Kickstart Twilight Zone for Pinball Arcade? Please?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

The guys who made Pinball Arcade need $55,000 to license The Twilight Zone for their PC/Mac/Everything-except-360 pinball sim.



A friend of mine says that all pinball newbs think they need The Twilight Zone. It's the #1 rated pin on the Internet Pinball Database. As a pinball newb, I think I need a Twilight Zone. I'm a bit off saving up the 4 or 5 grand it would take to get one, and by "a bit off" I mean "completely off."

So this would be a nice compromise.

I think Bally is insane asking for this much money, but whatever. I also think it will drive several thousand copies of Pinball Arcade.

I am posting this in the hopes that you will JOIN ME. I was thinking that this was really the only possible Kickstarter I'd back in a while, unless Infocom or Level 9 was going to come back together. This'll do, Kickstarter. This'll do.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I will be contacting each of you shortly to see what your goddamn problem is, and why you haven't kickstarted this kickstarter.

[The Happiness Engine]

I hate the fact that I have to make an account and go through all this bullshit when all I want to do is type my credit card in and be billed.

You are just a website for funding cynical empty promises, don't make things difficult.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

OK, that's fine. But there'd otherwise not be a way for you to INTEGRATE with Twitter, Facebook and Digg. I'll give you this one, but I will be expecting some different goddamn answers out of the rest of y-- nobody else is reading this, :(

[Jizaboz]

Dude, Funhouse is sooo much more fun than Twilight Zone.

You've already won.

[ICJ]

I can definitely say that Twilight Zone is more challenging.

[RetroRomper]

I'm playing the second table they put on Kickstarter, Star Trek: The Next Generation and the waves of nostalgia are just washing over me.

Thanks for pointing these guys out, ICJ.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

You are welcome, friend! I have the pinball bug really bad at this point. (There should be an announcement about that next Wednesday.) I have been playing the hell out of The Pinball Arcade on my Android tablet.

(Mostly Black Hole and ST:TNG lately.)

In real life, I got to 23 million on Tron: Legacy at the 1UP. I read the score wrong for a replay. I thought it was 8 million. So you can imagine my surprise when the game ended and I didn't get a credit. The real replay score was 25 million. So mad irl. (I would have stuck around and played some more, but the Rockies game got out and I knew it would take an hour to get home if I didn't book it.)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

They finished The Twilight Zone years ago, and I did get it on my 360. They let you pick two platforms. The other one I chose was the PC.

They said that they tied to my account, but I just checked and, no, TZ isn't there. I emailed their support to see if they can help me.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

They did manage to help me! Which is great because my 360 died. Second one. Love the build quality on those. (It is not completely dead, just dies after a bit of being on.)

[pinback]

How would you define the magic of Pinball Twilight Zone?

[Flack]

It's good until you want to play pinball and then your glasses break and you can no longer see the playfield well enough to play and you are the last person alive. And also you are Burgess Meredith.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I think the magic is that the theme is timeless and it was the high point of the entirety of the industry, from what I've read.

Fresh off the success of the Addams Family - still the best-selling pinball game of all-time - the design team got to do whatever the hell they wanted. They made an oddball game with so much going on. There are invisible magnetic flippers that interact with the ball. There are ceramic balls that don't interact with the magnetic flippers. And the theme will always be cool - even today there are shows ripping off the idea like Black Mirror.

The table itself has become giant, meaty monstrosity and the prices were so through the roof (it was hitting twelve grand at one point) that those who can own it dwindle. I can't justify it. Well, if I got rid of the rest of them maybe. It's also a 90s pinball game that looks better with LED lights which in my opinion not all do.

The Pinball Arcade people did a great job with it. Flip your monitor to the side and it's really fun.

[AArdvark]

I liked the one where William Shatner was playing pinball and a gremlin kept trying to make the machine tilt but nobody believed him. He ended up going back to the T.J Hooker asylum.

THE
SIGNPOST UP AHEAD
AARDVARK

[Ca ob]

I liked the one where William Shatner was playing pinball and a gremlin kept trying to make the machine tilt but nobody believed him. He ended up going back to the T.J Hooker asylum.

THE
SIGNPOST UP AHEAD
AARDVARK

Two great twilight zone jokes in a single thread, I'm voting for Aardvark for 2019 mvp already.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I am going to go ahead and say that my support of this Kickstarter was a mistake.

I think I am up to 3 or 4 times where the table has disappeared on me. Once or twice on PC/Steam and once or twice on the 360. I feel that if I had just bought it normally I wouldn't have these problems. But I have had to contact Farsight at least three times asking what happened to the table. (The other times, when they saw it, they said "check it again" and it was there). But come on. Getting it through Kickstarter made it worse than if I just bought it. And then they lost the rights to it.

Pinball FX (a different game and company than The Pinball Arcade, which is what the Kickstarter was for) on the PS4 has it, so tonight I just decided to buy it through that game. I have the PS4 up more than the 360, so this seemed fine.

[AArdvark]

So you bought...I'm not sure how this works (no google) you have a pinball simulation game and you can buy different tables to play on the simulator, like add-on content. The TZ table sometimes just vanishes while you're playing it, but it's not intentional, it's a glitch.

When the support text says to 'check it again', that makes me think that the actual table progtam is just being streamed to your console, instead of being in the hard drive, is that correct?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

So you bought...I'm not sure how this works (no google)

I will walk with you on this voyage of imagination.

you have a pinball simulation game and you can buy different tables to play on the simulator, like add-on content.

Yes!

The TZ table sometimes just vanishes while you're playing it, but it's not intentional, it's a glitch.

Yes!

When the support text says to 'check it again', that makes me think that the actual table progtam is just being streamed to your console, instead of being in the hard drive, is that correct?

Great point. I think the table is still there on the disk, yeah, but if I had to make a guess as to what is going on, there is some sort of key/value pair or equivalent that says "this account is authorized for this table", but because I was authorized through a Kickstarter campaign, it isn't the standard way they do it. So their pinball launcher gets updated, something fails to get updated with the Kickstarter tables, and it no longer appears as a valid table for my account.

In my line of work with webapps the last decade, I start making many accounts daily in the dev, stage and prod environments as soon as we can, but also as soon as we go into production. Those "older" accounts get used all the time in nightly tests, so that when an incompatibility occurs, the following happens:

QA: "Hey, this test failed."
Dev (using new accounts): "Works on my machine."
QA: "This account is from three years ago. Could that have something to do with it?"
Dev: "Yes." (fixes problem)

What I am saying is that I should get paid to play the Twilight Zone table every night by this company to make sure it still works.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I think this is the 5th failure I've had now, trying to get a TZ table I have paid for to work.

This time, it's PS4 and PinballFX.

I was out of date for the game, PinballFX. It couldn't update itself, because I was out of room on the hard drive. I do not own that many PS4 games. Maybe 12?

So, the thing new that I needed a network update, and what does it do? DISABLE BOUGHT TABLES.

Guys, this is not that hard. Put a UUID on the hard disk for my copy of the table. That I bought. With my money. Tie it to some identifier and PS account of mine. When the game starts, see what UUIDs are there. And DEFAULT IT to being enabled if I am out of date by a revision and it was already enabled. Christ. The update was 600MB. If I had taken this thing to a remote location, I would have had to wait hours for the dumb thing to let me play the table I bought. I'd rather just pirate this shit.

It is honestly just easier to go buy a real Twilight Zone pinball machine than deal with this horseshit, so I will do that.

[Jizaboz]

Best emulated version of a lot of these old pinball games was accomplished in PinMAME with virtual pinball table layouts lol

These new "pinball apps" fucking suck.