A Touch of Light in the Dark

By tdsmith5556

August 12, 2016

This story got featured & frontpaged on August 13, 2016

I've been a gamer all my life.

Some of my fondest memories growing up was getting my first nintendo and then moving on to genesis and then finally as a sophomore in high school playing final fantasy 8 on my first PS1. I loved going to the arcade as a kid. One of the coolest things I remember was going to the mall in Cinncinatti staying with the relatives all summer in 95 and playing in the arcade there all day.

To be blunt about it though gaming has just been shit lately. I went through the MMO phase with Anarchy Online until the grind got way overly repetitive. Went through the COD phase where eventually I was pulling off 40-80 kill games on kids with no thumbs and got bored of that. Seriously, can developers nowadays come up with anything else besides a mmorpg or a first person shooter? The console library after a certain stage just went completely dead. This year if you are a console player it's COD or battlefield or bust. Those are pretty much your only choices. Last year Fallout 4 was the only game I got excited about the whole year and that got old in about a month. Eventually I got tired of spending more time fantasizing about games based on their marketing hype than actually playing and enjoying them. Now it's so bad there isn't even a Titanfall or a Destiny to even generate that excitement for awhile before delivering disappointment. It's like the crash of 83 all over again. Developers just stopped making games for console not named call of duty and so my console collects dust as it has been the last year or so.

Gaming just isn't what it used to be. NES was brutally difficult as a kid and over the years it started to ease up. I remember most ps1/ps2/xbox games were pretty easy, but I didn't care because they were so rich in story and atmosphere. The survivial horror games in particular had enough challenge to at least make it feel tense. I don't know exactly where it all went to hell, but once I started seeing games like Candy Crush and all these little bullshit mobile games come out things really started going downhill.

It's gotten so extreme now gaming has turned into literally clicking a single button and swiping upward on the phone screen to add experience to a progress bar and that seriously is all the game. You walk around. At random a picture of a pokemon pops up on the screen. You click the pokemon. It pops into your inventory with no effort. You gain a little xp for it and you rinse and repeat. This model of game takes so little effort to make and is so profitable it's not hard to imagine many many more games like this are to come. Developers are going to take notice and switch their efforts over to what's profitable. It's simple laws of economics.

But while gaming is trash now the silver lining is that it has forced me into looking for other hobbys and ways I can continue gaming until prehaps the console winter ends if it ever does.

One day I got bored and started looking for some old steam games my pc could run and I stumbled upon pinball arcade. I didn't expect much, but I got hooked quickly. It's been a long time since I've played a game with a real skill curve where it's challenging, but you gradually get better. I'm really grateful that the developers of this app spend so much effort into emulating all the physics and details with these tables. Yes, it's not EXACTLY the same, but I played on the real machines and it doesn't feel that much different. I'm grateful this game exists because it got me to appreciate pinball.

I started playing locally wherever I could. There aren't many places to play in Evansville, but they got an Avengers machine that's pretty kick ass and a few other decent tables. There was something different about have a living breathing machine in front of you rather than a flat screen with no depth or feedback. I played pinball as a kid, but I never understood or appreciate this. There's something involving the feel of a real life game that a video game simply cannot emulate. The pinball arcade developers got it about as spot on as possible and even that is somewhat predictable. Real pinball requires skill beyond just memorizing patterns like a lot of video games. It's been years since I've played anything this engaging and challenging. Most of these tables will drain you in under 30 seconds if you aren't really careful, but it's fair and keeps you getting better. The only console games I remember doing this well are games like Ninja Gaiden and Dark Souls. Unlike these shitty iphone games and COD clones that rule the landscape nowadays the real pinball developers put true love and care into their games. It's a damn shame most of them are now out of business.

Attack from mars and Twlight Zone in particular you can just feel the effort poured into every detail. You walk up to them and know you are on something special. I know because recently my wife offered to drive me three hours to stay with relatives so we could play at the Game Galaxy Arcade in Tennessee. It was the most fun I had gaming in many years. Getting to lost in the zone multiball on a real Twlight Zone after being brutally punished on it was one of the best experiences I've had gaming. Also managing to defeat all the ringmasters in Cirqus Voltaire after a very rough first day of pinball was pretty awesome. Another pinhead was sitting beside me on an Elvira machine and gave me props for it. He seemed a little surprised when I told him it was this was only like the third time ever playing pinball on a real machine since I was a little kid. I also tried to show him how to backhand the ball in between the target and the side of the ringmaster's face like I was now an expert at pinball as I was draining all the balls before I could even trap one to demonstrate.

For me pinball has really rejuvenated my interest in gaming. In that one moment where I watched that final piano shot go in on that Twilight Zone game which pretty much dumped all the adrenaline in my body I was hooked. I could kill a hundred kids in COD in a row and never feel the way I felt during that moment. Even after capturing the wizard mode I was still about 350,000 off from setting a high score on the game. TBH, getting to wizard mode itself was so much fun I honestly wasn't thinking about high score in that moment. I think I was too excited just getting there to care, but I still get to look forward to a lot more challenges and cool stuff pinball has to offer.

