The new Pinball FX is disappointing

[Steve]

The original Pinball FX came out in 2007 on Xbox 360 and since then there's been FX2, Zen Pinball, FX3, and now the latest game, which they have simply called "Pinball FX" again. I'm a big fan of digital pinball so I was really looking forward to it, but it is disappointing in a number of ways.

They console versions suffer from very noticeable flipper lag. The first table you play is a Wild West themed table that is also present in Pinball FX3 and I noticed the lag straight away. I switched back to FX3 and played the same table and the flippers felt perfectly responsive, so yeah, something is fucked up. There's lots of people on Xbox and PlayStation complaining about this. They will no doubt fix it, but it makes you wonder just how much testing was done if it launched in this state.

One of the good things about previous games in the series was that your purchased pinball tables would carry over. Not so with this. Even though the tables from the older games are present, if you want to play them you have to buy them again, and prices can be as much as £12.50 for 1 table, plus some tables are only available as part of packs that cost £20 each.

They also offer a subscription service as an alternative to buying tables, so you can pay monthly or annually and you get to play all the tables, however, even if you pay annually (the cheapest way), it costs £83 a year! That's more than you pay for Game Pass Ultimate, which gives you access to hundreds of games, including top tier AAA titles. To make matters worse, some tables are excluded from the subscription, so if you want them all you'd still have to buy some of them.

The tables are also very dark. The game supports HDR, but so does Pinball FX3, and you can immediately notice the difference when playing the same table on Pinball FX3 and the new Pinball FX.

I think I'll just stick to Pinball FX3 for now.

[Mista_Ed]

flipper lag on a pinball game is absolutely ridiculous?!

i love pinball myself - Aside from the 16 bit stuff, I've only got a Wii U in terms of games console and often play the 'Williams Pinball collection' on this.

its got one of the best tables of all time, in my opinion - Funhouse. Absolutely brilliant table - id recommend you try it if you can!!

Do you emulate any of the old tables, Steve? There's so many good ones  

id be tempted with a full size emulator if i had the space 

 

 

 

[Steve]

Oh yeah, I love Funhouse!

Originally, Zen Studios, the makers of the Pinball FX games, only made their own tables, usually based on existing franchises like Spider-man or Family Guy. Another company called FarSight Studios used to do all the digital recreations of real world tables in their games, but their exclusive licenses expired 5 years ago and Zen Studios picked some of them up, so Pinball FX3 has a number of real world tables available for it, including over 20 Williams tables - Funhouse being one of them.

The Williams tables from the early to mid 90s are some of my favourites: Funhouse, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, Theatre of Magic, White Water, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Fish Tales, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Have you seen the mini virtual tables from Sharpin and AtGames?

 

[arkei]

Wow these mini-Pinball machines look great. I've always dreamed of having the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" pinball machine. But even nowadays these fuckers are super expensive and maintenance costs also a lot. As I got still around 6 XP-PCs in the house (as media players), I play the old pinball game that comes with the OS (i think it's called pinball wizard)...

[Mista_Ed]

On 2/17/2023 at 11:41 PM, Steve said:

Oh yeah, I love Funhouse!

Originally, Zen Studios, the makers of the Pinball FX games, only made their own tables, usually based on existing franchises like Spider-man or Family Guy. Another company called FarSight Studios used to do all the digital recreations of real world tables in their games, but their exclusive licenses expired 5 years ago and Zen Studios picked some of them up, so Pinball FX3 has a number of real world tables available for it, including over 20 Williams tables - Funhouse being one of them.

The Williams tables from the early to mid 90s are some of my favourites: Funhouse, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, Theatre of Magic, White Water, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Fish Tales, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Have you seen the mini virtual tables from Sharpin and AtGames?

