I had already written about Epic Quest in my post on eSports Zen pinballs. At that time I had discarded the table saying that it was hard to follow the ball. Suffering from the invisible FarSight balls I was particularly sensitive to tables where the ball visibility was not perfect.
But then when I wrote the previous ball on Adventure Pinball (which is a pinball only in name) my friend Marco chimed in and reminded me that he had already pointed out that Epic Quest was worth some attention on my behalf. And thus I decided to give it a second chance.
My surprise was that the game did not make it to the Mac version of Zen pinballs collection. This is somewhat intriguing since the other table of the eSports collection, Mars, does indeed appear among the tables one can play on the Mac. At least Epic Quest was available on the iPad and thus I could try it again. Since this time I was motivated I took the time to accustom myself to the highly coloured tabletop and was rewarded with a nice gameplay and the typical Zen table layout which makes the ball difficult to drain. (Unfortunately this is not the case for the Zen-Williams collection where the layout must respect the original pinball's one).
If you haven't tried Epic Quest, now is the time to give it a try.
One more of those pinball-based games made its appearance. It is even has pinball in the name (it's called Adventure Pinball) The game is announced as combining pinball, adventure and role playing and comes in old-school graphics and colour:
I watched the short video of the gameplay and I immediately decided not to spend the 2.29 euros: it is not a pinball. If you are interested in role playing you could perhaps find it appealing but if, like myself, you are a pinball fan, you can simply forget about it.
The title is somewhat misleading. I am not going to compare neither the two companies nor their whole product lines. I am going to focus on just one table I have been playing for the past week: Attack from Mars.
But first a statement. There is no comparison between the physics of Zen pinballs and that of the FarSight ones. Compared to the former the latter give an impression of clunkiness which, for the table in question is aggravated by the angle of the flippers that makes the control of the ball particularly unnerving.
The Zen table
As I said I have been playing the two versions of the same table and I have the impression that the point system is not the same for the two implementations. How would that be possible? Aren't the two versions supposed to simulate the behaviour of the real table? Still, I am obtaining systematically higher scores on the FarSight table. My personal bests are at around 8 billion for the Zen version and 12 billion for the FarSight one.
The FarSight table
One thing that I do appreciate in the FarSight layout is the possibility to adjust the table view. I like vertical tables (I was a big fan of the LIttleWing tables) and FarSight offers an angle of view which, while not being a view from above, is much better than the Zen fixed, "perspective", view.
Which table do I prefer? I haven't decided yet. For the time being, I am playing both, trying to improve my scores in both simulations.
I had already written about Epic Quest in my post on eSports Zen pinballs. At that time I had discarded the table saying that it was hard to follow the ball. Suffering from the invisible FarSight balls I was particularly sensitive to tables where the ball visibility was not perfect.
