Just after Mad Daedalus, Littlewing announced that they were working on their first i-pinball. The idea was initially to port Crystal Caliburn but finally they decided to revive the old classic Tristan. That was an excellent idea, all the more so because Tristan was not available for the new Macs since time immemorial.
The new Tristan is a superb reconstruction of the old one with a simple table and great playability.
It came in two versions at the same time: for Macs and for i-devices. The price is also adapted to the new iTunes/App Store ones, another argument in favour of an unhesitant purchase. The super low prices of both stores are motivated by the reasoning that, if you sell twenty times more copies, you can afford to have the price slashed by a factor of ten. I hope that this equation works for Littlewing. They are the ones who kept the pinball simulations alive for the Mac even through the most depressing times and I, for one, am one of their greatest fans.
In 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone and in 2008 they offered a programming framework to developers. It was an enormous success.
Third party applications started pouring in and, as was natural, pinball games did make their appearance. The iPhone success was followed by the introduction of the iPad in 2010. It was a portable computer nobody knew they needed until they saw it. It was immediately established as a great gaming machine.
More pinballs started appearing. This profusion of games brought also a profusion of crapware. (The fact that the price is minimal does not constitute an excuse). In this blog I am not going to bother about all the lousy pinball games. I will only review the ones I like and my readers should keep in mind that my opinion is guided by my personal taste.
Does the success of the i-devices mean anything for the survival of digital pinball on the Mac? That's where the "halo-effect" kicks in.
People who bought iPhones and/or iPads soon discovered that they could afford something better than wintel monstrosities and switched to the Mac. Within a few years Apple became the biggest technology company of the world. All of a sudden developers started being interested in the Mac. As was natural pinball games started appearing anew. In the posts that will follow I will try to review every pinball game available in the App Store. Curiously the proportion of crapware is smaller here. This has probably to do with the fact that MacOS pinballs are more expensive than iOS ones: you can apparently hope to sell enough copies of a shitty one-dollar game but, if the price is three or four times higher, people will not buy on mere compulsion.
It is my belief that the reason the whole pc-pinball business went down the drain is a killer app, a revolution in pinball simulation: Visual Pinball.
It is a Pinball Construction Set on steroids. Unfortunately it runs only on wintel machines. There exist already hundreds (thousands?) of tables written for VP. VP was alive till around 2004 and then faded away.
However at about the same time another pinball simulation (alas, again for wintel machines only) did appear: Future Pinball.
It took me some time to try it (first I had to get my hands on a fast Mac-Intel). Unfortunately FP refuses to run under virtualisation (or runs very poorly). It has probably to do with the graphics. On the other hand once you boot in Windows everything runs smoothly and I must admit that FP is an excellent pinball engine. Scores of tables exist and it is possible to find many useful links starting from the "Pinball simulation on the PC" site.
