Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Quality control. Could be any number of reasons, some could actually break the game or system (memory leak, crashing, etc) or skirt XBL policies or not be packaged properly or submitted in time. Who knows.

The fact that they can't get their pinball game to run on the Wii makes me think they've a long way to go to optimize the game. I don't trust these people after the demo and having PFX2 out for two years to copy, they missed the mark so wide on a unified gui for their game it's laughable.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

I'm looking at it from another perspective. It's a team of six people making the game, and trying to run it on every platform imaginable. I'm willing to cut them some slack. It sounds like they're learning as they go, and patching in improvements as they discover them. The game as it is now works fine.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Haven't they already had these same tables out on the xbox before?

Anyway, point being I gave reasons why MS might block the release and pointed to the fact that it "can't" run on the Wii as a lesson in why maybe they aren't doing everything necessary for an optimized experience.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Yes and no. The current Arabian Nights is very much different than the disc based version. Different camera angles, high-res textures, different ball physics, adjusted music. None of the "repeating" tables seem to be simple ports.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

I beg to differ. Texture resolution is horrible so far with all of the Pinball Arcade tables.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

This is probably part of the problem. Doing this so they don't have to re-do the textures for all the platforms. Trying to lowest-common-denominator the stuff they can.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

True for the console versions, but not so on the new iPad for example. This is one of the things they've said they're going to patch in.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

From the official forums:

I'm not trying to argue that the game is perfect. I'm just trying to dissuade some folks from that kneejerk "Game sucks, fuck that game" reactions. This is really the only shot we've got for real world, emulated pinball tables. I'm willing to stick with them, as it seems like they know what the problems are and are working diligently to fix them.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Good on you :up: Keep it up and let us know when they feel right ;)

I do know I wasn't thrilled with any of the 4 tables on the xbox version. I'm sure that when tables I've spent more time in the real world playing come to it I'll try again.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

May is 1/3 over and I'm really jonesin' for some Avengers/PopCap/ZP2 news! I know they wanted to get Avengers and ZP2 out in May, so not even having a release date for those yet is nerve-wracking!

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

I forgot about the PopCap one. Was that supposed to be a 360-exclusive table?

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

And I checked on the ZP2 Forums and the folks from Zen say they're awaiting approval and the games are done. It won't be next week, so we're at least two weeks away, but at this point they just don't know.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

News from the Pinball Arcade Facebook page about licensed tables:

"We have good news and bad news to report on the issue of licensed tables. We’ve finally succeeded in negotiating all of the licenses we’d need to bring the Twilight Zone to the Pinball Arcade. This is unquestionably one of the greatest pinball tables of all time (and is currently #1 in IPDB’s user rankings). However the licenses are VEY expensive- so expensive that the table probably isn’t commercially viable. Some of you have suggested a Kickstarter project to raise money for the license costs and we’re considering this. We’d like to ask your opinion- is this a good idea? If we did it what should the rewards be for backers, and at what contribution levels? We’d appreciate your thoughts!"

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

I don't think so. I hope they stop that when not absolutely necessary for the license.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

See, this scares me for the future of the platform and this will set a dangerous precedent. Hopefully it's isolated to this very popular table. I wouldn't think they'd need to pay fees both to Midway and TZ since Midway should have handled all that in the initial design.

For the question at hand, I'd say it's obvious that they should offer a $3/$5 level with a download code. Beyond that it's tricky. A nice documentary on the creation of the digital table would be interesting, but I don't think I'd go more than $10 on that (including the $3/$5 code).

Recreations of original promotional material would be cool. Like if there was a poster to advertise the table. I'd probably go for that and I currently have no interest in the PA suite.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

All the IP rights holders for the licensed tables are going to charge way more than they should. The Star Trek, Doctor Who, Star Wars, etc. tables? I guarantee you those studios won't hesitate to charge as much as humanly possible. It's music rights on DVD all over again.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Yeah, that just sucks and why I feel this is a dangerous precedent to set. If you raise all this money first instead of SHOWING it can be profitable on the back-end, why would any company ever agree up front?

And by doing it for arguably the most popular table first, the money is only going to go down from there. Well, in a purely pinball enthusiast backing, that is. Sure your top properties like those you mentioned will have no problem bankrolling, but I just can't shake the feeling that this approach is a bad idea.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Zen just announced a Ms Splosion Man tourney for 5/18-5/25 (XBLA only, I guess). This was the first table I really threatened a billion-point game, so take it from me that there is a lot of room for really bumping your SuperScore.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Here's the Kickstarter for the Pinball Arcade Twilight Zone table: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...-twilight-zone

Personal opinion, $10 is too much for a pre-sale. Sad they couldn't work it out with Microsoft to get those codes, though they may be butt-hurt over the PS3/Vita thing.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

$10 gets me a free $2.99 table on my iPad. I'll forgo my Starbucks one day next week and call it a wash.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

What do you think about the other levels? $100 for the operator's menu seems weird. Why wouldn't that be on every version of a digital table?

It seems like the first entry should be $5, the special table $10, and everything else (with the exception of the last one) is about 10x too much. Just my opinion as a consumer.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

They probably don't have the ability to split out the tables for leaderboards where there'd be ranked plays (no operator's menu) and unranked for people who want to futz around with the switches. Also, that feature would probably only be used by the hardest of the hardcore, and programming it into the game probably isn't cost effective.

$500 donor has already appeared.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Doesn't every single PFX2 table have an operator's menu included? They just don't go to the leaderboard.

$100 is just way, way too much for just that as an incentive. I mean, if you want to put $100 towards it, that's great, I just don't see that enticing anyone to spend 10x the amount of just the table.

I'll probably eventually do the $10 donation myself because I do want more real world tables and if this is how it has to be done, so be it.

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Seriously, you guys need to play in the Ms Splosion Man tourney. It's such a high scoring table that you're bound to skyrocket your superscore (since highest tourney score is part of it).

I played two games tonight, having not played it in many months, and the first game got me in the top 250 in the current leaderboard and the second got me #83 at 453M. I know for sure I'll beat my previous tourney high score (535M on Epic Quest), but I really want to beat my MSM high score of 721M anyway. This is a billion-point table, I feel it!

Re: The Ultimate Battle Free Pinball Thread
 

Alright, alright :), you talked me into it. Not that you really had to say much. It is a very ramp friendly table, which I adore. 63 million here which I'm happy with. Heck, I had 50 million in one ball, so I'm pretty sure I can break 100 million at some point. The table has points all over it, I just got to master a few things like that Zipline part. For some reason I keep hitting launch a splitsecond too late.