Art of Pinball - Aliens by ASK Homework

[Sun Vulcan]

[Grist]

The developer continues to place a constantly present, large and intrusive icon on the left side of the screen for the music on/off toggle. If anyone from this company is following this thread, please consider changing the position of this in an update.

[HerbertKornfeld]

[cross-posted from what I wrote at Pinball Arcade Fans]

These tables are pretty fun. They look great, and they’re definitely old school in their feel. The scores are kept low, there aren’t any dot matrix animations or missions, and you can’t change lit lanes using your flippers. But the ball moves and reacts nicely.

Here’s some random observations that I jotted down while playing:

• Neither of these tables are available in their pinball collection, Age of Pinballs. I emailed them about this, and they mentioned that they don’t currently plan on adding these tables as in-app purchases. Too bad.
• Be careful which version of the app you buy, this isn’t universal. There’s iPhone and iPad versions of each of these tables.
• There’s lots of in-app purchases:

  Flipper Pack: $1.99
  Ball Pack: $0.99
  Sound Pack: $0.99
  Ball Number: $0.99

  There’s not a naggy sales pitch anywhere in the game for purchasing any of this stuff. It’s available in the main menu, but there aren’t any pop ups or notifications trying to force your hand.
  
  Before purchasing any of these in-apps, there’s no way to preview what it is that you’re purchasing. You can see some of these alternate assets in the App Store screenshots, but there’s no way to preview anything from within the app. And I’m damn sure not buying any of this stuff, so I can’t comment on what any of these in-app purchases actually provide.
  
  Note also, that since this app isn’t universal, if you want these in-apps, you’ll need to purchase them twice if you’re buying the iPhone and the iPad version of each table. If you get both tables, and you got both version of each table, and you get all of the in-app purchases, you’re out $19.84. (If these tables were added to Age of Pinballs, we’d be able to get all of these in-apps for each table with a single purchase. This, in my opinion, is why they haven’t done this, unfortunately.)
• In what I can only assume is an attempt to coax you to buy the $1.99 Flipper Pack, the default (and free) flippers are ugly white flippers that put “Flipper” on them in bolded black text. This is good, I suppose, if you ever forget what these things are called. It’s bad if you’re averse to in-app nickel and diming.
• The plunger control isn’t analog. You don’t pull back to release it, you just press in the bottom-right corner, and it pulls it back. So if you want to release the plunger at less than full speed, you have to release your pull early. If you hold the onscreen press too long, there’s no way to lessen the strength of the pull. This is problematic on the Mummy table, because there’s a 1000 point shot you can hit with a well done pull. On Aliens, it doesn’t seem to matter as much.
• There’s a ball-save feature, where you’ll get your ball back if you drain quickly.
• The physics seem tweaked from what appears in the Age of Pinballs. To me, it seems less floaty, and it feels a lot better.
• Inexplicably, there’s an overlay on the left side of the screen where you can toggle the music on and off. If you press this onscreen button, the music turns off, but the sound effects remain. You can’t hide this distracting button from the interface.
• In Age of Pinballs, there’s an ambient crowd noise that isn’t present here.
• If you’re backgrounding music from another app, you won’t be able to run it while playing any of these tables. Even if you turn the game’s music off, you still won’t be able to play any of your music.
• Each table is portrait only, and there are four views you can choose from. The first view shows the whole table from a three quarters view, and there’s no zooming that’s necessary. The other views have zooming in and out, but it’s nowhere near as jarring as what you’ll see in, say, the Gameprom tables.
• Each table supports OpenFeint for leaderboards. Age of Pinballs supported Game Center, but it doesn’t appear to be supported with these apps for some reason. (I thought OpenFeint was supposed to have built in support for Game Center, and that this was something that developers would get for free when implementing OpenFeint.)
• OpenFeint scores are not synced between iPhone and iPad versions of the app.
• When entering initials, the text field that they’re using doesn’t limit text shortcuts. So even though I’m limited to only three characters here and I’m not trying to invoke this shortcut, when I type my initials, I’m triggering this shortcut that I’ve created to enter my email address. This shortcut doesn’t work, and I don’t want it to, but this suggestion should never be made to the user.
• There’s a bug in the plunger code. When pulling all the way back on the plunger and holding, the ball will spin and spin and spin. The spin is fine when you’re pulling back initially, but if you hold it, it should come to rest. Otherwise, it looks bizarre.

[MeanTuna]

Mmm would have been nice to have this tables in the Age of Pinballs app, or at least in a new Art of Pinball app where all the tables in this series could be bundled together... Looks nice though and the asking price is super cheap.

[gsxrboy]

As mentioned @ PAF (see link above) I think this new pricing model and disto isn't the way to go. An Art of Pinballs collection (universal) would be much better.

Art of Pinball - The Mummy (for iPhone only) has just gone free so maybe they are finding out the change hasn't worked. I'll gladly buy every table in a new Art Of Pinball universal collection!

[MeanTuna]

Originally Posted by gsxrboy

As mentioned @ PAF (see link above) I think this new pricing model and disto isn't the way to go. An Art of Pinballs collection (universal) would be much better.

Art of Pinball - The Mummy (for iPhone only) has just gone free so maybe they are finding out the change hasn't worked. I'll gladly buy every table in a new Art Of Pinball universal collection!

+1 to this. I would be all over an Art of Pinball collection app.

[JoeAverage]

Last update for Age of Pinballs was April, I think. Are there still plans to grow that app or did the devs give up on it?

Personally even after having put over $8 into Age, Id happily buy a 70s table pack inside it, and be much happier having it all in a single app.

Of course this prevents nickel and dime'ing the flipper and skin pack stuff. So maybe it is not realistic to hope for it.

Age is a GREAT game, and I recommend it to anyone who doesn't have it, at $8 or whatever sale price it is at.

Cheers and hope to see these tables in Age one day!

[gsxrboy]

Now available as a universal build in a Art Of Pinball Tables Pack app, including all five singles tables released earlier and another table. On sale now for $2.99

[CzarCastic]

Originally Posted by gsxrboy

Now available as a universal build in a Art Of Pinball Tables Pack app, including all five singles tables released earlier and another table. On sale now for $2.99

Thanks for the heads up! This is how it should have been released originally. Glad I held off on buying any of the previous Art of Pinballs releases. The IAP is expensive, so I would have been seriously annoyed to have to buy it again to consolidate the titles. Looking forward to finally checking them out!