I recently played through a demo for a game called Pinball Spire on steam, and it put me in the mood for playing pinball games. Unfortunately, and I don’t know if this is just due to me having bad google-foo, there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.
So figured I may as well make a thread asking about what the “state of the art” of pinball video games is. Some of the ones I’ve played:
- Sonic Spinball: Very janky, but very unique and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone try to do anything similar to it.
- Pokémon Pinball and Sonic Pinball Party: Fairly standard pinball games, tbh. They’re both on handhelds so they can’t do that much.
- Demon’s Tilt and Xenotilt: Just really fun feeling arcade pinball games with a really fun tilt mechanic.
So yeah, know any good PC or console pinball games?
Oh, and can someone help me: I vaguely remember seeing a stream of a pinball game for the Mega Drive/SNES where the ball goes through multiple tables. Does anyone know what that game was called, if it even exists?
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Yoku’s Island Express might be up your alley- it’s part platformer, part pinball, and it’s on sale.
This. Yoku is a great game. If it piques your interest, play it!
Space cadet pinball can be installed on any system you have and is still a blast to play.
I was gonna be absolutely livid if nobody mentioned space cadet
I know what I’m doing this weekend
there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.
I don’t know the situation on consoles, but on the PC…
I am not a pinball expert, though I do enjoy video pinball, but none of these are what I’d call the major PC pinball engines with reasonably-realistic physics, things that do a lot of tables. Look at these:
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Visual Pinball. I was not able to get this working on Linux the few times I’ve tried or to successfully get access to the forums that distribute tables (some kind of broken registration system). This is, as I understand it, what a typical person uses if they just want to make and distribute a free table. It also has many bootleg implementations of commercial tables.
Open-sourceSource-available, though only runs natively on Windows. -
Pinball Arcade. IIRC, these guys used to have a license for some major physical table distributors, like Williams, and had it expire. I have this, and the engine hasn’t been updated in some time. I run a high-refresh-rate monitor, and IIRC it has a limit of 60Hz, probably because the physics engine also runs at that rate. I don’t think that it’s getting a lot of updates, and I had some trouble running it last time I tried. This would not be my recommended engine unless it’s the only place to get a table that you specifically want.
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Zaccaria Pinball. Good if you want elderly pinball, pre-solid-state-electronics era, electromechanical pinball tables. They have some tables that they developed, not copies of real-world tables, that I personally like more than their real-world tables. They don’t have implementations of real-world tables for some major popular US manufacturers.
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Pinball FX3 (less old than Pinball Arcade). Not bad, but replaced by the below Pinball FX.
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Pinball FX (despite the name, newer). This is the only one off the top of my head that can do high-refresh-rate, and it’s also being kept current. It has a lot of stuff that I’d call fluff and would rather not have, like toys that animate more than on the real-world tables and sometimes obstruct your view, animations to wait through, and such. Also has some kind of online-DRM system that takes a sec at startup. Some of this can be turned off. Places a lot of emphasis on this virtual pinball basement full of virtual trophies. Has occasional very brief stutters for me. Many of the non-real-life board are wide, designed around a present-day portrait-orientation computer monitor, which feels weird but is more friendly to, say, a laptop with a fixed orientation monitor, though maybe not what you want if you’re going to set up a dedicated pinball computer with portrait-orientation monitor. Lots and lots of non-real-world licensed tables associated with movies and the like that I’m not really enthusiastic about; I would recommend trying those tables before buying them. This is probably what I’d look at if I were aiming to get one today, as the engine’s the newest.
I think that all of these let you download the engine and try out some basic play (IIRC Zaccaria has time-limited plays on tables that you don’t own, and Pinball FX has a rotating collection that you can try for free), so you can just install them and see what you like, but if you’re looking for a starting point with something reasonably modern and with a bunch of tables, these are probably where you want to look.
If you don’t have a strong preference as to tables and are also just feeling around for something to try, I personally like some classic real-life Williams tables, Medieval Madness and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Neither is too rough in terms of draining down the side channels, in my humble opinion. The Addams Family is also a popular table.
Note that if you haven’t touched video pinball for a long time – like, I played a few games in the late 1990s and then was away from it for a while), these engines also simulate nudging the machine and doing so is expected during play.
EDIT: If you’re willing to hit Reddit for information, /r/videopinball and /r/pinball exist; they were where I got some information back when. If not, there’s [email protected] – not a lot of life yet, but, hey, each additional person adds to it!
EDIT2: My understanding from past reading of said forums is that Visual Pinball is considered to have the best physics, but is fiddly to get working and get tables working on (and I don’t think that this was said from the standpoint of someone trying to run anything on Linux, just Windows).
EDIT3: I would also recommend not purchasing a great many tables unless you’re sure that you’re actually going to play them. Yes, you can buy the equivalent of multiple arcades full of virtual machines at one swoop thanks to modern technology, but…I have tables on all of the commercial engines here and personally find that I play a very small percentage of the tables that I have. Pinball, I think, benefits from becoming familiar with particular tables.
As someone using Windows who decided to check out Visual Pinball after reading your post, I’ll agree it’s pretty fiddly. It seems like if you have the patients/ focus to get everything set up it’s really good, but if you just want to download and play something you’ll probably want to go with something else.
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The OG: Space Cadet Pinball.
There is one I remember hearing about a while back and I want to find it again that was really dope because it was a full on simulator and had a easy to use builder to build your own tables. People were recreating actual tables for it, though only those in the public domain.
Space Cadet was one of Maxis’ Full-Tilt Pinball tables. Afaik it’s not in the public domain, Microsoft licensed it from Maxis. However, I’m not sure EA would actually enforce the copyright unless someone was making a lot of money off it.
By the way, The Windows XP version has been ported to WASM, and you can play it in a browser.
Space cadet has been reverse engineered and can be installed in Linux through flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball
I play a lot of Pinball FX and Pinball FX2. The only downer is that they’re huge downloads, even if you only own a few tables.
Metroid prime pinball was incredible, especially with the use of the rumble pack. Underrated accessory for the DS.
Made by the same team as the Pro Pinball games, which is why it’s so darned good.
I just finished a long fever with Pokemon Pinball: Ruby and Sapphire. Trying to build your collection of Pokemon across sessions is so addicting. I couldn’t believe how good I was by the end. I highly recommend it, just use a GBA emulator.
Not sure if it’s the same sonic pinball game but there may be another one.
Metroid Pinball was great I remember.
I’ll have to remember the others I played as a kid. They used to be more popular
Grab an Amiga emulator and get Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Illusions.
Absolutely, pinball dreams and fantasies are classics and still fun on DOS. Still have pinball dreams and pinball fantasies on my iPhone from when they were first ported. Great when I’m offline on a plane, not so great for the person in the next seat when I’m trying to tilt.
This comment isn’t helpful, but I really love Demon’s Tilt. I appreciate this post and the suggestions here!
While you’re looking for a good pinball game on PC and console, play Vector Pinball on your phone:
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.dozingcatsoftware.bouncy/
It’s simple and fantastic.
Zombie Rollerz - A Rougelike Pinball Game
Dino Land for Genesis was a lot of fun!
Three of four Pro Pinball games are available on GOG. They’re probably on the more realistic side of pinball games, effectively simulating a single table down to aspects like scratching, aging and blemishes. That’s all optional though, you can just install and play. I don’t know how well they’ve aged since it’s been a few years since I last touched one of them. But I’ve always found them fun, with great visuals and sound, even though I’m pretty inept at pinball in general.
I like the Skyrim and Deadpool tables on Pinball FX3. Plays great on Steam Deck.
