The end of a morose year

Who could imagine that the pinball landscape would become an utter desolation in the space of one year. Of course the writing was on the wall. When Littlewing called it quits 7 years ago it was clear that the days of glory of digital pinball were over. The close-to-zero prices of the AppStore were incompatible with the development of decent pinball tables. So over the years we witnessed the disappearance of all but one of the major players in the digital pinball business.

Gameprom, who gave us such great tables like RedPlanet and Arcade Pinball disappeared last year. Ditto for Ask Homework, aka Magic Pixel, of Zaccaria line fame. The Pro Pinball revival turned out to be a farce (but did leave all of us ProPinball fans with a bad taste in the mouth). FarSight lost their Williams/Bally license and since then they have gone in radio silence.

Right now our only hope is the Zen Studio line of Williams/bally pinballs. They are doing an excellent job with this but will they manage to make enough money so as to survive? In any case their attempt to monetise their iOS line with the Williams Pinball application has led to a monster which I prefer to forget. 

And just to add to the depression, there are the bad news of Catalina. With the new MacOS the wrappers of ProPinball will stop working. Will somebody provide new and Catalina-compatible ones? I wouldn't hold my breath. 

In 2019 I tried to publish a post per month just to let you know that the blog is alive. I am afraid that this is totally futile. The plan for 2020 will be to publish something whenever Zen Studios present new tables. At least I will write in order to say something positive. 

Two new pinballs by Zen

This time there were only two new tables instead of the usual pack of three. I don't like the idea that Zen may be slowing down. But then they probably tried to get these two pinballs out before Halloween, so let's not be too pessimistic (yet).

The two new tables are monster themed. Monster Bash is a collection of all the famous monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy etc.) against a backdrop of rock concert. 

It's a funny table and the various monsters which become activated as the game progresses add a variety to the gameplay.

The second table is the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Here the backdrop is a drive-in cinema.  While the gameplay is slightly less interesting than the one of the Monsters the graphics are superb.

In this case the Zen animations are absolutely great. One sees the creature swim in the lagoon and it even comes out when a ball drains to inspect the vicinity. Just look at the screenshot below.

There has been also a price hike on the tables but given their quality I do not regret at all the 11 euros I had to pay for them.

Epic Quest and a friend's suggestion

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.