Legacy Fun, Modern Issues – Pinball Arcade Review

Note: this is a 4 star app, but unfortunately on my new iPhone 12 mini, It’s borderline unplayable. — There’s a history to this one. Once home to some of the greatest pinball tables of all time when they had the Bally/Williams license, and now home to just some pretty decent to good tables under the Stern license - TPA was not only the sole option for licensed VIrtual Pinball operation, but was a pretty decent one at that. Over time, however, they lost their lustre with a frame locked physics engine, on rails physics shots, and an aging set of graphic options as more competitors (namely, zen) came to the forefront of virtual pinball recreation. The loss of the Williams license was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but there are indeed still some decent tables here, presented with a price model that, while expensive, is fair and straight forward. All that being said, there is a level of “give credit where credit is due” with Farsight Studios. If they hadn’t beaten the Virtual Pinball recreation drum for so long and pushed into all these different places, I don’t know if there would be much of a push to recreate legacy pins in a commercial environment at all. They literally created and maintained a small portion of a dying niche industry and made it accessible to a lot of folks. And they deserve many props for that.
Review by Zodzilla on Pinball Arcade.