What am I playing? The Pinball (Mac, iPhone)

Pinball, the ancient and mystical art! Some would say it requires a deep and innate relationship with the table to truly do well. After all, how else could a deaf, dumb, and blind kid play such a mean pinball?

I love pinball and have even when the skill involved was completely beyond my grasp, as well as the buttons. Hard for a little guy on a milk crate to reach both buttons! I have even made pilgrimages to what has to be the current pinball Mecca – The Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

It’s within that context that I can comfortably blame any dislike on my part towards ‘The Pinball’ to be related to the qualities inherent in the game and not any misunderstanding of the medium myself.

Gameprom has apparently made a name for themselves with three fully 3d, full physics pinball boards on the iPhone. I’ve seen countless rave reviews of these boards to the extent that I was convinced to purchase each of them even after I tried and was not impressed by the Wild West board. Sure, the physics are realistic, but the boards are uninteresting, provide no clear progression of game states, and boring flow.

Gameprom came up with a concept that really excited me at first. They released software for OSX that provided a full screen, full power rendition of their boards. That in itself, not so interesting, but the fact that the game was controlled by an iPod touch or iPhone.. That’s interesting!

While trying out the software I sadly was driven to ask myself ‘why am I doing this?’ I look down in my hands and I have this little interface that I’m mashing the hell out of to play some Wild West pinball, but all I could feel is that I wanted something else. I wanted to reach for the keyboard. I wanted to go to my Xbox to play some Williams Hall of Fame – arguably the best pinball simulator in existence. Instead I’m stuck with the requirement of using an external device for this pinball for a perfectly arbitrary reason.

It may stand to argue that they’re tying the experience through the iPhone app so that all of the board purchases can be handled through the pre-existing payment infrastructure. I can appreciate that. Kind of. But allow untethering after the board purchase!

It boils down to the boards. The free one – Wild West – remains uninteresting, even at higher resolutions. I know the others available aren't that hot either. In the end – try the free board out for the novelty, but don’t get sucked in. Too much hardware required for too little gameplay. Pinball can be magic, but this is almost as far from that as possible.

What am I watching? ESTATE OF PANIC!!

Estate of Panic! A throwback to when Sci-Fi channel hadn’t decided to get all edgy as SyFy. It’s like Fear Factor meets all those fun kids gameshows from the 80s and 90s like Finders Keepers, Double Dare, GUTS, and Fun House. It’s not anything you need to watch, but it’s fun to watch. I also for some reason snagged the six eps made off of iTunes when they were on sale at some point.

That’s about it. There’s 6 people at the start of the episode, tasked with entering environments and hunting for cash as the environments get more and more hostile. They can all spend as long as they like in there but the last person doesn’t get let out of the environment and the person that makes it out with the least cash is eliminated. Fun way to spend 42 minutes watching people deal with hydrophobia, arachnophobia, snakeophobia, electrocution, and rooms slowly closing in on them.

What am I playing? Zombie Driver

Oh, Zombies. Is there any situation you’re not good for?

Zombie Driver is an overhead drivearound, shoot-em-up game for the PC. Imagine the original Grand Theft Auto with 3d graphics and gore combined with Crazy Taxi and Night of the Living Dead.

Final verdict first? It’s a 10 dollar game, which sounds cheap, but not worth it. I picked it up at a promotional rate of 2.50 back when Steam was having their crazy sales in December.

The game is pretty for what it is – there is even some nice limb physics as zombies are mown down. There’s a nice progression of vehicles and a selection of weapons to choose from for taking out zombies. There’s some challenge in completing some of the secondary objectives.

However, the camera is just not all that great. It’s essentially a guess on how you actually get to your objectives. There’s no overhead map to help you or even any kind of gps system to show you good routes to take.

The combat is cool in theory, but only theory. In order to pick people up you need to kill all the zombies in a certain radius around the building they’re in. Sadly the combat boils down to accelerating through the crowd of zombies, then deciding if you’re just going to back through the crowd again or turn around to get up more speed. No real sense of skill adding to the possibilities.

17 missions gives the game some legs, but the ending is pretty throwaway. No conclusion to the ‘story’ and you forgot how horrid the opening art of the game was because you don’t see it again until the end. What I was really looking forward to was going back to the earlier missions with my souped up cars and seeing how much better I could do at them, but beating the game RESETS ALL OF YOUR PROGRESS. Failure..