[agentwiggles]

Medieval Madness is my all time favorite table. I recently bought the version for Pinball FX3, and it's not half bad. I could complain about all kinds of things about PinballFX3, it's very emblematic of the problems with modern gaming, but the tables themselves are pretty good recreations.

It's nowhere near as fun as real pinball, but the one thing that I found really cool was that I was able to play the game on "training mode" and get a better sense for the different things I could do and how to set up certain situations.

My best Medieval Madness score is something like 50,000,000... the table I play on has a high score of about 190,000,000 so I have a long way to go to have a chance at putting in my initials. But I can generally go for a pretty long session on a single credit. Even still, I hadn't ever seen half the stuff that I got to see while playing the virtual version, and I've taken some of that knowledge into the real world when I visit the bar where that table lives.

So overall, digital pinball is cool in my book, if flawed.

Quick edit/addition: Medieval Madness is unique among nearly all the tables I've played in that it doesn't bullshit you much. Most of the time when I lose balls, I know exactly the wrong thing I did (in particular, trying to hit the castle gate or the trolls without multiball is pretty dangerous). Most tables I've played will suck up a credit in a few flips in ways that seem pretty unfair, but Medieval Madness seems pretty fair. I would love to own a table but they're shockingly expensive, maybe someday!

[toast0]

> I would love to own a table but they're shockingly expensive, maybe someday!

MM has always been on the higher end (or at least for the last long while). And pricing went crazy during covid. But it's a great table, so there's that. Probably fiddly to keep working with all the dodadds though. Personally, I like the very end of the alphanumeric era, right before DMDs came and started stopping the game to show you animations, but collectors seem to prefer DMD games.

Most games you can do a good job of advancing the plot by just shooting for the flashing shots, but maybe avoid center shots, unless you have a good setup, because a missed shot may be hard to recover, although the trolls can be hard to recover from a hit too. Advancing the plot usually results in good scores.

In terms of video pinball that's not virtual physical tables, Demon's Tilt is fairly new, and pretty fun. I was deeply amused when I got a ball stuck and had to use the 'call attendant feature' and got some sort of bonus. But like a lot of video pinball, at some point it is too much a game of skill, and you can have epic ball times and then it's kind of boring.

Yoku's Island Express is also interesting, it's several years old now, and widely ported. It's an adventure game with pinball segments. Boss battles are pretty fun, imho

[agentwiggles]

I like to think (although reality may one day humble me) that I would enjoy the tinkering aspect of owning a table, at least one that I liked enough to make the tinkering worthwhile. I also stumbled on the strategy of just going for the flashing lanes - although you can do quite well for yourself just trying to hit the castle too.

I have been meaning to check out Demon's Tilt. Yoku is fun but didn't grab me enough to go much past the early game.

[adamrezich]

this is exactly why I bought Pinball FX3, my local barcade got a Medieval Madness table and I remember liking it as a kid, and I wanted to learn more about how the game works beyond "put a few quarters in and hit some flippers until stuff happens", without having to keep pumping fifty cents in time after time.

I think the depth that pinball tables (I'm not enough of a buff to feel comfortable calling them "pins" ...yet) have is hugely underrated. I remember learning about the objectives you can go for in Space Cadet but I was blown away by all the different systems/table features/etc. in MM! so much to learn and keep track of at once, but once you start to get the hang of it, playing & learning more is incredibly addictive. my MM high score in PFX3 is somewhere around 50M (with the hugely unfair default, not "realistic" physics—though I play both), but I haven't been able to get anywhere near that irl just yet.

it is interesting just how much irl pinball physics differ from their virtual counterparts, there really is nothing quite like it.

also, for those unaware, some Medieval Madness trivia:

- a pre-famous Tina Fey voices of some of the princesses

- Tim Kitzrow does his NBA JAM shtick as the joust announcer, and even BOOMSHAKALAKAs sometimes

- there's very occasional "Toasty!" and "FATALITY" samples from Mortal Kombat (Dan Forden, the Toasty Guy, did sound for both games)

really, if you're a fan of pinball/arcade history, it's just a real treat, sort of a culmination of the Williams/Midway arcade scene, in some ways.

[toast0]

> it is interesting just how much irl pinball physics differ from their virtual counterparts, there really is nothing quite like it.

