![]() ![]() Hitting a ball into a particular zone rather than one that’s five degrees to the right in order to bash a monster means I’m often heading off to the shop to sell a spare helm or breastplate in the middle of a fight. Two things crushed the RPG elements of the experience for me. It’s a marvelous solution to the frustration one usually feels when one fails to beat a previous high score by a small margin. Neither this persistence, nor the display of items on the character, would be possible on a physical pinball machine. As your level rises, your opponents become more challenging and your score follows. Even better, your experience and items accrue, not only during a single game, but stay for later games. ![]() Epic Quest offers players very few such situations. I was delighted to feel as though the table wasn’t specifically designed to make unhittable balls common-when you’re concerned about making sure people can make money off your pinball machine, you have an incentive to give people as little as possible for their money without going quite so far as to prevent them from playing again. I’ve read that this is a relatively easy table, and I believe it-one of the absolute joys of giving pinball this second chance after so long has been the discovery that the pressures on a developer for a home video game are very different from those on a designer of physical tables. The whole table is bright and humorously illustrated, but the small puppet theater which heralds the debut of some new monsters has a distinct charm, with a rustic wood appearance which suits the generic medieval setting. The low fidelity of some of the beeps helps keep the repetitiveness in perspective, helping it seem more like part of the developers’ devotion to their subject than laziness. Though the comments are, in some cases, funny enough to stand up to repetition better than many video game quips (I was particularly tickled by, “Bats? Your blindness doesn’t scare me!”), pinball tables have never specialized in overwhelming variety. The visuals and sounds do an excellent job of reminding the player of traditional pinball tables. The RPG elements of the Epic Quest table for Pinball FX 2 were enough to pique my interest and show me that pinball has a great deal more to offer than I remembered. I’ve long been interested in games which integrally embed one type of game inside another (the Puzzle Quest series and Quarrel are good recent examples, but the idea goes back at least to Archon). Because you only stayed as long as your quarters held out, I always found pinball an anxious exercise in keeping your ball in play while studiously ignoring anything that might distract you from your flippers, including everything that lent the game a degree of strategy. I haven’t played pinball in probably twenty years, so for me it still evokes memories of going to an actual arcade. Two questions capture the differing perspectives I hold on the Epic Quest board for Pinball FX 2: Wouldn’t it be great if every game of pinball game you played contributed to higher scores and more interesting experiences in later games? Have you ever wanted the execution of your decisions in an RPG to be dependent on your dexterity with an unrelated task? ![]() A dash of RPG adds zest and longevity to Pinball. ![]()
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