I know you're all playing pinball and that's lovely, but I just came here to say that earlier this week I got my hands on an as-immaculate-as-you-could-hope-for-after-this-amount-of-time PSone and official bolts-onto-the-back LCD screen. It's a thing of beauty. It frankly looks very new, you have to pick it up and investigate to find the wee scratches that adorn it.

PS1 got Pro Pinball:Fantastic Journey which is a nice one though I never got anywhere with it.

I have a few on Saturn - Pro Pinball : The Web, Last Gladiators and Tilt (aka Hyper Pinball 3D in NTSC).

Last Gladiators is excellent - probably my favourite. In the main because the tables have been designed to be viewable full screen with the resolutions of the day and the cues for targets are pointed out very clearly by use of comic book style speech bubbles pointing at targets.

.

I've barely played any other pinball games TBH, I never really found pinball itself appealing and only really like Dragon's Fury because it's also a proper videogame. I'm amazed how well it's stood the test of time actually - obviously I knew it really well from before but thought it might be a bit disappointing now. They've just really nailed the feel of the ball and there's a surprising amount of nuance in the shots you can make, which means you can develop strategies but they're still tough to pull off consistently.

It may be worth playing the sequel Dragon's Revenge briefly, just to see how something very similar can all go wrong.

Flipnic is pretty close to Dragon's Fury in terms of it being a game based on "impossible tables".

I'm enjoying playing this far more than I thought I would.

There's a remake on Wii's WiiWare library too. I downloaded that ages ago but haven't played it much so I'll go back to that one too. It actually had an online mode which sadly won't be active now.

Played the Wiiware game last night - it's called Alien Crush Returns.



Quite nice. It has 3 tables, each with 2 or 3 sections like in the 16bit game though they don't seem to be as complex.

You can play story mode which treats the tables as levels and you have a set of targets to destroy to progress - and there are boss tables to defeat too. Arcade mode just deals up the three tables (no boss tables) - you pick one and go for a high score.

You get powerups for the ball which you can use sparingly - a speed boost and a direction reversal are available from the off (I think). I also unlocked a split ball ability when I completed the story mode. There is talk of an extra table to unlock - must try story mode again on a higher difficulty.

There do seem to be the hidden bonus tables as in the original game but the way to activate them isn't clear - I have just stumbled across them by luckup until now. They seem to be a similar to the originals so far.

Multiplayer is online only sadly - it was a race to a selected score on a selected table for up to (I think) 6 players. Pity that is defunct now.

The graphcis have a nice organic feel to them and the control is very good - the wiimote and nunchuck are used so nudging is really good.

What's the deal with OG Wiiware games via the Wii U tablet, do you have to pay a quid to unlock it?  I might get that.

Hmmm.....

19m on my next go.


Not quite as successful since

I think I have. I completed one bonus stage for the first time last night.

I had a fair bit of that last night, too!

That just ends up confusing me.

Those are 2 and 4 (and are the pots not coffins?).

25,540,700.

Thing is, my best score before that was something like 24m, so it's easy to suddenly make that jump if you get a good game going. Of the 52m, I think about 19m was just the bonus on the last ball, having racked up the multiplier after surviving for ages.

I was trying to get the ball in the skull on the bottom screen for ages, because it gives you your current bonus score but doesn't reset it, so you still get it again at the end of the game. But I just couldn't get the shot right.

This is the bonus that accumulates the more you destroy waves of little creatures on the table, like the wandering skeletons (up to a maximum of 109, which gives you a free ball), and also just the longer you survive. If you lose a ball down either side channel it gives you it straight away and resets to 0, whereas if you lose the ball down the middle it carries over to the next ball. You always get it from the last ball wherever it ends up. 

The only other places I know where you can get it are on the upper left bit of the middle screen, behind the door you can break down (but that resets it to 0 again, so isn't worth it), and the skull on the bottom screen, which gives you the current score and then lets it keep going.