The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

when i was littler i used to rent a genesis game called "virtual pinball" a lot, though i never owned it. it's a follow-up of sorts to electronic arts's "pinball construction set" for the c64 and apple II. the tables the genesis version creates are entirely unlike real pinball tables: that's what makes the game so interesting. the elements you're given - flippers, bumpers, tracks and rails and targets - can be placed anywhere on a two-by-two screen area, making the title more of a physics playground than a compelling video pin.

last night i was tinkering with virtual pinball in an emulator and decided to put together a table. between placing all the pieces, playtesting, and revising, it took me a couple hours.



i've titled it "pachinko dreams". the concept behind it was a pachinko like area of pegs and bumpers that leads into a more conventional pinball table where the player can attempt to put the ball back into play.

the plunger and angled wall at the top right allow the player to have some control over where the ball initially travels. in the "pachinko" area are a number of goals that reward bonus points: lighting all the red lights (by passing the ball over them), lighting all the blue lights, knocking down all the white pegs, or hitting the four targets near the bottom.

inevitably the ball reaches the bottom and is ferried along a track into the "pinball" area. (the track leads onto a bumper so the player can't shoot it back onto the track, a convention of virtual pinball.) the pinball area is the only place where the player can lose the ball, and is subsequently the only place where the player is given direct control of the ball.

in the pinball area the player can hit targets for bonus multipliers. by shooting the ball up to the track on the left, the ball can be put back into the pachinko area, along with three other balls (the round objects on the top left) for furious multiball action. the balls roll down the slope and hit the spring at the left, launching them along the angled wall and back into the pachinko pit.

(the way multiballs work in virtual pinball, the camera only follows one ball at a time. if the ball falls into the sink, the camera switches to another ball in play. balls that hit the sink while the camera's on them can never be regained, but balls that fall out of play off-screen return to their place of origin to be activated again.)

the table underwent a lot of revision after i started playing it:

• some things just weren't functioning the way i expected them to, so the first changes were just to get tracks working correctly and such.
  
• it became apparent that a ball could fly out of the pachinko area and up the multiball slope to activate some of the extra balls. i made the slope more severe (as pictured), so it would be harder for the ball to get up it.
  
• the 200-point bumper was originally a spring, which bounced the ball upwards when hit from above but stopped balls dead when hit from the sides; the all-directional bumper makes for better dynamics.
  
• the pinball area underwent a lot of revision: first i thought it was too hard to get the ball back into play, then too hard to lose it. i'm fairly satisfied with the way it is now.

you can play pachinko dreams by downloading this file, which contains the rom, the saved data from my emulator, and a save state that will bring you to the pachinko dreams table. you can run it in gens: unzip all the files to the same folder, run the rom, press F8 to quick-load the save state, and press the start key to play.
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[Six]

Oops, I guess my reply got eaten before.

I've never really seen the appeal of video pinball; a few notable exceptions nothwithstanding, when I get a hankering to play some ball I'd rather track down a real table. That said, the notion of creating strange and wonderful tables is very appealing to me. Case in point: your table is a neat fusion I wouldn't have imagined could work if I hadn't seen it.

A suggestion: the actual pinball area is a touch anemic. Is there any way to squeeze in more stuff in that empty space above? (C'mon, aren't you an editor? Whitespace = waste, etc.?) It's pretty obvious that you meant for the pachinko area to be the primary focus, but I imagine it as a pinballer's wet dream of a bonus area, since there's not much to do in there except try to give a helpful bump or two. As such, I think it might be more interesting if the ramp to reach the pachinko were a bit further and more difficult to reach. My thoughts, anyway.

I'll certainly tinker around with this tomorrow and see what I can come up with.


(Also, this was the banner that came up writing this post:
!)

[Cycle]

I agree with six.
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[dessgeega]

yeah, the pinball area is a bit bare, mostly because i had so little space for it and i put all the bonuses in the pachinko area (that is, if i put roll-over lights in the pinball area than the player wouldn't be able to activate those bonuses without returning to the pinball area, etc.).

i do have a lot of unused vertical area over there, though, so what i might do is extend the pinball area vertically, making a multi-level table where the player has to get the ball all the way to the top to get it back into play (and allowing it to fall all the way to the bottom ends the ball).
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[dessgeega]

i re-did the pinball area of the table. here's what it looks like now:



it's now a three-level structure. the ball enters the lowest level, and the player can move it to the second either by shooting it into the track on the left or by hitting it up to the upper flipper. putting the ball into the hole on the upper right of the second level transports it to the third level, where it can be put back into play by shooting the track. the hole will take it back to the second level.

i changed all the roll-over targets in the pachinko area to red - which means the player has to light two rows of lights to get the multiplier, which i guess is fair - so now there are blue roll-over lights in the pinball area, to give the player a target. the goal in the pinball area is to gain multipliers, then put the ball back in the pachinko area, without losing the ball to the sink.

the flippers are also bigger, giving the player a bit more control on the lower levels of the pinball area.

there are only two extra balls now, because i felt like a four-ball multiball was too much. i was also able to knock the ball high enough out of the pachinko area to free one of the extra balls, so getting rid of the bottom one was a convenient solution.

you can download version 2 of the pachinko dreams table here.
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[Pijaibros]

I found this the other day thanks to Brandon of Insert Credit and since people like pinball, I should share it.

There is a site called Future Pinball which is a more modern and high level pinball construction set.

There's several user created tables that I thought were pretty darn spiffy, but what drew me to the site originally is a Bubble Bobble themed table! Look at how hott that is! I should give this table a round this weekend, I hope!

Anyway, this software looks real cool and there is even a pretty detailed 12 page tutorial in the downloads section. Should anyone here try to build there own pinball land. Looks like it may be worth toying with!