Oh man, don't get me started on PC sims! I will type your ears off! Or eyes off...whatever.
I might know as much about pinball sims from say mid 90's to present than just about anybody. There is likely not a game released since that time that I don't know about, & I spent a lot of time over the years digging up everything I can find, whether it sucks or not! Even some of the cool sims I got are german & I can barely navigate the menu's, but I got em! I got some stuff hardly anybody knows about that are pretty good games. I used to start a topic on the Pro Pinball series & the like at least every year at the old forums, just to keep people reminded of how great some of these games were, and still are today. & inform noobs that if they like pinball even a little bit, THEY MUST OWN THESE GAMES ON PC. Yeah, some of you might have played them on the playstation or dreamcast or xbox.
But as far as the Pro Pinball series, you haven't seen nothin' yet until you played them maxed out in 1600x1200 resolution on your PC. To this day, still nothing compares, even though The Web is 15 years old now! Timeshock! is probably 13 or 14 years old, BRUSA is probably 12 or 13, and Fantastic Journey is 11 or 12 years old.
The Web was no doubt a great game, but The Web being 15 years old doesn't amaze me as much as what Timeshock accomplished.
Released just a year or two after The Web, Timeshock took the PP series a step further a few steps further. It supported 1600x1200 resolution, which to this day is the maximum 4:3 resolution that most people can play at anyhow, even then you need a 1920x1200 monitor, not a 1920x1080.
Pro Pinball &
VP are the 2 reasons I will always have a 16:10 monitor that can do 1200x tall. The Web could only do 1024x, but still amazing for its time & still good today.
I gotta think 1600x1200 resolution for a game released in '97 was pretty mind blowing at the time.
Btw, many games of that time only did 1024x rez, if even that. Many games were 800x600x.
But beyond that, the graphics also took a nice leap with Timeshock, as did the physics & smoothness of ball movement. Sound FX took a leap, the soundtrack was awesome.
I remember when I first discovered
VP, I thought it looked so crappy cuz I was used to playing the Pro Pinball games! I like
VP, mainly cuz of the whole pinmame thing & variety of tables. & when I hear people say on these forums that
VP has great physics, my first thought is that they must have never played Pro Pinball.
Play Fantastic Journey for an hour then play
VP, you will think
VP's physics are awful.
VP's physics aren't great. They are just OK. Non flipper physics can be tweaked to be pretty accurate, but
VP's (&
FP's) flipper physics have always been an issue with me, though I obviously get over it.
How Empire Interactive made this Pinball series of games so good, so long ago...makes me think Aliens landed in the mid 90's & gave them pinball sim technology that the rest of the world won't see for another 20 years from now! & to this day, nothing compares to what they did. & the detail of the PP series, are you F-ing kidding me? Unbelievable. They literally made an entire real pinball game on the computer. It has all the audits & book keeping settings in the made up rom, & every other setting you would find on a REAL pinball machine from the late 90's.
Again I think Timeshock (2nd in the series of 4) is the game that took it to this level. Also its actual pc game settings were worlds better than what The Web had. I hate seeming like I'm knocking The Web cuz I love that game, but Timeshock did have the great in game menu where you could tweak the gameplay, dmd, & sounds to exactly how you wanted them.
& of course all the stuff that Timeshock did carried over to BRUSA and FJ, except they didn't get lazy, they added even more stuff with those games. With BRUSA you could set table slope, choose the "wear" of the pin (condition), put dirt & scratches on the ball, add ball blur, etc. And FJ came along with an amazing
DMD that did color. & I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff.
Also, Empire still didn't rest on their laurels. They actually updated their games! They put out patches for XP, updated the game exe's with improvements & additions. Not sure if this can still be bought, but I got the whole series on amazon years back, all 4 games in one package called "gamefest pinball classics". All games were the very latest versions (which are still the very newest versions today, or close to it) and were compatible with XP.
Thank GOD that they did that, cuz that is the reason why I can still play these games today on Windows 7 64 bit! I don't even set a compatibility mode. I actually had some issues with the games, oddly, on XP SP2 and/or SP3, and the games actually ended up playing better as I moved onto vista and now win7 where I got no problems at all.
I can't stress it enough. Whoever hasn't played these games on *PC*, I recommend, nay, I INSIST you getting them all (especially TS, BRUSA, & FJ), and hopefully you have a monitor that does 1200x tall. They will still look great at 1280x1024 or whatever the next notch down is, but to play them in all their glory, 1600x1200 all the way.
Damn, I wrote all that & didn't even talk about many of the other great & lesser known sims out there. Maybe I'll write more at another time.
Well, I'll throw a couple out there.
Addiction Pinball was pretty good for its time & still is, I think this was mentioned earlier in the thread. 21st Century released a game called "The Tomb" that has always been a fav of mine, but they already created like a dozen other tables that are pretty damn good to for their time (late 90's?). Games like The Avengers, Judge Dredd, Jailbreak, to name a few. I forget the pack or game they were released in originally, I can fidn out but I'm sure other pin simheads know of these tables. I got mine via a Pinball Classics CD where all these came on 1 disc.
These guys also released the ORIGINAL Williams Pinball Classics. Had TOTAN, CFTBL, Lost World, & Black Rose on it. By todays standards they aren't mind blowing & some people knock them for being a little inaccurate to the real thing, but they do have good graphics, and they are recreations. That alone makes them pretty fun. I think Black Rose is really well done on that, & their version of TOTAN is a lot of fun & good looking.
I even like popping in Microsoft Pinball Arcade every now & then, just cuz its fun to play commercially made 3D versions of Haunted House & Cue Ball Wizard. The ball physics are pretty choppy on MS Arcade, but they can still be fun. And the graphics for those games also pretty damn good for its time.
Also some really good pins are LittleWing pins. Especially their last couple which are made a bit more modern than their older stuff, though actually their last 5 I think are 3D then the couple oldest ones are old top down ones. They have really nice graphics for their age, and the newer couple aren't that old so they are pretty good. Only drawback is that they don't do high resolution like 1600x1200, but they do scale up to full screen & don't look bad at all. Physics aren't the best, visuals aren't the best, but they are overall pretty damn good, and just plain fun to play. Fairy Tower & Monster Fair are really good tables. These things are great pc sims cuz they are filled with lots of colors, toys, & gadgets on the PF. Cool themes.
You need to try em out to see what I mean. You can download the demo's for free.
Man, there is definitely some other really good stuff I'm leaving out, but I gotta go. I didn't even get into much of the better sims from the past decade & there is even some good stuff from just the past few years. Oh well, maybe I'll get into it later if anybody is truly interested.
But getting into all the pinball sims from the past 15 years or so is pretty damn fun, and a nice change of pace from
VP &
FP, its good to have different sims. & I'm happy to have such a huge collection of them. Furthermore, thanks to windows 7 because amazingly everything is seeming to play just fine no matter how old (minus the dos era stuff of course).
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