Download: CyberRace (original, 2023) by Flux
I often have low expectations for original pinball designs, and I wasn't sure what was so special about CyberRace going into it when I set up the 2023 stream of Silver Ball Century. Kat joined me for that stream. And we ended up playing 2-player games of CyberRace for longer than I expected, keeping the stream up until like 1AM because we didn't want to stop playing.
That's a strong sign that this is a fun pinball table.
Some of the strengths of this table are:
- The physics are top-notch. The ball feels like a real object and its interactions with the flippers, ramps, and other mechanisms are satisfying. There's even a spinning circle embedded in the table, a mechanism which many other VPXes fail to simulate the physics of, but this one works right. Shooting ramps and making combos feels really good.
- The DMD captures the retro-future feel. The DMD is made with a tool called "FlexDMD", which I see on many original VPX tables, and the unfortunate thing about FlexDMD is it seems too hard to make displays that look realistic and too easy to make them look like ass. The DMD on CyberRace is not, let's say, "realistic", but it is anachronistic in the right way for the theme. It looks like an early-90s display with extra technology, like the ability to create brightly colored LED dots, not just red and amber. And the bright colors it chooses are, most of the time, CGA colors. Genius. The bonus count animation is a strange outlier but most of the time the DMD looks fantastic for something created with FlexDMD.
- I am extremely susceptible to cyberpunk themes and synthwave music, which this table delivers on.
Some weaknesses:
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The modes are really hard. I know this is a common philosophy of how to design pinball scoring -- make the table steer you toward doing a hard thing, with a huge payoff if you make it, and make that a mode so that you can't exploit it forever if you're good at it. I just don't like modes that work like that. If there have to be modes, I'd want it to be at least conceivable to finish a mode in one try.
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The scoop that starts modes, on the top of the table, seems hard to shoot on purpose but very common to hit on a weird bounce from the top lanes. A strange injection of physics luck around one of the big things you're intended to do.
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When you select a "race" (a mode), there are races that seem to be locked behind successful completions of other races, which means you never see them. They don't seem to be presented as wizard modes but they seem as difficult to attain as a wizard mode.
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The lighting is so so dark by default. I cranked the illumination up by 4x to take this screenshot.
The table as a whole presents satisfying challenges that Kat and I wanted to rise to. It was really fun for the two of us to compete on the table and work out what kinds of strategies would lead to a high score.