15 September, 2016

Eight Ball Deluxe frustrations

I have been playing Eight Ball Deluxe for quite some time now on my iPad Pro (a great pinball machine) and on my iPhone 6s. I do not have a 5.5 inch "plus" monster and, to tell the truth, one can play perfectly well on the 4.7 inch screen. Were it not for a small problem. Unless you are extremely careful, the multitasking functions pause the pinball and you have to resume the game.


Mind you, this is not something specific to Pinball Arcade, I have the same problem with Tristan. However in the case of a very demanding game like Eight Ball this becomes annoying. 

Talking about the difficulty of Eight Ball brings me to my second, much more important frustration. Usually, when a new pinball appears, I play a few times in order to get the feel of the game (and to be able to write about it in this blog) and quite often I manage to score one of the lower high scores. If I like the game I continue playing and after some time I manage to break the absolute high score. (I never care about scoreboards and the extraterrestrials who manage to reach scores a 100 times higher than mine. I am talking here about the high scores that come from FarSight together with the game).

In the case of Eight Ball I managed to get a low high score without great difficulty. And then I got stuck. Although I keep playing this pinball, my scores remain mediocre with practically no progress. I am still far from the 3.5 million high score, most of my games ending below million.  This is what I call the effect of the lost ball. I had this problem with Big Shot. You start playing a nice game, racking enough points and then you lose a ball for no reason at all, just a matter of a bad trajectory, and this sets you back in the score. In Big Shot with five balls this was annoying but not catastrophic. With Eight Ball's three measly balls and the ball that drains as if it were sucked by vacuum this is a disaster. When Littlewing proposed a five-ball game for Eight Ball one could afford losing a ball. Here a loss of a ball is shattering all hopes for a high score. Why, oh why, did FarSight deny us the possibility of enjoying the game?

2 comments:

  1. Isn't 5 balls part of the paid pro version? I mentioned before it was a possible setting on the real life pinball table so it would make sense. I haven't bought the pro version though, so it is a guess.

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    1. Now I did buy the Pro upgrade and it comes indeed with dip switch settings for the number of balls. Farsight switched the 4 and 5 ball settings though in current version for iOS. But it works. I can play with 5 balls if I want. Obviously scores are not counted for global scoreboards and I have to set it up each tine I start the game. Once I quit EBD to play a different table it resets.

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