Starting today, we will be offering the Pinball Arcade launch pack of four tables, free to PS Plus subscribers! Tales of the Arabian Nights, Black Hole, Theatre of Magic, and Ripley’s Believe it or Not are all great tables.
This week at FarSight Studios, we’ve been packin’ up our new expo display and gettin’ ready to head to the Texas Pinball Festival to show off our latest Pinball Arcade tables and features!
Happy Halloween week guys and gals – we’ve got a special treat for you all! In our on-going quest to re-create as many of the best pinball tables of all time, we were able to get the licenses needed from Bally and the Mistress of the Dark herself, Elvira! This means Elvira and the Party Monsters will be released in Table Pack 6 tomorrow, and Scared Stiff will be released before too long in Table Pack 7.
Elvira has been super cool to work with. She invited us to part of her Macabre Museum at Comikaze Expo last month. We got to show off the Party Monsters table right along with a real machine. Some of the guys here on the pinball team got to meet her, and she even came over and played our game for a while. She’s actually pretty good at pinball!
A lot of people are calling The Pinball Arcade the greatest pinball simulation ever created. At FarSight, we take great pride in our work and we take this distinction very seriously. We are focused on adding a steady stream of great pinball tables into The Pinball Arcade for both PS3 and PS Vita.
It’s always a pleasure to get feedback from hardcore pinball fans telling us how much they appreciate the attention to detail we put into each table. We actually own a real, physical machine of each table, which we re-create digitally. Our studio’s rec room and half of our conference room are already full! So full, in fact, that I’ll be moving my favorite machine — Creature from the Black Lagoon — into my office to make room for the some others that we just bought!
With the PS3 and PS Vita launches of The Pinball Arcade on PSN this week, I thought that I’d share a few more details about our game and offer some general gameplay tips.
The launch tables include one from each of the four major manufactures that we’ve licensed. Tales of the Arabian Nights (Williams), Ripley’s Believe It or Not (Stern), Theatre of Magic (Bally), and Black Hole (Gottlieb). Tales and Black Hole were part of the Pinball Hall of Fame games. We’ve spent a lot of time improving the physics and the graphics of our pinball engine over the past few years, so we feel that they’re definitely worthy of updating.
When we first made the Gottlieb collection we gathered references from the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. We took a lot of pictures, recorded the audio with microphones, and took notes on the rules along with gameplay video reference. We actually re-programmed all of the rules from scratch.
We’re very excited to be launching the Pinball Arcade on the Sony Entertainment Network. We have four great tables running on the most accurate pinball physics engine ever developed. What’s more, The Pinball Arcade will offer players the ability to buy our game (and any DLC tables) once and own it on both the PS3 and PS Vita versions! The PS Vita version supports the front and rear touchscreen and will be a great way for people to play our game while they’re on the go. We can’t wait for the game to be launched on April 10th. We can confirm that the game will run at a smooth 60 frames per second, and the lighting effects and real-time reflections make the graphics look stunning. This is the best pinball simulation we’ve created so far!
If you’re a fan of either real pinball or video pinball, we’re pretty confident that you’re going to love our game. FarSight has been making digital pinball games for years! We have received overwhelming support by the mechanical pinball community – and these are the people who insist on realism in their pinball games.