Pinball fans: classic pinball tables on your PC!

I used to love playing pinball in the arcades when I was a kid. I'd never found a decent pinball video game... until now!

Pinball Arcade acquired the licenses for loads of the old classic pinball machines, so you can play the real machines you used to play in the arcades!

http://www.pinballarcade.com/GetItNow/

It's free to download on Steam, but you only get access to one table (a good one -- Tales of the Arabian Nights). You can play all of the others... but only until you reach a high score... which is enough time to get a good feel of the game.

It's £4 to get access to a table, with discounts for buying season packs of multiple tables. You can pay a little more to get "pro" features... But the only genuinely useful thing with the "pro" version seems to be the ability to change the number of balls per game from 3 to 5!

I'm not much of a "gamer", but I've become slightly addicted to it.

Obviously it's not quite as good as the real thing, and I'm annoyed that I had to install Steam and "own" a game that exists in a cloud somewhere instead of on a floppy disk (:p). And I think I've discovered a minor bug in one of the tables. :-/ But otherwise, I'm loving it.

I jumped in and bought the Season 1 pack for about £29. It has 21 tables, but I might have been better off buying tables individually, as I only really enjoy the ones from the 1990s with the dot-matrix displays. But, then again, the old tables are fun to play for a quick blast. It's nice to have a selection of simpler tables to play for a 5-minute stress-break -- well worth a couple of quid extra. Certainly a lot cheaper than feeding a machine with 50p coins for game-after-game.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/238270/Pinball_Arcade_Season_One_Table_Pack/

If you bought all the packs (or all the tables individually), it would cost a fortune. So its well worth taking your time playing a few tables in the "free trial" mode to work out which ones you'll have most fun with and whether or not it's worth buying a season pack.

I started looking for a pinball game after playing Theatre of Magic in a bar in Amsterdam last year, and found it (in the Season 1 pack) of Pinball Arcade. I downloaded it, and was up all night playing it!

Then I re-discovered Twilight Zone (also in the Season 1 pack). It's got to be my favourite pinball machine of all time. It's tricky and unforgiving, but so cool.

And then I bought WHO Dunnit, which is basically a 1930s film-noir version of Cluedo. It's in another season, so I had to buy that separately, but it's been well worth it. Such a good game!

Sorry for the long ramble (and slight over-excitement), but has anyone else discovered this game?

Does anyone else have a favourite pinball table? I haven't had this much fun with a computer game for years! :rotfl: