12/24/2023 0 Comments Microsoft pinball arcade theme song![]() Losing a ball down the gutter costs a percentage penalty of your points earned. Each gamer plays on the same board, attempting to be first to reach whatever point goal has been set. How about some ambient sound so I feel like I'm in an arcade? Why not create an online virtual experience where gamers are playing in the same arcade? Speaking of online play, there's a decent four-player online component in Pinball FX. A great game, even a good game, should immerse the gamer in the experience. It doesn't help that the music is easily forgettable. If only Zen Studios had invested in some better art and a more appealing presentation package, Pinball FX might have come closer to being worth $10. The center of the board is wasted and it's far too easy to enter a repeated loop. Even if you can stomach the obnoxiousness of this board, the design itself isn't very good. The in-your-face board comes complete with offensive sound bites and ridiculous "street" art. The bad comes with Extreme, a spoof (I hope) on overly-enthusiastic urbanism in games. The design could have been more imaginative for Speed Machine, but it's certainly good enough to drop a few virtual quarters into. Speed Machine (a take-off on classic hotrod pinball cabinets) and Agents (a Bond riff) are enjoyable boards. The three boards (Speed Machine, Extreme, and Agents) are a mixture of good and bad. After all, if the three boards aren't up to snuff, no amount of physics of pinball addictiveness is going to hold anyone's interest. The value of Pinball FX lies almost completely on the quality of its boards. So while it suffers slightly from its speed, Pinball FX more or less gets it right. Fortunately, the ball has near-perfect interaction with the bumpers and other objects on the board. And that's an essential skill for anyone who wants to master a board. Because the ball is eager to launch into the stratosphere at the slightest touch and the flippers kick strongly, it's virtually impossible to make a transfer between flippers. I've yet to pull one of the most basic pinball moves in the repertoire: The flipper pass. It's difficult to use a soft touch in Pinball FX. The ball is far too fast, unrealistically so. For the most part the physics in Pinball FX hold up, but there are a few issues that harm the overall experience. Turns out I was just moments from a stroke. So when I saw Pinball FX for the first time, I felt a little tingle in my flipper fingers. I had a fondness for old pinball cabinets that were a tad cheesy and had perhaps a little less flash than the new wave of machines that were creeping into the last few arcades in America. As my college test scores can attribute, I spent a lot of my early adult life playing pinball games.
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