Welcome. Tapping the flippers is better than tapping a screen huh?

Next thing you know, you'll be seriously thinking of purchasing one. Then your really and truly hooked.

I wanted one for the basement. Because "hey, it'll be fun to have". Now I have six.

Enjoy!

Ut ohh. Watch out, you get one, then two, they breed like rabbits at my house. Not only is it fun to play real pinball, buy fixing and cleaning them becomes part of the challenge. Buy an older system 11 pin First, just one your first year. Then join a league, better than anything a flat screen can offer.

I was probably one of those "55" year old kids you were demolishing on COD! LOL

I know what you mean. I still enjoy playing console games, but I quit playing multiplayer years ago (unless it was for co-operative play). I agree most of the newer games don't have the "Magic" as some of the classics, but I still get games like Gears of War, Resident Evil, Dead Space, Mortal Kombat, Killzone and the Naughty Dog games. In those games I can tell the developers still care about their games and quality.

But like others said, watch out because before you know it you'll be buying pinball games because you "finally get it" over the hype of pinball fever. It's a new and different game every time and does require good reflexes. Okay, video games and consoles are cheaper than buying a pinball machine, so you got me there. But man, what a fantastic hobby. I met some of my best friends in this hobby and I know you will too. From one Hoosier to another, welcome Sir!

Update:

Fell just short of entering initials last night on Avengers, which kind of sucked cause I thought I was ready. I got a wizard mode, but I was gunning for initials this time. On pinball arcade I was smashing almost every game. For instance Getaway 2, which is pretty fast, furious, and tough to control I got double redline mania and 377 million without ever using nudge. I was actually gearing up to play this game, but my wife was up at the hospital and that arcade was closed by then. The other arcade was open a little later so I went to that one.

I thought I was ready for everything. Fast moving ball, tight shots, didn't matter. What I wasn't prepared for was a bunch of teenage kids right behind me at the pool table running around the arcade screaming so I gotta make note you might have distractions in a place where kids hang out. It wasn't like the other times I went late on a Tuesday night when the place was completely dead.

Long story short, after losing about a quarter every 30 seconds those kids finally left or calmed down or whatever and I'm finally able to focus. I'm 7 million away from entering initials and hulk multiball and an extra ball is right there at the saucer ready to claim. All I gotta do is hit the black widow ramp to drop it in. It deflects and goes straight down the middle.

I was one super jackpot away from vs mode on hulk and four shots away from vs mode on hawkeye.

People are talking about buying machines, but you still can't take away from doing it at the real arcade when you aren't sitting there shooting fish in a barrel in the comfort of your own home and can just keep playing until you win. It's like in the movie The King of Kong where Steve Weebe goes directly to the arcade to put the high score up on the game calling Billy Micheal out and Billy Micheal just turns in a VHS tape. Even after the movie where the high score now is actually on a MAME emulator they separated the scores out because although the mame version is exactly the same down to the last detail it still isn't the real Mccoy. If you ask me the truly official score should be on a real machine in a competition environment just like PAPA, not on a home game in someone's house.

So I might buy a machine to practice on, but entering initials in the actual arcade is how it's done imo.

And @Indypin. There might be a developer or two still trying to make quality games, but it's just like what happened to pinball unfortunately where William's decided to scrap their pinball division and move on to slot machines.

It costs 100 million to make Destiny for instance and it sold for 60 a pop, which is the same price games were selling for in the early nineties and it shipped (not sold, shipped) about 500 million dollars in copies.

Pokemon GO cost 30 million to develop and is already worth 29 billion dollars.

Even the game that took 100 million to develop and made much less money only had about maybe 10 hours of real content in it and probably took years to make with a huge team of artists and everything under the sun.

So even in the case game studios want to make good games you are going to see increasingly less content. But when you look over and these other kind of "games" are making much more money for much less cost and effort that's where the financial incentives are and that's the direction game studios are moving.

Pretty much nailed it with this post. I'm 33 and have been a huge gamer all my life. most of the games you described describe me and my past. Final Fantasy since the original, World of Warcraft, Dark/Demon Souls games, Destiny, and a deep love for the challenge of NES classics. I have a large video game collection with 7 bookshelves of games from Atari up. Been collecting for 25 years. I hit a wall in my gaming world in the last year or so and Pinball magically appeared and sucked me in. I've now sucked a bunch of my friends in as well. Play in the local pinball league and like these other guys thought it would be cool to own a machine so I bought my first and thought I would be happy just adding that to my collection and next to my few arcades.....nope. 6 weeks later a bought a NIB pin. Owning a Pin in the home is a huge luxury item, has made me a much better player as you have mentioned it might, and makes for some wicked fun weekend drinking game nights flipping. Agree the real badassery is still throwing up initials on "on route" pins. But owning and fixing your own is an amazingly rewarding experience as well!