An alarming situation

Well, to be fair, what I am going to write about are not news. It is something I knew all along but somehow I preferred to forget.

While visiting the ProPinball forum I stumbled upon a discussion where some member was asking if anyone had an estimate on the possible release date of the remaining ProPinballs: BRUSA, Fantastic Journey and The Web. The answer by another member was really disheartening: "unless there are some huge advances in rendering technology, they are several years away". The discussion attracted more members who voiced their doubts as to whether the rendering was the real source of the delays. 

Talking about delays, I wonder whether we are on track for beating a new record. Timeshock was supposed to be released in December 2013 (yes, that's not a typo: December 2013 was indeed what was announced in the Kickstarter project). Two and a half years later the release is still a beta-esque one, rendering still goes on and promised features (like the new physics engine) are still AWOL.

I wrote about the Timeshock delays already in this post. By now I am practically convinced that while the ProPinball project is not dead it has been put on the back-burner. The developers at Barnstorm Games (I wonder how many) most probably work on this when they find time while tending other, probably more lucrative, projects. When the initial ProPinballs were produced they covered just a four year span from 1995 to 1999. Admittedly at that time one had to develop for just the Mac and Wintel machines while now one has to plan for iDevices and Android based portable devices as well. Moreover the number of different screen configurations increases the number of necessary renderings. Still I find three years a disproportionally long time interval for the development of a single game. If this goes on, I do not think that we will ever see the revival of the remaining ProPinballs.

Gameprom's new pinball: DreamLand

Without fanfare, Gamerpom added a new table to their already quite substantial collection. The new table is an amusement park based, a theme pinball manufacturers tend to return to. We have for instance real pinballs like Fun Park, Jolly Park but also digital ones like Thrillride of Sierra (reviewed in this post), Theme Park of ASK Homework or FarSight's Hurricane, to say nothing of one of Lawlor's masterpieces, Funhouse.

DreamLand

is a table nice graphically and has the usual layout of the recent Gameprom tables: secondary tables, three-dimensional structures, very bright colours. The physics are the ones we are accustomed to with Gameprom, although with the table at hand I find the flippers somewhat less accurate. But perhaps this is only due to an effect of perspective and once one integrates this the problem disappears. 

I find the gameplay only moderately interesting (not everyone can be Pat Lawlor) but since you can try the game before you buy I suggest that you spend some time with it in order to decide if you like it or not. 

Yes, FarSight can always do worse!

I have been complaining about the invisibility of the Farsight standard (silver) ball, like for ages. The only solution, following a suggestion of my frend Nick, was to choose among the various special unicolour balls one that had the best contrast given the dominant colour of the playfield. So when I tested Rescue 911 I decided to use a black ball. After playing for a while I had the growing impression that the ball was fuzzy. I took some screenshots in order to have a better look and this is what I found

Farsight has added a shadow at the ball. Instead of fixing the reflections that are creating all the problems, they have added a shadow, God knows why, which makes the black ball (one of my preferred ones) almost unplayable.

In the previous post on Rescue 911 pinball you can clearly see the shadow around the blue ball. The effect is not as bad as in the case of the a black ball but it is definitely not an improvement.  I cannot tell for sure when this feature made its appearance. It was definitely not there when ElDorado and Fireball were released but I have the impression that it was already present in Hurricane although I did not notice it at the time.

And just to remind how things can be bad with the ball reflections, shadow or no shadow, here is a screenshot from the Big Shot table

Why on earth does FarSight ignore the essential things and just adds useless cosmetic modifications? I guess we will never know.