Farsight is a blessing for a digital pinball blogger. When you are scratching your head trying to decide what will your next blog post be, Farsight comes along with new tables and cures your anguish.
The new installment of Season Two Farsight tables comes with one more Pat Lawlor gem, Whirlwind
This is a relatively early Lawlor table situated between Earthshaker and Funhouse. (By the way, when are we going to have Earthshaker on iOS/OSX?). Whirlwind has all the whistles and bells characteristic of Lawlor's style. It is eminently playable (even with the invisible Farsight ball) but I must admit that over the last month I switched to the iMac for any serious play. The iPad is a game machine but I prefer to avoid the Farsight-ball stress. Although in general I prefer uncluttered playfields I do make an exception for Lawlor's crowded playfields and the need for precise shots. If you have not played one of his previous pinballs in the Farsight Season One collection, Whirlwind is definitely the one to try.
The second pinball Champion Pub
is less interesting. The heavily coloured playfield makes following the ball really hard. Still I did like the skipping rope and since you cannot buy Whirlwind without Champion you could as well give it a try.
Champion Pub is 'sort of' story driven. You need to take down different fighters by shooting the head (the punchback turns around to reveal a fighter). But Whirlwind is the real gem. A classic but hard to master. The three spinning discs make the ball trajectory less predicable. Still I do love it and will be playing this many more.
ReplyDeleteI agree about whirlwind.. and is it just me or are they getting better at the graphics.. they look clearer to me. Not surprising as it's the same method of drawing as Future Pinball uses, which is vector graphics... I do think they are getting better and better, on the Mac, anyways. I was stunned to see so many negative reviews on the "Badapps" site, although they mostly have to do with the price per table...
ReplyDeleteWorks great in Lion though, which is good, as I have very few that have survived the transition from Slow Leopard.. almost none of the Wineskins still work, with no PPC (temporarily) lots of others don't either. I've found out though that SL can be set up to work in Lion, just like classic did on Tiger, so you don't see it run, but it runs the PPC pins transparently. Will let you know how that works out...