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Comment by hipnoizz | Hacker News Reader

Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies were my favourite pinballs games on Amiga (and then Psycho Pinball on PC). I know that nowadays e.g. Pinball FX3 provides so many bells and whistles and boards... but I often find all these boards to be kind of overloaded and so busy with animations, sounds and flashing lights... Maybe it is like with football games - I understand that FIFA or PES are much more complete games but the arcade charm of Sensible Soccer makes it a winner for me.

This or just a nostalgia factor...

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Pinball FX3 is so hostile to regular gamers too. The level select screen makes it really hard to see which tables you own and which you don't (to incentivize you to buy more), until you go and find them and add them to favorites column. There is no way to filter the list by tables you own. I am so sick of this upsell bullshit when I have already given them my money, and even worse most of the list is licensed franchise bullshit for properties I do not care about.

Also their ball physics feel weird. It has gotten better from FX -> FX2 -> FX3, but still feels off. Their remakes of actual tables seem to have a different physics model and ball interactions feel a lot more plausible

This is why I don't play much virtual pinball. Its different enough subtly to wreck the physics model in your brain about IRL pinball.

I have a friend who streams Pinball Arcade on Twitch--and he's very good at it but he relies on a lot of nudging which is very difficult to do IRL. It involves physical strength and you have to have clearance around the machine-- but its just a button on the controller.

The real hobgoblin is how consistent the game play is. The table never dents, parts are never misaligned, there's never a playfield protector on that subtly changes how the ball acts in certain places. The timing of the shots are always exxacctllyyy the same.

Same here, I loved those two games, graphics was excellent, music too, and motion was incredibly fluid for a 8MHz machine. The linked .asm code however seems rather x86 than M68K to me, it's probably a late x86 DOS port. The PC port of the above games was not bad, but it lacked the same smoothness of the Amiga version and, if memory serves, music was a lot worse.

> but the arcade charm of Sensible Soccer makes it a winner for me

+1. It was damn fun, as Kick Off had been a couple years before. I have great memories of tournaments with friends; good old times.

I've never played the Amiga version but the PC version was very smooth even on my old 286.

Maybe you were playing on the PC speaker, the music on that was definitely lot worse. If you had a real soundcard though, the music was definitely up to par with Amiga or maybe even better quality, and most probably better if you were using the GUS that did it's mixing on the hardware.

The game was also very smooth on a 386 SX 25 MHz, one of my favorite games from that era. The PC version also had 256 -color support, making it a better looking version than the standard Amiga ECS version.

Interesting tidbit from Wikipedia, Pinball Fantasies was hailed in the magazines also:

"In 1994, PC Gamer US named Pinball Fantasies the 33rd best computer game ever. The editors hailed it as "the best and most realistic pinball action ever seen on a PC screen".[97] That same year, PC Gamer UK named it the 19th best computer game of all time. The editors wrote, "[I]f Pinball's your thing, there's currently nothing on the PC (or any home system, for that matter) better than this".[96] In 1995, PC Gamer US presented Pinball Fantasies with its 1994 "Best Arcade Game" award.[98]"

>but I often find all these boards to be kind of overloaded and so busy with animations, sounds and flashing lights

No, i think you're quite right - especially tables that don't have a "real world counterpart" often don't make a lot of sense to me, rules wise and also, have way too much going on, too many gimmicks etc...

Real world emulations on the other hand most of the time have really well thought out gameplay and lots and lots of replay value.

I miss the days being able to go to an arcade or some random pub and play a few balls...

Which of the boards in Pinball FX3 you think are not overloaded? Triggered by my recent visit in some pinball 'museum' (me and my family spent like 3 hours playing on various tables) I did a quick research about available pinball games, then I played a little a bit those 2 tables available for free in Pinball FX3 and demoed a couple of others. But it was easier to achieve some 'competence' and understanding and select favourite ones when you had 4 boards in Pinball Dreams/Fantasies then in FX3 when you had few dozens of them...

https://pinballmap.com/ is a great resource for finding games in your area though it's mostly US based

the nostalgia factor for Dreams & Fantasies for me is mostly the music & sfx. the game was fun, but the atmosphere from the music brought it to a new level.

I still hear the laughing from Haunted Mansion [1] in my head quite often.

[1] https://youtu.be/y6xfzwO8GdA?t=933

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