For once I am not going to write about pinball. Those who have followed my blog may remember that in the pinball prehistory I talked about my favourite game on the Apple II: Serpentine.
Having written about it I decided to go looking for it on the web. And by some miracle I stumbled upon Pythentene. It's a resurrection of Serpentine. Written, in python, by Rob Leachman the game runs perfectly on my iMac.
If you are tempted, you can download the game here.
In fact Rob may recreate this game for idevices. I, for one, look forward to this.
My friend Marco did it again. He pm'ed me with praise for the new Zen pinball table: Avengers. It features the six Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye) and each character has a special ball. The fact that each ball is non-uniformly painted makes the trajectories look somewhat bizarre (they are not, it's just an optical effect). The table looks nice. The moving parts are less intruding than in the previous Zen pinballs. There are plenty of ramps, perhaps too many since they even manage to almost hide the bumpers.
Do I like Avengers? Well, not really. The game is fluid but I do not manage to grasp its purpose. After some time, hitting the ball around does become boring. I think I will wait for the Plants vs Zombies table (which is supposed to come out soon) again from Zen.
Two new pinball tables came out for iOS from ASK Homework: Speedking
and Hippie
What can I say? Although the tables are not cluttered there is no real improvement over the recent ASK pinballs. Some of the graphical elements give the impression that they have been hastily finished (look at the borders of the red corridor in the upper right part of Speedking) while the flippers remain mediocre (at best) and the balls are a disaster.
I have the impression that the ASK team is cranking out new tables just in order to make a fast buck. So, unless there is some substantial improvement I will not bother reviewing their pinballs in the future.
I have never denied it: I am a huge Littlewing fan. But...
if you ask me what are the best pinball tables ever, I will not hesitate a single second to answer: ProPinball.
If you have followed my blog, you already know that these legendary tables have passed away. They play on PowerPcs but not on Intel Macs and the only way to keep them alive is to play the pc version thanks to a wine wrapper. There was no hope to see them on idevices till now.
But this has changed. Just visit this kickstarter page.
You'll learn that Adrian Baritt, the guy behind the ProPinball team is planning to revive these legendary pinballs. Not only this, but he has teamed with another mythical pinball designer, Pat Lawlor, who has brought us, among others, FunHouse and the Addams Family, in order to build a fifth, brand new, Propinball.
Go to their their page and pledge some money to the project (I did pledge 75 $). If they manage to get 400000 $ before October 5th they will go ahead with the project.
It's going to be tough, but I keep my fingers crossed.
Gameprom, which has been amply mentioned in previous posts, has just published another table for i-devices: Arcade Pinball
It's a nice one. I do like the idea of acade simulation inside the pinball game: after all a game is meant to be entertaining. Also depsite the presence of the arcade simulation and a pachinko corner (!) the table is less cluttered than the most recent Gameprom ones. So this one is a silver medal winner: to my eyes it's the best pinball on iPad after Crystal Caliburn.
P.S. Arcade Pinball does exist now also for the Mac.
