![]() Foolishly, I forgot when I was buying it that only the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions include Medieval Madness. But recently I learned that there exist pinball video games that license actual pinball tables - as well as the free Visual Pinball and Visual PinMAME - and I decided to give that a shot.įirst, I bought Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection ($10 used on Amazon) for the Wii. Also, it costs 50¢ per play, and that adds up over a while. Unfortunately, it isn't always in the greatest condition a fact of life with pinball machines, I know. There's a Medieval Madness machine at Pinball Pete's here in Ann Arbor, and I play it a lot. Sir Psycho is already pretty bad, but the "sexy princess". It's mostly funny, but some of it is seriously cringeworthy. I'm guessing that they're judging it on different criteria than I am, but that reinforces the conclusion - apparently it's a great pinball table for serious players and newbies alike. I think maybe I'm just saying that because I understand it now.)Īnd on this, the pinball community seems to agree with me Medieval Madness is a top-rated pinball machine. (And having now learned how the game actually works, it isn't that complicated on the whole. ![]() Unlike with other pinball games, I immediately understood what I was supposed to do: Shoot the castle! OK, there's actually considerably more to the game than that, but the design of the table - both the physical layout, and how the game responds when you do shoot the castle - makes it clear that this is something you want to do, and even if you have no idea what else is going on, well, at least the game is guiding you to do that one thing. I encountered it by chance as a kid at an arcade I never had the opportunity to return to. (I'm also too weak to nudge the machine effectively, unless I'm somehow doing it wrong.) And more relevantly, I continue to find most pinball machines baffling.īut there is one pinball machine I love, and that is Medieval Madness. (Also, even before then, the in-game messages do provide a fair bit of guidance, and there's also the flashing arrow pointing you towards whatever it is you need to do to begin or complete a mission.) Still, for all I've played, I don't think I can claim to be good at pinball. A complicated game, to be sure, but once I found the manual hidden away on the hard drive, it became comprehensible. (Mostly a fun game, but eventually I got good enough I could beat it, and the final boss fight takes so long and is so tedious that it counterbalances the rest of the game.) That game at least allows you to control the flippers separately, but you can win without ever doing so.Įventually I started playing the famous "3D Pinball for Windows - Space Cadet", which taught me some actual basic pinball skills. I also played Sonic Spinball on the Genesis, which really shouldn't count. ![]() You can't even control the flippers separately. It's definitely not great pinball, though. These days I don't think I'd find it very fun, but it held my attention at the time. (I know what it means now, thank you, you don't have to explain.)Īs a kid I would play my grandparents' Star Explorer machine, a pinball machine made for the home, whenever we visited them. For many years, "LOCK IS LIT" was my own personal pinball equivalent of "PC LOAD LETTER". Meanwhile they have their whole own set of terminology and conventions that I don't know how one is supposed to learn in the first place - one reason those instruction inserts are so unhelpful is because in addition to their brevity, they're also written in pinballese. I've always wondered how it is that someone is supposed to get into pinball in the first place modern pinball games are quite complicated, but typically provide little in the way of explicit instruction (the little inserts in the lower left are really not enough) or implicit guidance. I am, to be honest, really not much of a pinball player. (This entry has been revised on July 8th and again on July 15th revisions are marked.)
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