Problems with video recreations of classic pinball

 (This doesn't have to do with roguelikes much, but I needed a place to put this sequence of tweets that got hopelessly tangled on Twitter, on the subject of video pinball.)

One thing about licensed video recreations of pinball machines that bugs me is the implied function of preservation, that one can play the machines as originally intended despite the increasing rarity of the physical tables, and the thing is, I don't think they're good for that--

Let's take Zen Pinball 3, which offers a good number of licensed Bally/Williams tables, as an example. Even if one lets pass how no video pinball recreation plays like real pinball for various technical reasons, there are at least three major ways I've noticed their tables differ

1. "Improvements." 

One of my favorite real machines is Party Zone, mainly because my college had one once and I ruled at it. Lately, our local Pinball Palace got one in that I'm pretty sure is the same machine the college had, but that's off the subject--

Party Zone is a good example because all three of my complaints with Zen Pinball are illustrated by it. It's a table I'm really familiar with. As is often the way with video pinball, they attempt to "improve" the game in bad ways.

It don't think it's necessarily bad to offer play differences if they're done really well. My favorite example is Rare's Pin*Bot way back on NES, which has some really interesting modifications, including monsters and non-round pinballs.

It don't think it's necessarily bad to offer play differences if they're done really well. My favorite example is Rare's Pin*Bot way back on NES, which has some really interesting modifications, including monsters and non-round pinballs.

But Pin*Bot is a relatively simple table, so there's conceptual room for such changes. To offer such things in, say, Addams Family, which already has a lot going on, would be less welcome. Anyway...

Zen Pinball 3 offers two major kinds of "improvements," player aids (which I never end up using) and really distracting visual effects. Both can be disabled or just ignored, but the visual effects have a habit of turning themselves back on at the start of a game.

To its credit, it offers a "classic" mode that disables all such things, but it also changes the physics, supposedly in a way that makes play more realistic? It always tends to make shots harder to hit.

For various reasons, if video tables aren't carefully designed they can make shots harder to hit than on a real table, sometimes much harder. I think the tables were designed to make shots hittable in "normal" mode, meaning, "classic" mode's changes makes them artificially hard.

I should move on--

2. Lack of licensed music. 

This is something perhaps unavoidable in this litigious age, but it still counts, and the thing is, usually the publishers simply don't bother to mention the game soundtracks have been made much weaker.

There are two egregious examples. One, to my great sorrow, is Creature From The Black Lagoon, which has one of the best soundtracks in all of pinball, with multiple licensed songs, with the game picking a different one for every ball.

I know of no official recreation of CotBL, either Farsight's or Zen's, that offers the complete soundtrack. Thing is, neither of them mention this fact. They just silently offer the games without all the music, and hope you don't notice. That sucks for preservation!

Also bad is, again, Party Zone. Again, to their credit, they offer what is probably the headline song, The Who's Pinball Wizard. But it's not the only licensed song, a fact that I wouldn't expect most players to know.

That's because, to hear the other one, you have to score a Big Bang during play, which is quite a trick. If you do, you get treated to an excellent rendition of *Purple Haze*!

I've heard this on a real machine, and it's *awesome*. But it's just gone on Zen Pinball 3's version, replaced with Pinball Wizard again. You might even have already had it playing before multiball, it's a sorry replacement.

This is it (oddly, it's hearable on a Youtube compilation of the game's soundtrack): 

 

Finally:

3. Rule changes 

I know of two games with a form of progressive jackpot, an element that carries over between games, that are changed in Zen PInball. The games are Dr Dude and (of course) Party Zone.

Dr. Dude advances the player state through five levels, carrying over between games, with each multiball. The 'Gazillion' point shot, the game's biggest award, is only available from "Super Dude" state, which is only about 1 in 5 multiballs.

Instead of doing this, Zen Pinball resets the game to Plain Dude, the lowest state, at the start of each game, making the Gazillion almost impossible to hit! You have to play five multiballs in one game, or be REALLY lucky with random awards!

Party Zone's Big Bang is a progressive jackpot that builds with each game. Defaulting to 20 Million, it's intended to keep climbing until someone hits it. Zen Pinball resets it with each game, meaning, it's never worth *huge* points.

And its rule discussion says the maximum is 50 million, which it's not, on a real table, it's 99,999,999, a value I have earned twice. (It's the only way to get a high score that ends in 9!)

