Going live at 8pm Eastern Standard Time, I'm playing virtual versions of pinball tables from 1974.
1974 is an exciting year for pinball: it's the beginning of the end of pinball prohibition in the US! Remember, despite all the pinball going on, it's still illegal in several large cities. But in 1974, Los Angeles figures out there is no basis for banning pinball compared to any other game, and lifts the ban.
Unrelatedly, the Italian pinball company Zaccaria starts up the same year. This is exciting for virtual pinball, because they have released official virtual versions of all their tables, and they're good recreations. At the end of the stream (starting maybe around 10:30 or 11) I'll be hosting a multiplayer room to play the first three Zaccaria tables against others.
Amigo is a table I looked forward to because I played it in person, at the Morristown Game Vault, while traveling through New Jersey. I think that visit was when I started to realize I really really liked retro pinball tables, because I focused on that machine a lot.
Anyway I didn't remember it being this hard? The flipper gap is huge and I was playing scared most of the time, trying to raise the up-post between the flippers before I did anything else, though it would usually just go down again before I accomplished anything.
The thing to accomplish is one of my favorite simple goals in pinball: light the spinner, then rip it for thousands of points. Eventually I got it. Worth it!
Dolphin has one neat gimmick (smack the three captive balls into their holes for an extra ball) and nothing else going on. Chicago Coin was always at the trailing edge of pinball. The VPX physics are slippery.
Far Out is fun and also great to look at. It introduces a mechanic where one drop target is worth 10x as much as the others, so that you want to aim for the correct drop target instead of just drop targets in general. If the 10x target is already down, then you need to move the 10x light by hitting a bumper, or maybe hit the rest of the targets so it goes back up. It also gives you options for saving your balls from the outlanes by shooting the side lanes. The VPX physics feel super good.
Fifteen is one of those wacky Spanish tables. I like the mechanic where scoring certain combinations of shots lights up more ways to score, and it's particularly neat that these combinations are all expressed as "hit 3 numbers that add up to 15" and visualized as a magic square. If you're good at aiming it seems like you can light the center 5000 and shoot it over and over, and that's most of the points you can get, which would make the table non-viable for competition even if it were less rare.
Free Fall: if you like the select-a-drop-target mechanic in Far Out, this one's got it even more. And I do like it. Hitting a numbered rollover multiplies the corresponding drop target by 10, and the selector also multiplies a drop target by 10, so you want to hit rollovers, line the selector up with one of them that you hit, and correctly hit that target for 5000 points. It requires planning! This has a lot of depth for an electro-mechanical table. I declared I was moving on to the next table and then loaded it up again for just one more game.
Magnotron will mesmerize you with its semi-circular movement! I guess. I didn't find any interesting way that the features of the table combine into a strategy.
Wheel is another wacky Spanish table I tried. It's got a spinning circle in the play surface to make sure you don't know which way the ball is going. I don't know how the physics of spinning surfaces works in VPX, but this has the same problem as the VPX version of Fireball, where it seems like it can just rotate the velocity vector of your ball with no regard for how acceleration should work. At least Fireball has skill shots and ball locks, so play that one instead if you want a random spinny table.
Granada, the first of the Zaccaria tables we played, is a feast-or-famine drop-target-fest. It's hard to control the ball with those dated, tiny flippers, but it feels good when you start scoring the specials.
Top Hand is a bit busted. It's an exact clone of the Gottlieb table of the same name, but at least in this digital version, there are rollovers that just don't do anything. This doesn't detract from the main point of the table, hitting drop targets and collecting score for them in the bonus hole. Perhaps what really wrecks the experience, even though it technically doesn't affect the gameplay, is that the bonus scoring is completely silent.
Look, it's the EM era, so if it doesn't go ka-chunk or ding, it didn't happen.
Tropical (a clone of Williams' "Tropic Fun") is good. It's super deep for this era of Zaccaria. You want to hit bumpers to select one of 9 lights, then hit a center target to light that light, and lighting three in a row gives you the opportunity to score a special. Similar to Free Fall, this involves planning and risk-vs-reward decisions. @FlannelKat says she's definitely including this in her Zaccaria tournament.
Free Fall and Tropical are the ones I would seek out to play again.