The Farsight Cyclone debacle

Farsight’s new table came out as planned this month but with a small departure from the standard procedure. While the table was made available for the Mac the iOS version did not make its appearance, probably for technical reasons. 

After having waited for a few days I decided that I could not postpone the blog article on the new table and so I decided to give the Mac version a try. After all I have always maintained that playing on a bigger screen is better than the cramped space of an iPad (to say nothing of the iPhone).

I will not comment on the table itself. It’s an oldie and thus more to my taste than the newer ones. The interesting thing is elsewhere. I tried first the standard “chameleon” ball. (I will stop calling it invisible for reasons that will become immediately clear). Since the table is high in colours, playing with the chameleon ball is quite hard. So, I decided to look for a ball with a better constrast and opted for an all-black one. Here is what I saw when the ball appeared at the launcher

Farsight has invented the invisible ball! I was wrong complaining about the invisibility of the standard, chameleon, ball. Farsight could do even worse and they did. Just in order to be able to take a few screenshots I tried to play with this ball. Unfortunately the only one where I could see the ball was the one I took while holding the ball with the right flipper. 

In all other cases I could not find the ball on the table. The same happened when I tried to choose another custom ball. (Fortunately the older tables to not seem to be affected by this bug. One should count one’s blessings).

Frankly I have trouble understanding Farsight. When are they going to get their act together?

P.S. Just in case you were wondering. Cyclone is out for iDevices today (April 4th) but the custom ball bug is still present.