On Silver Ball Century we've reached a time where we're running out of real pinball tables that can be played virtually, but we've got a lot of not-real tables to talk about.
Zaccaria Pinball (the PC game) has been a pretty good engine for playing real tables made by the Italian pinball company Zaccaria in the '70s and '80s. And now we're reaching the point (around 2018) when the game developers, Magic Pixel, decided to make their own virtual-only tables roughly inspired by the Zaccaria ones.
At some point they must have said: hey, the tables we have the license to are missing features that people expect out of pinball, like ball save, modes, multiball, and any sort of display besides a score. What if we remade each of the tables as a more modern pinball design, in the style of the '90s or '00s?
So they made these remakes, and sold them as DLC for $3 each, and they're not really worth it. The rules they came up with kinda suck, and they're mostly the same rules over and over, no matter what the table layout is. They're playable but they certainly don't each bring $3 worth of new gameplay, and they miss the mark on '90s pinball design while also losing the design sense that the Zaccaria brothers brought to pinball.
So then some mad genius at Magic Pixel said, what if we do the opposite of that?
If you're playing Zaccaria, you clearly have at least some interest in retro pinball. So the developers decided: What if we take the tables and de-make them, in the style of '50s and '60s pinball tables? What if we ignore every best practice we think we've learned about pinball design in 60 years, and just sprinkle around some pop bumpers and put flippers in stupid places, like Wayne Neyens used to do? What if we bring back gobble holes?
The result is great. You get 27 pinball tables that are bad in convincingly retro ways, and they sell the entire pack for $2.
I have more fun playing these than I do any of the "remakes". They're nonsensical chaos machines, and the challenge is how to get control of them for long enough to score a lot of points. Sometimes the decision is about how to lose your ball in the highest-scoring way, because you sure won't get to keep it.
It's just you against (virtual) physics, and when it doesn't work out for you, you try again.
I appreciate these Zaccaria Retro de-makes, and I will be playing every one of them tonight on Silver Ball Century.
