Here’s a quick update on a few items from the wonderful world of pinball that I have come across today:
UPDATE: Added info on VPCabs below
8-player Pinball game, Gamelan Wizard – The country of Indonesia is not a place you might think of when it comes to pinball and likewise the name Lucas Abela isn’t one that is recognized among pinball designers but if he keeps up his efforts then that can change. The Creator Project has an interview with Mr. Abela, which covers his previous pinball oddities (such as a multiplayer star shaped pinball table that also used guitars for bumpers) as well as his latest 8-player pinball machine called Gamelan Wizard. It takes a lot of work to develop something for a single player at a time and 8-player simultaneous style certainly has to be a different beast.
Hopefully we could see one of his creations outside of Indonesia one of these days. You can visit the Gamelan Wizard page here or the Facebook page here.
FlipPaper – This one was a surprise, a project by Jer Chris & Roman Miletitch in France. This unique and innovative video pinball project allows the user to draw their own pinball playfield, which the machine scans to make collidable objects from. Different colors correspond to different effects. While it appears to lack fine detail, the customizable nature of the machine can make up for that. I don’t see how it handles points and different values but I think this shows the versatility of using new tech in pinball design. I’m still hoping that projection mapping onto real tables becomes a thing in the next few years.
[Read more at the FlipPaper website]
KingPin Video Pinball – Home Leisure Direct in the UK sent me this article where they looked at the new King Pin video pinball cabinet which has been designed by Bespoke Arcades, another UK based company that designed arcade cabinets with a focus on home buyers. The King Pin is looking to offer what we saw years ago from GlobalVR with UltraPin. That helps video pinball feel more like the real thing – I have tried to get into stuff like Pinball FX2 but it just feels weird to me so I don’t spend a lot of time on games like that. Perhaps something like this would make the difference.
VPCabs – After posting this, I was sent a tweet about VPCabs, who is” the number one Virtual Pinball Machine company in the Universe.” While I had not been aware of them previously, they already are in the business of manufacturing a variety of virtual pinball cabinets, which you can take a look at here.
That FlipPaper sounds like an interesting Pinball game. This will be a great program to challenge friends as each of you come up with one ridiculously hard playfield after another for your opponent. I’m with you in wanting to see how this program will go after a few years.