Zen Studios just announced a new pinball table: Deadpool.
As it is now customary with the Zen pinballs the table is excellent graphically. However, to my eyes, this is hardly a pinball. Unless this is the future evolution of pinballs and I am missing something.
Anyhow, I do not care much for this type of pinballs and I do not intend to buy this table. So, if somebody were ready to report on this particular game I, for one, would be indebted.
The thing that I really appreciate in Farsight is their regularity. Every month or so the are coming out with a new pinball. When you are, like myself, following the growing pains of Timeshock, you can wonder at times how the people at Farsight are doing. In fact I have been for quite some time now speculating about the engine they use. Most probably they have a Visual- or Future- pinball like home-brewed engine for all the platforms they are developing for. Any information on this would be most welcome.
This time the pinball is a classic one from Gottlieb: Lights... Camera... Action!
It's a game that I liked at first sight although it is very hard to play with the "invisible" ball. I found that the only one I could somehow follow was the dark yellow one and even thus I was losing it at times. Some features are great, in particular the pistol draw where one manages almost always to beat the villain and get a reward. Other features are a nightmare: when the ball passes through the side-lanes one cannot really follow it and it arrives at the flippers so fast that quite often it drains. Still it's fun to play this pinball and if you are ready to fork out the 4.49 $ Farsight is charging for a single table, go ahead and try it. It's a nice pinball.
That's probably a new record of mine. I did like two Farsight pinballs in a row (Junk yard last time and now Lights... Camera... Action!). Well, perhaps I am losing my mojo as a bunch of people who pretend to be journalists are saying about Apple.
I did continue my experimentation to have the remaining ProPinballs running under emulation. Fantastic Journey did not present any difficulty. I downloaded the wrapper from Paul The Tall’s place and was able to have the game running without hassle. The case of The Web proved to be harder, as expected.
There is somebody in the ProPinball forum claiming to have been able to run The Web under Crossover. I tried but I did not manage. (I also PMed him but I got no answer). Next I looked and found a Wineskin for The Web and indeed the game does run. Only It seems stuck in that crazy mode where the gravity is multiplied by 10, thus making the game next to impossible to play. I do not know whether this is a bug or if there is a way to go back to normal gravity (I do not think so) but as it stands the game is unplayable. In fact following a Crossover thread I found an old report of someone who described the very same situation. So, the idea of a Wine emulator was discarded.
The next solution was to play The Web in DOSBox. Here I got more lucky. Using Boxer I was able to set up the game in a few clicks and had it play quite nicely. The graphics are not bad at all, as you can judge for yourself from the screenshot below.
My only remark is that I have the feeling of a certain sluggishness, as if the game were running a tad slowly. Still it is perfectly playable and one can really enjoy it.
Since Good Old Games do not distribute The Web (yet?), setting up one’s own emulation is the only way to play The Web on a Mac now-a-days. (If you wonder where you can buy the PC version of The Web, just have a look at Amazon).
I was visiting the site of Good Old Games in order to download the PC version of ProPinballs for my porting experimentations and I noticed that one more oldie had been ported to the Mac: Pinball World.
I purchased it immediately and before giving it a try I decided to dive into the package contents. It turned out that the game plays under the DOSBox emulator using Boxer.
Not being a PC user I did not know the game. After playing a few games, my opinion is that this 20 years old game is far better than most of the pinball games from the App Store. It’s a game with a plot and instead of having you aim for the highest possible score it takes you on a trip around the world.
Of course, graphics are DOS-era ones (but not that bad after all) and I, personally, hate the scrolling tables. But, overall, it’s an amusing game which costs no more than a Farsight, season three, table. You can give it a try.
