The theme of the game is a V12 engine and has none of these useless and distracting animations that plague the recent Zen pinballs. With V12 one plays a more classical game, albeit a difficult one. Be prepared to spend quite some time on V12 before mastering it. One thing that I did like a lot was the fact that it is very easy to stop the ball on the flipper and launch it while taking a good aim. Since this is my preferred technique one can easily understand why I did like V12 at first sight. The one thing I do not like is when the ball crosses the lower part which shows in semi-transparency the engine working parts. With a silver ball over silver-grey metallic part visibility is seriously diminished and, what is more, at a point where it is of paramount importance. But this is a minor flaw in an overall well built and challenging game.
By the way I remarked that the new version of Zen pinball classifies the various tables into separate collections. South Park, the Walking Dead and Portal stand on their own, just as Football Super League. Star Wars and Marvell constitute two large multi-table collections and the Zen Studios regroups the more "classic" tables. It goes without saying that this last collection is my preferred one. It comprises 13 tables at this point: Epic Quest, Rome, Tesla, Mars, Wild West, Castle Storm, Secrets of the Deep, Biolab, Excalibur, Paranormal, Shaman, Pasha and V12. If you like the same pinball flavours as myself, this is the collection you should invest in.
Although several of the "classic" series came out immediately on release of Zen for mac, such as Shaman, and I think Tesla, as well, V12 is one of the very first ever released, and was part of the original 9 or 10 tables belonging to the Classic series that were not ported due to a licencing issue with Microsoft. For a long time, as well, and It was the last of that series to still not be ported to Mac. EVERY few months I would write a comment on the Zen blog asking when these last few would come out, such as Rome, Excalibur, Pasha, and V12. Always the same thing "Maybe, if the legalities can be worked out". Looks like it got worked out.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely that the original series, now called the "Classic" Series, is wonderful. A lot of people wonder why this is called "Zen 2" If there's no "Zen 1".. Well, Zen 1 was a console game, and the tables were these ones mentioned., They're all the *original* Zen tables. Long before they discovered the wonders of proifits from DLC tables. Each of the original tables is completely original, and plays more like pinball than the later 'bells and whistle' tables...
So, for all intents and purposes, if you have the 13 tables Vasili listed, you *do* have a copy of "Zen 1"..
Cool, huh?