there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.
I don’t know the situation on consoles, but on the PC…
I am not a pinball expert, though I do enjoy video pinball, but none of these are what I’d call the major PC pinball engines with reasonably-realistic physics, things that do a lot of tables. Look at these:
Visual Pinball. I was not able to get this working on Linux the few times I’ve tried or to successfully get access to the forums that distribute tables (some kind of broken registration system). This is, as I understand it, what a typical person uses if they just want to make and distribute a free table. It also has many bootleg implementations of commercial tables. Open-source Source-available, though only runs natively on Windows.
Pinball Arcade. IIRC, these guys used to have a license for some major physical table distributors, like Williams, and had it expire. I have this, and the engine hasn’t been updated in some time. I run a high-refresh-rate monitor, and IIRC it has a limit of 60Hz, probably because the physics engine also runs at that rate. I don’t think that it’s getting a lot of updates, and I had some trouble running it last time I tried. This would not be my recommended engine unless it’s the only place to get a table that you specifically want.
Zaccaria Pinball. Good if you want elderly pinball, pre-solid-state-electronics era, electromechanical pinball tables. They have some tables that they developed, not copies of real-world tables, that I personally like more than their real-world tables. They don’t have implementations of real-world tables for some major popular US manufacturers.
Pinball FX3 (less old than Pinball Arcade). Not bad, but replaced by the below Pinball FX.
Pinball FX (despite the name, newer). This is the only one off the top of my head that can do high-refresh-rate, and it’s also being kept current. It has a lot of stuff that I’d call fluff and would rather not have, like toys that animate more than on the real-world tables and sometimes obstruct your view, animations to wait through, and such. Also has some kind of online-DRM system that takes a sec at startup. Some of this can be turned off. Places a lot of emphasis on this virtual pinball basement full of virtual trophies. Has occasional very brief stutters for me. Many of the non-real-life board are wide, designed around a present-day portrait-orientation computer monitor, which feels weird but is more friendly to, say, a laptop with a fixed orientation monitor, though maybe not what you want if you’re going to set up a dedicated pinball computer with portrait-orientation monitor. Lots and lots of non-real-world licensed tables associated with movies and the like that I’m not really enthusiastic about; I would recommend trying those tables before buying them. This is probably what I’d look at if I were aiming to get one today, as the engine’s the newest.
I think that all of these let you download the engine and try out some basic play (IIRC Zaccaria has time-limited plays on tables that you don’t own, and Pinball FX has a rotating collection that you can try for free), so you can just install them and see what you like, but if you’re looking for a starting point with something reasonably modern and with a bunch of tables, these are probably where you want to look.
If you don’t have a strong preference as to tables and are also just feeling around for something to try, I personally like some classic real-life Williams tables, Medieval Madness and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Neither is too rough in terms of draining down the side channels, in my humble opinion. The Addams Family is also a popular table.
Note that if you haven’t touched video pinball for a long time – like, I played a few games in the late 1990s and then was away from it for a while), these engines also simulate nudging the machine and doing so is expected during play.
EDIT: If you’re willing to hit Reddit for information, /r/videopinball and /r/pinball exist; they were where I got some information back when. If not, there’s !pinball – not a lot of life yet, but, hey, each additional person adds to it!
EDIT2: My understanding from past reading of said forums is that Visual Pinball is considered to have the best physics, but is fiddly to get working and get tables working on (and I don’t think that this was said from the standpoint of someone trying to run anything on Linux, just Windows).
EDIT3: I would also recommend not purchasing a great many tables unless you’re sure that you’re actually going to play them. Yes, you can buy the equivalent of multiple arcades full of virtual machines at one swoop thanks to modern technology, but…I have tables on all of the commercial engines here and personally find that I play a very small percentage of the tables that I have. Pinball, I think, benefits from becoming familiar with particular tables.
As someone using Windows who decided to check out Visual Pinball after reading your post, I’ll agree it’s pretty fiddly. It seems like if you have the patients/ focus to get everything set up it’s really good, but if you just want to download and play something you’ll probably want to go with something else.
I like RTS, it is fun to play in single player. I love turn based and tactical games, planning and thinking all through properly is how games should be played.
Kind of sounds like rocket slime. I looked up games like that and found this. Older than a couple months ago but maybe keeping on the trend of rocket slime like games will help you find it?
Thanks! Not quite. The tank in the game I had in mind wasn’t mechanical…I think…it had a more organic feel to it. Like, one would look like a turtle, and another would look like an insect. And it was always a top-down view.
Dark Souls 1 and it was Chaos Witch Quelaag. I don’t know how many times she killed me, but it has to have been over 20. I got destroyed over and over again.
Very disappointing if the only reason is competition. I don’t really think that any Obsidian RPG is going to sell gangbusters, and there’s not really any competition within the space, so if this is just Microsoft wanting to pad out their release schedule to keep people hooked on Game Pass, that’s scummy as fuck.
Hopefully the extra time in the tank prevents the typically Obsidian jank from creeping in at least.
Whether or not theres competition in the genre, putting a release around the holiday schedule is usually a bad time for your game unless you are a top name in the industry. The most famous case being Titanfall 2 being sandwiched between CoD and Battlefield with Gears of War, Final Fantasy, Pokemon, and South Park releasing at similar times too. Titanfall was drowned out by relevant and irrelevant competition and was likely the best game in that holiday season. Simply delaying it to January could have been the difference between being forgotten and the next biggest franchise.
I mean, even despite that release date, Titanfall 2 sold 4 million copies that holiday season and is certainly remembered today more than Battlefield 1 or CoD: Infinite Warfare. The franchise has managed to continue through Apex Legends. Maybe delaying it would have caused it to sell a little bit better initially, but I think positive word of mouth gave it much longer legs.
Also…is anything actually releasing later this year that’s worth pushing back for? Especially in the realm of RPGs? If anything pushing it back is going to cause it to conflict with Dragon Age Veilguard, which is also looking to be released very late 2024-early 2025, and is realistically the closest competition Avowed could run into. There’s basically no other RPGs releasing this fall, so who’s to say that it wouldn’t get a ton of attention by being one of the only options in town?
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