A new pinball by GearWorx, named Retro Pinball: Tropical Splash
just made its appearance on the AppStore. The developer announces it as a first in a series of retro pinballs which aim at bringing back the classic feel of the arcade. While it boasts realistic ball physics it falls really short of the target. In particular I found the flipper action quite frustrating. So the fun of the arcade is just not there (all the more so, since the gameplay is not particularly interesting). Let us hope they improve things in the future.
By the way I would like to point out that some Mac games listed under the category "pinball" will not be reviewed here. I only consider pinball simulations and not pinball-based games. Thus games like PinTiki Ball or Snowball (not to be confused with GameProm's Snow Pinball) will not get a review: to my eyes they are not really pinballs. (On iOS the situation is even worse. The profusion of mediocre pinballs makes it impossible for me to review everything. Thus for iDevices I review games according to some, absolutely arbitrary, strictly subjective, criteria).
Two new pinball tables made their appearance with the new year. The first is Rob-o-bot from Nena innovation. It's not their first pinball: they have, among others, produced Dino madness which I found somehow cute. The new Rob-o-bot pinball
is based on, you guessed it, a robot theme. Again it's a cute game with nice graphics and decent physics. Is it interesting? Well, not really, at least to my taste (and I am perfectly aware that this is a subjective judgment).
Farsight continues publishing classic pinball tables. This times it's "Attack from Mars"
A nice table but which did not manage to get me hooked. At least this new issue was the occasion for Farsight to correct their monstrous mistake with the fixed landscape orientation introduced with Star Trek. Now you can play in portrait mode, which rehabilitates the iPhone. Whether you can really play on the iPhone is another question, see below.
Since I was having two new pinballs from two different companies I decided to do a side-by-side comparison of the ball visibility. See for yourself.
When I first looked at the Attack from Mars table I thought I had made a screenshot without the ball. I let you judge for yourself whether you can play Farsight pinballs on the iPhone with this "camouflaged" ball.
In August I wrote about an unofficial port of Dream Pinball 3D through a Wine emulator. The game did make its appearance on the App Store recently:
Having played the emulated version I am not particularly interested in purchasing the App Store version but, all in all, it is a decent game and one could give it a try.
Since I am writing about App Store pinballs I should point out that Gameprom is proposing Mac versions of all their pinballs, previously available only on idevices.