Anyway! I will stop blathering about pinball now. These things are probably important to roughly five people, but I'm one of them dammit.

How to Get Started Playing Mystery Dungeon

This is Shiren, recognizable from his straw rain hat:

Not all the games star Shiren. Mystery Dungeon crosses over with several other game series, and when it does it stars a character from those. One is Torneko, aka Taloon, the merchant from Dragon Quest IV. Another is a Chocobo from the Final Fantasy series. But the best of these games, I think, are the ones that star Shiren, and if you learn one you've learned most of them, so let's stick with him.

Shiren is as silent a protagonist as they come. Speaking for him is his talking weasel friend Koppa, who doesn’t play a role in gameplay but shows up in towns and cutscenes:

Shiren is a Wanderer, which is a kind of adventurer who wanders the countryside, and is sort of like a ronin, but their specialty is exploring mystery dungeons, which seem to be a weird but natural feature of Shiren's world.

A mystery dungeon is a sequence of areas, called floors, even though they don’t always go vertically. Each floor’s layout is randomly generated, or sometimes chosen from a set of possibilities. Its contents, monsters, items, and traps, are also random. Note the map, in blue, overlaid on the screen! It might seem distracting at first, but you will come to rely on this display at least as much as the close-up view of the dungeon, although in later games you can disable it, or move it to a corner.

A trip through a mystery dungeon is usually one-way: you find the stairs (or sometimes, an exit path) to go to the next level, but you cannot go backward to previous floors. But advance enough levels forward and you clear the dungeon, which is a considerable video game accomplishment!

Sometimes there is a boss at the end, but less often than you’d think. The challenge of defeating a mystery dungeon isn’t in beating a ruler monster, but in surviving the dungeon itself. The dungeon is your enemy. Monsters, while common, are only one part of the challenge of a mystery dungeon.

Another component is traps, which are scattered invisibly around most floors. If you step on a trap, you usually suffer a bad effect. You can check for traps on a space by swinging your weapon over it, but doing that everywhere is boring, and furthermore...

...if you do that, you’ll waste time. As you explore and fight, you are slowly getting hungrier, and you only have so much food. You can usually find more by exploring further into the dungeon, but if you waste too much time you could easily run out!

Back to those monsters. The creatures of the mystery dungeon are a tricky and capricious bunch. While some just beat on you, most of them have some troublesome special ability. These monsters can shoot arrows at you from a distance:

And these monsters can turn your items, permanently, into riceballs:

In nearly all other JRPGs, when a monster does something bad to you, it’s temporary. If it isn’t hit point damage, or a persistent state like poison, it clears up when the fight is over. That doesn’t always happen in a mystery dungeon. Some forms of harm, like Strength loss or item loss, do not just go away. And the range of things monsters can do to you is much greater than in other games. They can make you hungry, erode your equipment, drain your strength, or even rob you of maximum hit points or experience levels. And many other things too.

In some dungeons, even the items you find are unknown at the start, and their functions have to be deduced during the game! Mystery dungeons are treacherous places.

They have a reputation of being challenging, but that’s what makes them fun! Shiren is kind of a badass, you see. He roams around seeking out the hardest dungeons known and explores them for fun, hopefully to the end. Practice, and figure out good strategies, and with a bit of luck you can help him prevail. Mystery dungeon games are turn-based, so no reflexes are necessary, just patience, logic, and insight.

Even if you die though, it isn’t a judgment against you. It takes practice to become good at Mystery Dungeon games. Newbies always die a lot, but even experts sometimes just have bad luck. If you die, you lose all the stuff you were carrying, but that’s just the way of this world. You can usually find everything you need to complete a dungeon inside it anyway.

One way to think of it is, while Shiren’s level resets to 1 at the start of every dungeon, you as a player learn and get better as you play. And that's fun! Dying in a mystery dungeon can be a lot more fun than winning other games. If you can laugh at yourself, and at the sometimes ludicrous workings of fate, you'll enjoy playing Mystery Dungeon games.

But eventually, you can win. You can do it! Good luck, wanderer! We're cheering for you!

 

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This is an excerpt from We Love Mystery Dungeon, a book by John Harris (that's me) available in the current gaming Storybundle. It contains a lot of information on the 29-game-strong Mystery Dungeon series, and lots of screenshots! I think you'll like it.