit lights. They are all 2D illusions rembember - it's easy to forget while you play these, with reflections of the game lights changing as the ball rolls, and if you like, a small decal on the pinball to show that it's really rolling (with a shadow), and not some flat animated circle floating in space like early computer games. (One designer spent six months working on just one table, primarily on the artwork, the programs handle the "game engine", you just have to set the location, strength, elasticity, all the physical attributes of each item on the playfield, there aren't that many)
The original Bow & Arrow table, realistic vs the original
real table, complete w six different ball rolling sounds
Bow and Arrow (Bally), by J.P. Salas, in Visual Pinball
Original design by Greg Kmiec for Bally in 1974
The revision by J.P. Salas, which I captured during a game so you can see
the actual pinball just above the right flipper, and its shadow,
constantly updated as you play, along with the ball reflection
on the surface if you have enough RAM to power all this - if not,
the ball will "stutter" or flicker. I've been able to play 95% of the tables on
an Acer netbook with only 2g of RAM, "your results may vary"
Next Up: I'll post a shot of my Virtual Pinball Database, actually two Excel sheets, one with table ID info, the other for rating each virtual table in nine categories: Art, Sound, Playfield, Originality, Clarity, Use of Screen (scoreboard there? many do not show the score), Enjoyment, Favorites (this last allows added "bonus" points based on how much I like or play a table). My scoring is tough, using 1 to 11 (I need the extra point like Spinal Tap needed it for "extra loud, one level higher than anyone else"!), 11 time 9 equals 99 max possible score, but my top rated tables so far are 91 and 90 points (though any could change on any replaying of a table, some may wear off over time), JP Salas' incredible revision (and update) of Bow and Arrow (Bally 75), adding soft electronic sounds to a previously mechanical table, and redoing all the art brilliantly with new Photoshop tools.
That one is closely followed by Star God at 90 [see fullscreen, hi-res cabinet version screenshot below, it's a work of art, both the graphics and the playfield layout]. This is a rare Italian machine with only 3 known in existence, which I had thought would be #1 in my rannkings since it has the best art (gave it 11 for that, natch, with the Spinal Tap bonus point), and very interesting table layout: a figure 8 to mimic a winged-serpent around a sword as the main center art, see below, it's awesome - as an artist, I know how impossible pink is make work with anything, and this design does it:
Star God, by Zaccaria, art by Lorenzo Rimondini
Original designer not mentioned at IPDB,
the Internet Pinball Database
Star God is a beautiful machine from Zaccaria of Bologna, Italy
Artwork by Lorenzo Rimondini, who has brought a Renaissance
of sorts to pinball artwork.
Shown is the full screen cabinet version, used by either turning your monitor
vertically or building an actual pinball cabinet for a large computer
monitor with a 2nd as the backboard to simulate a real pinball
table, but with as many virtual table simulations as you want on
your hard drive. I keep around 400 myself, play about 50 a night.
The problem is they keep posting new ones & updating old ones..
NOTE: All these original designers, like Greg Kmiec (Bow and Arrow original table), are well known within the community as many did lots of classic tables, around 50 in his case, such as Aladdin's Castle, Capt. Fantastic, Power Play, Night Rider, Skateball, Wizard, and Xenon. Playing pinball all day and making machines better: tough work, glad someone had to do it.
"It's my job!" - Harold Ramis as "Court Clerk", on Second City TV
"I helped create the future, and I dig it!" - The Firesign Theater, "Bus Trip to the Future", on We're All Bozos on This Bus
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