Absolute Pinball

Am I the only one who saw that title, and remembered an ad for Absolut Vodka, tied in with The Who's Tommy? Nevermind.

One of the things I miss about modern arcades, is that it doesn't seem to be real often that you find honest-to-goodness pinball tables in them, anymore. I know that they're still out there, and still being made, but for some reason they're rather hard to find in any arcades in my area. While my video gaming skills are spotty at best, I'm reasonably good with the silver ball, and I've been known to be a genuine pinball wizard, more than once (I'll never forget winning a free game, on a Star Trek TNG table, at the Walden Galleria, when I was about 12). So not surprisingly, my dad had managed to track down a couple of pinball computer games, around the same time, and I used to play those plenty as well (specifically, Tristan [?} and Pinball Fantasies). And naturally, when I was browsing Abandonia for a game to try from scratch, this one popped out of the list (even if Windows 8 likes to regularly interrupt my playtime, with dialogue boxes about sticky keys...).

As you might expect, Absolute Pinball is a compilation of four virtual pinball tables. You are chauferred to them, by a cartoon robot. That's pretty much the extent of the conceptual depth, but hey, what do you want? The tables themselves have a decent variety to them: one has a baseball theme, another is about diving, another about highway driving, and finally about making movies. Each one has its share of mini-games, a plethora of targets, and lots of ways to keep yourself occupied and challenged.

In a lot of ways, reviewing a pinball game is a bit cheap, because all they really have to do is look good, sound good, and play well enough to be challenging without being impossible to do anything. AP mostly accomplishes that... though unfortunately this is another one where the abandonware neglects to include any music from the CD-ROM that I'm guessing this was released on. So not only is there no music to go with my fun, but it makes it very apparent that they were a bit skimpy on the sound design -- not only do the impact/table sounds rarely resemble the real thing, but often times there's nothing there.

Lots of gamers complain about the unrealistic physics in virtual pinball games. Now, since I'm a dental assisting student, former crossing guard, and sometimes filmmaker, I don't really know the details of what they're talking about. However, one thing I have noticed about the physics, is that the balls don't seem to have much weight or resistance to them. When they roll down the screen (representing rolling down the table slope), they feel more like they're in free fall. When you hit them -- with the somewhat shallow-looking flippers -- they seem to careen to the other end of the table without much difficulty. Maybe it's just me, but it feels more like a weird variation on ping-pong, than pinball.

My biggest beef, though, is with the graphics. Okay, they're in bright colours, they flash like the lights on real pinball tables, etc. and that's great. However, there are some rather big problems. First of all, the ramps and other protruding areas of the tables, aren't outlined in any way. So it can be very hard, to tell exactly where -- or what -- various parts of the tables are. I would hope that these days, this would be countered to a certain extent, by simply changing the angle of the view (to something more realistic than a bird's eye view of the whole table), but even if they were stuck with this at the time, there are ways to paint the table to simulate depth.

The second graphics issue, is all about the camera. Like some other pinball simulators I've played (like the aforementioned Pinball Fantasies), your view point is not only directly over the table, but constantly following the ball itself. And apparently you're doing this from about a foot over the table window, because your peripheral vision of everything else is almost non-existent. Now, lots of times this is no big deal -- but how are you supposed to "shoot the submarine" when you can't see it from where the camera's pointing? How are you supposed to take skill shots with lateral bumpers, when the camera zooms past them too quickly for you to notice them half the time?

I cringe to think of what these games much have cost in stores, when they first came out. At least today, they're free to download, and to be honest that's about what they're worth a lot of the time. Personally I prefer Pinball Fantasies overall -- especially since I know for a fact that you CAN hear music in that game, without a CD in the drive -- but this is alright for a quick diversion.