Pinball Fantasies

[Warzun]

Brilliant! I agree at first the speed seems a bit floaty. Not like the first one for pinging around but when you get used to this though the tables are excellent. All four tables have their own play-style and feel to them. It's good to have 8 tables (in both games); now all they need to do is make them accessable from one front-end then it would be almost perfect.

EDIT - Also if the developers see this forum are you going to implement global and national scoreboards for both dreams and fantasies. Anyway good job with the conversions much appreciated.

[TKO]

@Tuzzo Nah, I reckon they got the speed just right. The original PAL one does play a -teeny- bit faster, but the ball feels a bit weightier in the iPhone port, which is exactly what I was hoping for. Give it a bit of time, it grows on ya. (IMHO that Monster Pinball one was too fast ..can't time yer shots at all. And Zen was far too slow. This one's just right.)

@BeefJerky The transparency effect (such as the raised-level on Stones'n'Bones) is exactly the same as it was in the original. In fact, turn on retro graphics. You'll see they did that on Speed Devils originally too ..I miss that on the updated graphics. Gave that table a bit of a 'future pinball' feel to me. The retro graphics are exactly as they were in the AGA/CD-32 version (I still play it), which is very much how the original OCS/ECS (32 colour) version was too - they just added more colours.

@OahuSurf If you're a pinball fan, you'll find it well worth the asking price. This is possibly the best game of the best pinball series the Amiga (and IMHO PC) ever saw. I believe it's the best pinball game on the iPhone by a significant margin ..and I think only Pinball Illusions has a chance of unseating it ..when it eventually arrives.

[your personal robot]

On my iPhone 3G 16 GB it runs far from smooth, even after rebooting.
Landscape mode is worse than portrait. And somehow, also to me it feels a bit too floaty and too slow. And I played the orgininal one for years, day and night. Not 100% satisfied right now.

[markx2]

Originally Posted by Notinuse

Purchased and played. It's worth every penny. Not to nitpick though, but the ball physics feel "off".

Thanks for saving me the money. If the ball physics isn't absolutely perfect then it's not pinball.

[Vesuri]

Originally Posted by Notinuse

Purchased and played. It's worth every penny. Not to nitpick though, but the ball physics feel "off" - it floats too much and feels much slower than the actual game for PC (which I booted up for comparison). I never played it on Amiga so I have no idea if it's the same as that but it's definitely slower than the PC version.

The game is directly ported from the Amiga code. The problem is that even on the Amiga the NTSC and PAL versions had a difference in ball speed. The PAL version runs the physics subroutine 200 times per second (4 times per frame, 50 frames per second) and the NTSC runs it 180 times per second (3 times per frame, 60 frames per second), causing a 10% speed difference between the versions.

On the iPod 1G and iPhones other than 3GS, though, the framerate is about 52FPS in portrait and 60FPS in landscape due to fillrate issues. The game tries to get around this by using the "PAL mode" in portrait and "NTSC mode" in landscape, which will result in approximately the same speed in both orientations. On iPod 2G and iPhone 3GS there are no framerate issues so it uses the "NTSC mode" in both orientations.

This choice was made in order to get as smooth gameplay as possible on all devices and to be as close to the original as possible.

[RM imagery]

Originally Posted by your personal robot

On my iPhone 3G 16 GB it runs far from smooth, even after rebooting.
Landscape mode is worse than portrait. And somehow, also to me it feels a bit too floaty and too slow. And I played the orgininal one for years, day and night. Not 100% satisfied right now.

I just left this under the article ::

"For 3G users - I recommend putting the phone in airplane mode and turn wi-fi, 3G and Bluetooth off. Both PBFant and PBDreams run smooth like this. I usually play late at night when it doesn't matter."

I just played each table. I could swear that Speed Devils had quicker ball physics than the others. But I think they all played well. I also freed up mem by using Memory info.

[TKO]

I'm wondering how much OS3.0 has to do with this, coz this game played damn smoothly under 2.x when I was testing it. (I only upgraded to 3.0 a week ago.) Hopefully the next 3.x update will help with some of these issues. In the mean time, yeah, airplane mode can help.

..and Vesuri's right, this does play just the same as the original. (I just went back to the PAL Amiga one to compare.) The feel of it is just right.

[Acidbottle]

might pick this up, tho as with most games nowadays, reports vary wildly in regards to performance.

would much prefer slamtilt tho

[your personal robot]

Originally Posted by TKO

I'm wondering how much OS3.0 has to do with this, coz this game played damn smoothly under 2.x when I was testing it. (I only upgraded to 3.0 a week ago.) Hopefully the next 3.x update will help with some of these issues. In the mean time, yeah, airplane mode can help.

..and Vesuri's right, this does play just the same as the original. (I just went back to the PAL Amiga one to compare.) The feel of it is just right.

I think, going into flight mode to run a game smoothly is missing the point of having an iPhone totally. I want to play the games on my phone, while using it as a phone. And many devs show me, that it works. I really don't like this compromise. This is dev's work to make it run. Not mine to adjust.

[Factor05]

If only they would drop the price of Pinball Dreams to coincide with this release - that would be even better!