I think there's probably a couple components.

#1 is virtual pinball physics is usually too simple and it plays too deterministically. Real pinball plays differently when the machine clean vs dirty, and it gets (minutely) dirtier as you play, parts wear, etc. Sometimes the ball jumps or otherwise moves in unexpected ways.

#2 is flipper timing variability. In virtual pinball, the controller is usually sampled once a frame, but pinball machines pre-fliptronics had the switches connected to the flippers through a relay, post fliptronics, I'm not sure if there's a sampling delay, but if so, I think the sampling rate is higher than 60Hz. That really increases the possibilities, even if a couple ms here or there doesn't make a big difference.

#3 tilting on virtual pinball is very precise, but I haven't found it nearly as precise in the real world.

[syntheweave]

If you've seen the Slow-Mo Guys pinball episode you will quickly realize that video game physics still aren't really up to the task; they're very good at getting an effect, but still approximate.

Pinball is full of violent, three-dimensional forces: the pop bumpers launch the ball by crushing it from above, the slingshot bumpers deform the rubber rapidly enough to create visible resonance. Nudging and shaking the game creates a vibration across the whole playfield. And so on.

Most video pinballs outside of the dedicated simulators don't even try to get close, and opt for an implementation that treats the flippers as simple point-and-shoot devices that can always return the ball in any direction; the reality is that the available shots are all dependent on how the ball was tumbling, and the precise details of the flipper coil mechanism(games since the solid state era switch from a high-power coil to a lower-power one to prevent overheating when the button is held; this means that the flipper in the low power state bounces back when hit). High spin and low spin balls are categorically different and many games are designed so that you have to set up difficult shots by first creating a high spin scenario. Add in all the vibrations and deformations of a real game - the exact behavior of rolling down a wireform ramp, for example, is easy to dictate and hard to simulate - and you get to the parts that a simulator can't touch.

[toast0]

> games since the solid state era switch from a high-power coil to a lower-power one to prevent overheating when the button is held

Is this really limited to solid state machines? Pre-fliptronics, this happens under the board, with end of stroke switches, no electronics needed, there's no reason it couldn't have happened on an EM, and lots of good reasons to do it...

[agentwiggles]

My personal take is that even if you could simulate the physics perfectly, there's just something about the physical movement of a ball across a table, that you track with your physical eyes, that just can't be replicated.

[agentwiggles]

I honestly can't think of another table that's close to as fun as MM, it's got the perfect vibe and so many neat little table features. MM was also the first table where I started to learn the objectives (I can get the multiball with pretty decent consistency now). And again, it's probably the fairest table I'm aware of, I very seldom say "that was bullshit!" when playing MM.

Most of my prior pinball experience was just "bang in a few quarters and watch the lights flash until you lose." Imagine my surprise to find that those little cards on the tables actually tell you how to play :)

My 50M play was a magical one, I lucked out in all kinds of ways. My average is around the 25-30M range (on good runs, I'm still not good enough that I don't occasionally flame out near 1M haha)

[stevenwoo]

We had a Star Trek Next Generation table in one of my workplaces and that required a technician to service it once every other month or so (it was free play but only a few of us played it much) so you'll need to budget for that or learning to do that part yourself.

[agentwiggles]

Yeah, I can imagine the maintenance would be fun, but I can equally easily imagine that it would join the ranks of disassembled devices and half-finished projects in my garage. I can also imagine that you get into situations where you need a quick $200 or something for some borked part and just don't want to constantly invest in some expensive toy. Or worse, that you need some part that you just cannot find anywhere. After all, they only manufactured a few thousand of the things. Eventually, I assume the well of replacement parts dries up and you're left either custom-building a new troll or castle or just letting your table sit idle.

[aidenn0]

Something that no video pinball communicates compared to a physical table is just how violent it is. The force with which the steel ball is launched deflected and bounces is really quite visceral.

[a_t48]

I also wish MM wasn't so dang expensive. :(

[agentwiggles]

Just googled around and found one for 5k, which is still wildly out of my discretionary budget, but about 25% of the number I had in mind.

[cokeandpepsi]

aww, i'm sorry you're going through a tough time. i know mm can be expensive, but remember, we're in this together. i'm here for you no matter what