01 June, 2016

The complicated situation of Zen pinballs

I have always been intrigued by the "2" on the Zen Pinball 2. If we are talking about "2" then a "1" should have existed. I voiced my bewilderment in a previous post of mine and my friend Doc gave a first answer. Zen FX (1) was a console game and the 13 tables, Epic Quest, Rome, Tesla, Mars, Wild West, Castle Storm, Secrets of the Deep, Biolab, Excalibur, Paranormal, Shaman, Pasha and V12 were in fact the Zen 1 collection.

Since I have always a plan to do a post on these classic Zen tables (which are the ones I like best) I was thinking about the FX(1) list and decided to do some digging.



Just as Doc said, Zen Pinball (1) was a console game. Nine tables were released from 2007 and up to the upgrade, in 2010, of Zen pinball to the FX2 version. They are 

   Speed Machine
   Extreme
   Agents
   Buccaneer
   Nightmare Mansion
   Rocky and Bullwinkle
   Street Fighter II 
   Earth Defense
   Excalibur

Those are the real FX1 tables. However only Excalibur and Earth Defense are part of the classic collection. So where do the remaining ones come from?

A visit at the table guides of the Zen Studios site tells us that the tables

   Eldorado
   Shaman
   Tesla
   V12

are part of the Zen Classics collection. Does this mean that they are FX1? Most probably yes, but what about the other four tables collection

   BioLab  
   Pasha  
   Rome  
   Secrets of The Deep  

In the table guide page they are listed as Pinball FX2 Core Pack. So they are definitely not FX1. And finally we have the remaining four tables 

   Epic Quest  
   Mars  
   Paranormal  
   Sorcerer's Lair  

of the classics list which are listed unambiguously as FX2. What is curious is that there is a fifth FX2 pinball which has not made it yet to the Zen Classics for iOS: Ms. Splosion Man. The table looks nice so let us keep our fingers crossed.

In fact I have trouble understanding the logic of porting this rather than that table to iOS. It has perhaps something to do with licensing with the absurd results that a pinball like Plants vs. Zombies is available for the Mac and not on iOS.

And in order to complement this blog on Zen Pinball forensics I should just remind the existence/disappearance of the first two Zen pinballs for iOS, Rollercoaster and Inferno, I wrote about in a previous post.

I hope that one can now see in a somewhat clearer way how the pinballs of Zen Studios are organised. I certainly do.

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