is free, while the remaining two, Alice in Chains
can be purchased from within the app. The price is the same as for the two aforementioned music-themed pinballs (a tad high for my taste).
Did I like these pinballs? Frankly I can't tell. The physics is OK (standard Gameprom), the graphics are heavily 3D and in fact not bad at all. The light effects manage not to spoil the gameplay and the ball is clearly visible at all times.
Of course I hate the music (I am a latin music aficionado) and I do not like the idea of in app purchases for extra balls and for multiball play. I cross my fingers that the latter do not set a trend.
Since Pinball Rocks is free you should give it a try and shape your own opinion.
I do like my rock and metal so nothing's holding me back there. In fact I've bought and played the Slayer Pinball Rocks many times on my iMac and iPad. Later on I tried the AC/DC themed one, but found it quite a bit slower and less challenging. Since the new Pinball Rocks is free anyway I wondered why it's not included in the main Pinball HD app, all other Rock themed tables are. But I downloaded the app and gave it a try anyway. The objectives were not that clear at first but as with any pinball table just shoot at the flashing lights. There are just a few songs in the soundtrack and every ball lost starts a new one. That means every game you play you end up hearing the same songs. The basic sound fx are similar to their other titles. It seems they keep recycling those. The artwork is quite nice with lots of little details. Overall it's not too bad for a free game but It could have easily been added to the main Pinball HD app. All paid downloads are available so why not this one?
ReplyDeleteThe app got an update. Main thing I notice in the Pinball Rocks table is the added music tracks. That's a good bonus. After a few rounds it feels like a nice game, though the annoying rock chick samples I can do without. Personally I feel a game should never annoy, unless it's about your own skills. Then you should practice more.
DeleteOh and btw, buying extra balls is a big no. It renders any leaderboard meaningless.
ReplyDeleteWhen you've played one Pinball HD, in my opinion, you've played them all.. the original one with "the deep" has 3 different enough tables to keep things interesting, but with the music oriented ones , like Slayer and AC\DC, it looks like they've done the same thing over and over again.
ReplyDeleteHowever, unlike the original Pinball HD, they run OK on my Lion install.
I installed Lion because of Pinball Arcade, and Zen Pinball, Zen is by far the most resource intensive.. and yet, it is also the best running pinbal I have .. period, on any platform. I have the same on my Vista partition, and even though Vista runs much quicker than OSX (Snow Leopard, as I believe Lion is faster).. Zen Pinball on Vista is a slug. All the others run really fast on Windows. Conversely, Pinball HD runs horribly slow and unresponsive on Lion. So does "Retro Pinball". If this is what you tested it on I can see why you still hated it.. Although I an afraid I was a little bit overenthusiastic myself, but only because I actually *got a reply* from support.. shows how rare that is, in general ;-).
As far as extra tables for Pinball HD, there are no in app purchases for OSX, i think they rely on the iDevice impulsiveness factor to sell their tables, which I think 000gameprom is churning out by stampers now..;-(
Best I've ever seen on a mac.. Zen.. ands I'm now happier withPinball Arcade too.. Least happy with.. Gameprom, as they made no attempt to ensure Lion compatibility for their first pinball, essentially, their "signature" app. Arcade Pinball, however does rock especially if you enable close up view and scrolling (both settings I rarely use)
Problem solved on Lion. Seems that the 1.8 update was the problem. I found a copy of Pinball HD 1.7, and it is as responsive as ever.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone else reading this uses Lion, I would urge you to back up your current copy of this table before doing the update to 1.8. I did actually contact support, but I have no idea whether I will ever hear back, especially as it is no longer necessary.
I only accidentally discovered that the latest Pinball HD updates were the cause, because I have the "War" pinball, which was an update behind, and worked fine. So do Slayer and ACDC pinball HD, but I can't find out which issue is current, as they do not appear in the Mac App store anymore.
What I need now is an earlier version of "Arcade Pinball HD", (1.2, or 1.1), as it too is sluggish on Lion, as of 1.3. I don't know what 00Gameprom have done to bork everything up, maybe a new compiler, I don't know...
Anyways.. that's the answer... other than, of course, throwing your Lion install application into the trash!
There are so many disabled or missing functions in 10.7 that for the first time, I am never going to use the later version as my main OS. I still have Slow Leopard, and it will remain my main OS, i simply have to reboot to play Zen 2, or The Pinball Arcade... Considering how cool the tables are on both of these I'd say it's not that much of an inconvenience...