virtuaalinen sähköfortuuna
Get Visual Pinball. Right now.
That is, of course, if you care for the noble sport at all. If not, this is not going to convert you… In a nutshell, visual pinball is an editor that allows the creation of pinball tables. Which is pretty much the smartest move in this area since the classic Pinball Construction Set by Bill Budge in the early eighties.
Supplemented with PinMAME, which offers emulation of actual pinball machines’ ROM chips, it provides means to play virtual pinball on user-created tables. And many of those have indeed been created. Sampled a few: Twilight Zone, Addams Family, Alien Poker (the very first pin I ever played back in ‘81). And as the size of Internet Pinball Database indicates, there’s plenty more to come.
Of course this ain’t a perfect product. The ball movement is not entirely natural, but very convincing nonetheless. The tables are not truly 3D, so you cannot scale the tables or look at details from
different angles. And the engine is visual basic, which means that the game experiences occasional hiccups. And the controls… Sure, they are nothing like real pinball, but then again, who’d expect a
similar haptic experience from a measly keyboard.
Leave a comment