When Zen Studios released the first batch of their Williams-Bally pinball tables the bad news was that there was no iOS version. In fact my friend Nick was pessimistic even concerning their release on the Mac since the tables were supposed to be FX3 (which does not run on the Mac) only. Well, the tables did get released for the Mac and I could play them and comment.
Fortunately the iOS-version absence was only temporary. A few days ago my friend Marco let me know that the Williams pinballs were available through a separate application named, quite predictably, Williams Pinball.
I downloaded the app and installed it on my iPad. Unfortunately it's a bummer. I am not talking about physics or graphics. Those are excellent as is always the case for Zen pinballs. The problem in the case of the Williams app is that it came overburdened with all kind of customisation stuff, which are in fact a not-so-subtle way to push in-app purchases. I would have preferred, and by far, a situation identical to the one on the Mac: you buy each table and that's it. I would even have been read to purchase the same tables a second time. As things stand now, I seriously doubt I'm going to do this.
Some two months after the first batch of four (well, one free and three paying) tables from the Williams colllection newly licenced to Zen Studios, the second batch is here. The three tables are:
Black Rose,
Attack from Mars,
and Party Zone.
I tested them both in the classic and the new, "enhanced", version. As in the case of the first batch, the remastered version is (slightly) better. Again, Zen has applied self-restrain and did not overburden the tables with unnecessary animations.
Black Rose is the table I preferred among the three, Party Zzone being the one I will not be playing much. Given the quite reasonable price of the tables you can purchase all three and decide after you have tried them out.
My one regret is that the tables are Mac-only and I do not know if there is some plan to port them to iOS devices in a near future. But then, we would, most probably, have to buy them again, so ...
In a previous post I was wondering why the FarSight site did not include the Stern tables among those available. My guess is that that was due to the fact that the Stern pinball arcade existed independently from the rest. Now that the whole FarSight collection is present in Pinball Arcade the artificial separation between Stern and non-Stern tables has disappeared and one can find the complete list of tables on the same page.
While the offer is not comparable to one before the loss of the Williams-Bally licence it is still a quite decent one, with 39 tables. Will this offer suffice in order to save the bacon of FarSight? Time will tell.
When Zen Studios released the first batch of their Williams-Bally pinball tables the bad news was that there was no iOS version. In fact my friend Nick was pessimistic even concerning their release on the Mac since the tables were supposed to be FX3 (which does not run on the Mac) only. Well, the tables did get released for the Mac and I could play them and comment. 
