In my previous post I was complaining that there have been practically no pinball novelties this month (which is true). Still, on can always count on FarSight. The fifth season of real pinball table simulations is going strong and, while I am always criticising FarSight, I must also congratulate them for reviving all those classics.
This month's table is Rescue 911, based on the tv series with the same title:
While the game is well designed and it is rather easy to obtain a multiball or reach a decent score I did not really enjoy it. The ball has a tendency to enter the "Call 911" nook all too easily and I am not thrilled about the helicopter ride (although in the real pinball table this should have been a nice feature). I found also that it is not very easy to reach the upper part of the table and it took me some time before I could profitably use the upper right flipper. Moreover given the table configuration one cannot follow well what is happening in this upper part, independently of the camera angle. Finally the drain channel is a bit too wide to my taste.
However there is another feature that FarSight has introduced that is making me most unhappy. Since this point will need further testing I will report on this new feature in the next blog post. Stay tuned.
Since this month is rather slow in new releases I have been scouring the various sites that aggregate news on iOS games. And I found a reference to two Zen pinballs I had never seen: Rollercoaster
and Inferno
I do not know how I did miss them when they were released. Most probably that was due to the fact that it took me some time to start interesting myself in iOS pinballs. After all I started with a 3G iPhone, which was not a great game machine (although people claim that both pinballs above were playing fine on that iPhone, albeit with less than 30 fps).
Historically these two pinballs were the very first pinball games for the iPhone. However at a certain point they were pulled from the App Store despite the excellent critiques they had garnered. Trying to find more information on these "missing in action" pinballs I found a post in some forum by a member of the Zen team. He said explicitly that the games were pulled because their quality was not up to Zen standards and that they are not going to return, ever.
I could, locate (very low quality) videos of gameplay for both Rollercoaster and Inferno. I find that both are perfectly decent games. With redrawn graphics they could have been a perfect addition to the Zen collection. It's a pity that these nice games did disappear while crappy ones keep crowding the App Store.
I have missed this update of two classic pinball games, Pinballs Dreams and Pinball Fantasies. The reason is that I had in the past purchased these two games under an older iTunes identifier and, when I changed it, some of the previous purchases went MIA.
Moreover since these two games, which appeared early in the creation of the App Store, were hardly ever updated contributed to myself practically forgetting them. Then a few weeks ago Pinball Dreaming and Pinball Fantasies were both updated for the iPhone. Unfortunately there is no update (yet?) for the HD versions of the two pinballs but one can hope that some will materialise one day.
The fact that these two pinballs are not dead means that Cowboy Rodeo, who developed them, has not given up on pinballs and thus may, one day, bring the missing member of the trilogy, Pinball Illusions, to iOS . All we can do is cross our fingers and wait.
In my previous post I was complaining that there have been practically no pinball novelties this month (which is true). Still, on can always count on FarSight. The fifth season of real pinball table simulations is going strong and, while I am always criticising FarSight, I must also congratulate them for reviving all those classics. 
