I've been working with Cowboy Rodeo on a number of things, but most relevantly to this forum, testing the next game in the Pinball Dreaming lineup, Pinball Fantasies. I know a lot of you have been waiting for this one, and it's just a day or two away from going gold and being submitted to the App Store. (They're just polishing up the App Store icon; everything else is ready for prime time.) They've now given me the greenlight to let the cat out of the bag, so those of you who've been waiting (and those who should really get to know the Pinball Dreaming series up close and personal) only have a week or so left to wait. As to the game, the main menu is still familiar with its coverflow-style interface, but the high scores have been moved below so they can be seen as soon as you flip to a game. Flipping the game icon now rather amusingly shows you the back of a floppy disk. Most of the rest is still pretty familiar, though. In-game, all of the same features are present; all of the screen action areas are still there, and the pause menu still brings up the options to change graphics, lock orientation, and so on, but there’s a new option to add a “finger area” which blocks off a portion of the bottom of the screen dedicated to flipper use. This is purely a visual thing, in case you don’t want your thumbs obscuring part of the action. Landscape mode is still supported as well, which has its own natural areas for the thumbs due to the portrait nature of the tables, though it is at the expense of some visibility. Now, Pinball Fantasies was my favourite of the series, so of the two this is the one I’d be most critical of. Fortunately I couldn’t find anything to criticize — bit of a downer for a curmudgeon like me, but at least it meant I got to play one of my all-time favourite pinball games in all its glory. Having played all of the tables, everything is as I remembered it — the music, the sound effects, the action, the skill shots — everything, just like playing it on Amiga and Jaguar as I fondly do. The frame rate sits at a perfect 60FPS pretty well all of the time, though playing it on an iPhone necessarily introduces the occasional stutter as background processes eat away little bits of time. On the iPod Touch however it’s smooth as silk drawers. Not, uh, that I’d know what that feels like or anything. I’m strictly a boxer dude. You’ll be glad to know that it’s everything you hoped it would be, which is a perfect port of one of the best multi-table pinball games out there. But there’s no point in me blathering on about it any longer, you can see for yourself in the (unfortunately over-exposed) video below, plus some screenshots. Note that in the video there are some audio dropouts. I’m not sure which part of the audio feed setup I was using was causing it, but it wasn’t the game, as the sound is perfectly fine there.
Thanks -- though it's all their work, I'm just the messenger. It's definitely worth the wait though, and it still remains one of my all-time favourite pinballers.
I'm in fo sho! I did ask Cowboy Rodeo once in the Dreaming thread if there was a chanc they'd ever institute online leaderboards, unfortunately they responded probably not A shame as that's the one thing I think the series could really benefit from.
looking forward to this, i did already it was coming after sending off a few emails to the guys at cowboy rodeo a few weeks ago they sent me a message saying it was almost ready to be submitted to the store ofc i kept this to myself, seeing the screenies and vid is great though and i knew they would do it justice as Juuso Salmijärvi (the guy who mailed me back) had just as much passion for recreating it perfectly as i did.
Online leaderboards are coming. The game code already supports it, but they need to do all of the server end stuff, and that's going to take a while to get it right. Juuso tells me probably mid-late summer -- August/September-ish if all goes well. Vesa (their coder) is off on a 4-week vacation so nothing's going to get done in that time anyway. That's been their number one mandate for the series, to make as perfect a port as they can, and they've succeeded like gangbusters with both of them, but especially with Fantasies. I played he hell out of Fantasies back in the day, and this brings back all the memories in detail.
Awesome! When I saw Pinball Dreams come out, I was hoping for Pinball Fantasies, as it was my favorite of the series. I shudder at the thought of how many hours I've spent playing PartyLand on the PC. (I've even got the good, but seriously flawed SNES version...)
YESS! Love Fantasies - Stones n Bones, Bilion Dollar Gameshow and the absolute classic Partyland. Let's hope Apple don't dick around too much with the submission times!
No multiball, no, but neither Dreams nor Fantasies had multiball in the first place. They seem to be catching up a bit, so with any luck it'll be the usual week or so.
No deal killer, just confirming what I thought I had heard before. There still looks like there is SO MUCH going on in the tables, just like in PD, sets of drop targets, ramps, missions, and multipliers galore!
That's part of what made the series so much fun. It was a perfect match to real pinball tables, with plenty things to aim for and places for the ball to travel. Wild West Pinball wasn't bad -- lots of flash and bling -- but it lacked the sort of substance this series has.
This looks completely phenomenal - as expected! :-D I have just one question: I see that the graphics in the video and screenshots provided are not just copies of Amiga rendition of tables, but are instead enhanced/full color, much like you guys did with Pinball Dreams. Is there going to be an option, like in Pinball Dreams, to use AGA version of tables (256 colors) and/or OCS version of tables (32 colors)? I'm also curious about why did you left some of the dithering intact when you were redrawing these into full color? That was never the case with Pinball Dreams. There's even fake/dithered transparency preserved on Stones and Bones, why wasn't the real transparency used on an enhanced version of table?
The enhanced graphics are optional; you can set it to classic mode in the options menu for the original OCS graphics, just as in Pinball Dreams. I'm not sure what the deal is with the dithering -- that's something I noted as well when playing in enhanced mode and thought it was a bit of an odd choice, but I have a suspicious feeling it has something to do with performance and using transparency. Cowboy Rodeo have been intent on pushing 60FPS on an iPhone 3G so as to bring the full experience of the original without any hiccups, and it's entirely possible that adding transparency might have been just enough to bring the frame rate down. However, I'll ask Juuso tomorrow. I'm still working on some other things for them, so I'll just toss it at them and report back with my findings.
I was thinking it could be performance related, but even then I'd like an option - as I'm sure many other 3GS owners would I'm actually more curious as to why would they use dithering in places where there's no transparency to speak of, like the gradient shading on ramps and such. ----First game didn't have that---- *edit* scratch that - first game actually did have dithering on ramps and such as well! I just never inspected screens closely enough, and on Iphone's small and pixel-dense screen, it's almost impossible to see. Still, even on computer screen, dithering is a bit more visible on Fantasies screens, especially between those bumpers on Party Land. I'm suspecting the reason for this is because the graphics are optimized for 16bit color, as they clearly have more than 256 colors still. This is not even a complaint, mind you, I think the game looks amazing anyways, it's just my curiosity. Please tell them also that I appreciate them putting 'Magia' (anagram for Amiga of course) on the back on those 3.5" floppies. It nearly brought a tear to my eye when I saw it :')
