Zen Studios have just released their Balls of Glory collection based on animated TV series of Fox Digital Entertainment. Four tables have appeared both as part of Zen Pinball 2 and as standalone apps. They are: Family Guy
Bob's Burgers
American Dad
and Archer
I must confess that I haven't been following any of these series (and after having watched three minutes of Archer on YouTube I decided that I should better forget about it). Still the games are not bad. Graphically they are really nice without too many moving parts (something I dislike in Zen pinballs). The gameplay of the other hand is not very interesting: you just have to keep sending the ball along the various lanes. Moreover the bright colours make at times the ball hard to follow.
The table I liked most was Archer. (That was in fact the reason I sought out a compilation of Archer's best of in YouTube, an, a posteriori, bad idea). The one I did not like was Bob's Burgers but you may disagree with me. Speaking of animated TV-series themed pinballs I enjoyed South Park much more than Balls of Glory. Still, the latter is a nice collection and since you can buy the various tables separately this new collection will add some variety to your pinballs.
The new, season 5, pinball of Farsight is here. This time we are treated to a table from the 80s: F-14 Tomcat.
The first thing I noticed when I tried to play the game was that the ball looked somehow darker than before. Has Farsight tweaked the ball? If yes, the changes are for the worse. Judge for yourself: compare the visibility of the standard ball and the green one
still a far from perfect solution.
I did the terrible mistake of playing the game just after trying the latest Zaccaria one. After the sluggish ASK Homework simulation I found myself in a top-speed pinball and it took me some time to adapt. That was not my only mistake. For once I let the music on and I must say that the F-14 Tomcat's soundtrack is simply awful. As a result I did not like this pinball in the least. But perhaps this is a bit unfair. Had I tried the game under different circumstances I might have liked it better.
