Exclusive First Look: Pinball Dreaming: Pinball Fantasies

by Eric March on July 6, 2009 at 1:48 am

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	App Name:	Pinball Dreaming: Pinball Fantasies
	Developer:	Cowboy Rodeo	Version:	1.0
	Publisher:	Cowboy Rodeo	Size:	TBD
	Category:	Arcade Games	Price:	TBD

As I mentioned on Flog!, posts were going to be a little threadbare this weekend.  Originally that was going to be due to me working on a couple of new tracks for the next update to Galactic Chill, but it turned out that I ended up doing some work for Cowboy Rodeo, setting up a blog and some forums which are not quite ready for prime time as of writing this.

What is ready for prime time however is their highly anticipated next installment in the Pinball Dreaming series, Pinball Fantasies, and Frapstr’s got the exclusive first look at this classic and much loved pinballer.  The thing about this series and the reason it is remembered so fondly is that, ignoring the flash and pizazz of more modern pinballers for the moment, it got pinball right.  The physics were spot on, the action was intense at times, the tables were well thought out and presented, and the music and sound was perfect.  In bringing Pinball Dreams to the iPhone, Cowboy Rodeo set out to make the perfect port, and they succeeded as well as it’s possible to do, offering the game in every inch its original glory, even with optionally enhanced graphics.

Now they’ve done it again with the forthcoming Pinball Fantasies, and I can tell you first-hand that even more love went into bringing this sequel to the iPhone than its predecessor.  The main menu is still familiar with its coverflow-style interface, but the high scores have been moved below so they can be seen as soon as you flip to a game.  Flipping the game icon now rather amusingly shows you the back of a floppy disk.  Most of the rest is still pretty familiar, though.  In-game, all of the same features are present; all of the screen action areas are still there, and the pause menu still brings up the options to change graphics, lock orientation, and so on, but there’s a new option to add a “finger area” which blocks off a portion of the bottom of the screen dedicated to flipper use.  This is purely a visual thing, in case you don’t want your thumbs obscuring part of the action.  Landscape mode is still supported as well, which has its own natural areas for the thumbs due to the portrait nature of the tables, though it is at the expense of some visibility.

Now, Pinball Fantasies was my favourite of the series, so of the two this is the one I’d be most critical of.  Fortunately I couldn’t find anything to criticize — bit of a downer for a curmudgeon like me, but at least it meant I got to play one of my all-time favourite pinball games in all its glory.  Having played all of the tables, everything is as I remembered it — the music, the sound effects, the action, the skill shots — everything, just like playing it on Amiga and Jaguar as I fondly do.  The frame rate sits at a perfect 60FPS pretty well all of the time, though playing it on an iPhone necessarily introduces the occasional stutter as background processes eat away little bits of time. On the iPod Touch however it’s smooth as silk drawers. Not, uh, that I’d know what that feels like or anything. I’m strictly a boxer dude.

One of the other things that sets this series apart from some of the others is the responsiveness.  With some other pinball games there’s a very brief delay between you hitting the flippers and having the flippers respond.  It’s perfectly playable that way, but you end up having to adjust your timing to compensate for the latency.  This series never suffered from any of that; flippers respond when you tell them to, so if you’re used to pinballers with slight latency issues, you’ll have to unlearn that and respond in real-time.  Such immediacy of action can be a subtle enhancement, but it’s one of those that’s oh-so important.

I know many of you have been waiting for this game, and there are plenty of you who share my love for this particular installment of the series, so you’ll be glad to know that it’s everything you hoped it would be, which is a perfect port of one of the best multi-table pinball games out there.  But there’s no point in me blathering on about it any longer, you can see for yourself in the (unfortunately over-exposed) video below, plus some screenshots.  Note that in the video there are some audio dropouts.  I’m not sure which part of the audio feed setup I was using was causing it, but it wasn’t the game, as the sound is perfectly fine there.

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• Friday, February 13th, 2009 -- Pinball Dreaming: Pinball Dreams

 

Posted in Games: Arcade, Sneak Peeks