 

 

Fish tales -another GREAT williams table!! theres a lot of good ones though obviously. i still think Terminator 2 was my favourite of all time (not a williams table i dont think, regardless) 😄 

Ive seen the table top ones, ive actually watched that video above from ETA prime before....but didnt know 'at games' also made these, until i read your post. 

they look great - in theory - but id personally be VERY wary of anything made by at games, knowing just how much they've fucked up sooo many systems in the past.

they are the company who were responsible for putting out lots of iterations of segas products over the past 10 years or so and they've ALL been notoriously bad in terms of the emulation - TERRIBLE sound, screen tearing, and just about any problem you could think of.....and thats with fucking megadrive?!

jesus - i mean, its been working just fine, emulated on PC etc for about 20 years...i dont see how they could fuck that up over and over and over - this is despite the retro gaming community giving feedback on all the issues they had. so wierd - they just didnt seem to care enough to fix the software....?

there are full size emulation pinball tables which look hella sick - id love one of those!!

 

 

 

 

[Mista_Ed]

just had a quick squizz through that video on the at games ones, he seemed impressed - maybe not the case on these and theyve finally done something half decent haha

[Mista_Ed]

Ps what's ur high score on funhouse??? 

Post a high score, bitch!!! 🤣

[Steve]

6 hours ago, Mista_Ed said:

Ps what's ur high score on funhouse??? 

Post a high score, bitch!!! 🤣

I can't remember my exact score, but I got over 100,000,000 on the Pinball Arcade version on PC, which is the version I've played the most by far. I lost my save when I reinstalled Windows and I have barely touched it since then.

On Pinball FX3 on Xbox, my high score is just under 24,000,000.

What about you?

7 hours ago, Mista_Ed said:

i still think Terminator 2 was my favourite of all time (not a williams table i dont think, regardless) 😄 

Yeah, that's another Williams one. I love that one too! It was available via Pinball Arcade until they lost the licenses, now only people who bought it before then can play it.

I messed up with my list, cos some of the ones I mentioned are Bally/Midway, not Williams.

[Mista_Ed]

4 hours ago, Steve said:

I can't remember my exact score, but I got over 100,000,000 on the Pinball Arcade version on PC, which is the version I've played the most by far. I lost my save when I reinstalled Windows and I have barely touched it since then.

On Pinball FX3 on Xbox, my high score is just under 24,000,000.

What about you?

Yeah, that's another Williams one. I love that one too! It was available via Pinball Arcade until they lost the licenses, now only people who bought it before then can play it.

I messed up with my list, cos some of the ones I mentioned are Bally/Midway, not Williams.

Yeh right! 

It used to be on the wii u as a free download able game... It was a zen pinball release too, but it got taken down before i got mine unfortunately. 

Ill check my high score when i can lol

[Steve]

I ended up buying the pass for this, just for 1 month so I could see what the other tables are like.

Zen claim to have put out some kind of configuration patch to help address the flipper lag, but I can't really notice any difference. One of the devs said that they are going to address the issue in a full patch that will hopefully be released some time soon.

I played around with the in-game brightness settings and I think the issue with the tables being too dark was down to one particular slider being set too low by default, which affects the HDR brightness. I cranked that up and it's a lot better, although some tables still look a bit off to me.

The controller vibration is too much IMO. The Xbox controllers have rumble motors in the triggers as well as the handles, and this game uses the trigger motors, but really aggressively. It's only like that on certain tables. Thankfully there is an option to turn the rumble off in the game's own settings.

I've only played a couple of the new tables so far. Garfield is pretty good, although the audio on it sounds like it's encoded at 64Kbps. The Snoopy table is really good, so I'll definitely be playing a bunch more of that. The flipper lag is less noticeable on some tables than others. Each table has various modes you can play, including classic, arcade, pro etc. and you can create/enter online tournaments. They are adding a "Pinball Royale" mode soon, where 64 players will compete against each other, but I'm not sure how that will differ from a regular tournament.

The UI is a definite improvement over Pinball FX3. You also have your own pinball room that you can decorate, and as you achieve certain objectives, you unlock themed rewards including posters, statues, carpets etc., which you can use to decorate your room.

I'm sure they will iron out the kinks with a few patches, but monetisation will still be a big issue. I bought every table for Pinball FX3 (all 100 of them!), but no way am I buying them all again, nor am I paying over £80 a year for a pass that doesn't even include all of the tables. There are 86 tables available right now, with 75 of those being covered by the pass.