Pinball Arcade
Pinball and the games industry have always endured an uneasy co-existence. Locked in a battle for supremacy with coin-operated video games throughout the late 1970s and 80s, both pinball and its arcade rival were eventually superseded and pushed into decline by the rise of home consoles. Yet for all that, video games have never really managed to recreate an entirely convincing simulation of pinball – until now. Pinball Arcade captures the glory of the hobby’s golden era, as well as its brief resurgence in the 1990s, in what is easily the most comprehensive and realistic pinball game on the market.
Pinball Arcade embraces the current free-to-play trend with the base game and one table, Tales of the Arabian Nights, available as a free download from the Playstation Store and Steam. Additional tables can be purchased either in packs consisting of one or two tables or as part of larger and much better value Season Packs, containing at least 18 tables each. While not entirely exhaustive, the line up of licensed machines ranges from the Spartan simplicity of early 70s stalwart Big Shot to the electronic and mechanical wizardry of mid-90s heavy hitters like Twilight Zone and Star Trek. At the time of writing, upwards of 40 tables from manufacturers including Gottlieb, Williams and Bally are available for purchase.
Each table is realised in painstaking detail, complete with authentic lighting and sound effects and a robust physics engine that accurately simulates ball dynamics and the mechanics of flippers and plungers. All other aspects of the visual presentation are similarly impeccable, down to the scuff marks on well-worn floorboards and the option to adjust ambient lighting in the virtual room your machine sits in. While Pinball Arcade hardly taxes the power of the PS4, each table takes full advantage of the 1080p resolution offered by Sony’s new console with a few decks approaching photorealistic levels of detail.
For those unfamiliar with pinball, the sheer variety of gameplay options on offer in Pinball Arcade may come as a surprise. Each machine features its own set of challenges that go far beyond the simplistic satisfaction of setting and beating high scores. Successfully directing the ball into the correct targets and channels can open up previously unavailable areas of the table, while hitting a certain combination of bumpers may grant access to mini-games, missions and score multipliers. The most feature-rich tables in the game contain an almost overwhelming number of gameplay permutations, augmented by video modes that add a further level of depth.
As a simulation, there’s little to fault Pinball Arcade on, though some aficionados may take issue with a table selection skewed towards newer machines from the 1990s rather than 70s and 80s classics. The learning curve is also quite steep for the pinball neophyte and new players may find themselves aimlessly knocking the ball around for quite a while before some of the more complex mechanics start to sink in.
The inherent limitations of gaming as a medium for representing such a tactile hobby do occasionally niggle but a few issues around control latency and camera angles aside, this is about as accurate a representation of pinball as an experience as is likely to be achieved with current home console technology. For diehard pinball fans happy to fork out for all the additional season packs, there’s potentially months of gameplay on offer here. For the rest of us, there’s a lot of fun to be had but a degree of patience and persistence is required to really get the most out of Pinball Arcade.