High Speed impressions

[Deltaechoe]

Great table with lots of bricks XD

 

[Shaneus]

I play mostly on Android and was geting my head done in by this last night as well.

The same plunge strength would produce different results ball to ball and player to player. I didn't even know if the ball would be going up the ramp or slamming into a post on the plunge.

Glad I'm not alone on that one. Even found that when quitting the table (but not the game) and going back into it made a difference. I'm really baffled by it.

Perhaps if FS somehow was able to make the ramp shot as tricky to do as the one in BK2K, this would put up the challenge people are looking for. For that matter, upping the difficulty in ramp shots might also be the elixir for TZ.

Yeah, but I don't know where the increased difficulty should come from, whether it's flipper strength, tighter ramp entry or both. For instance, several times (not in the same game) the ball went up the ramp and into the hideout spots by banking it from the rightmost red light target. No machine setup could possibly allow that kind of action... so maybe ramp steepness (as a variable, not as a graphical thing) needs to be increased. Would account for (apparent, I guess) upper-flipper power and seemingly easily landed shots.

But doesn't account for the times when a full plunge barely makes it around the ramp, though.

Discussing pinball preferences is like discussing who goes into a hall of fame. It's all subjective data. "High Speed" is a fast, fun, fairly easy game. More than a few people wanted it, because here it is. I'll leave it at that, I'm not gonna try to caahnge your mind if you don't like it. Now, back to runnin' red lights...

Subjective to a point. I'd have no problem if the virtual table was setup (not in rules but in physical setup like angles and such) to be easier than usual, but when seeing scores on the leaderboards 10 times that of my best score on my own machine, something definitely needs to be tweaked to bring it more into line with real-life scores. You may say it's easy because it's easy in TPA. But seeing scores 5 times what a professional would get on a real-life table after only a few games means that something's not quite right. Scores we're seeing in HS now should only be achievable by those who can pull off the nearly-impossible, like completing LitZ or Atlantis multiple times in one game of TZ/RBION respectively.

So yeah, it's a fast and fun game, but only the TPA version is easy. In reality, High Speed is legitimately one of the hardest games you'll play.

 

[Zaphod77]

Once again, they have too easy to handle kickouts. Catch or dead pass them safely every time so you get to pick your lower left flipper to trap them after every single ramp shot. this lets you just repeat kicker to ramp all day long. just two freeways to light the spinners and boom.

Both the dead pass and the catch should have a chance to fail to control the ball.

 

[DrainoBraino]

This table looks great. Wish it played better. It's too bad that the physics are going more floaty on the last few tables. FS is heading in the wrong direction with whatever they're trying to do with the physics.

 

[Shaneus]

Once again, they have too easy to handle kickouts. Catch or dead pass them safely every time so you get to pick your lower left flipper to trap them after every single ramp shot. this lets you just repeat kicker to ramp all day long. just two freeways to light the spinners and boom.

Both the dead pass and the catch should have a chance to fail to control the ball.

Agreed. Should be more dangerous.

 

[Zaphod77]

Who dunnit is really supposed to be that floaty.

From what i've played on the demo for android, i feel that they dropped the ball somewhat here. Here is how I would have personally tuned the kickouts.

For the hold trap, i would have the ball sometimes trip the slingshot, and thus require nudging to stop the outlane drain from that.

And have it so sometimes the dead pass struck the bottom slingshot post, so trying to catch it after then would have it trickle off the edge of the flipper, again requiring nudging or a flip on the fly to handle it.

Trapping feels like cheating in TPA because it's much easier to do then it is in real life.

 

[vikingerik]

I kind of agree with weirdingway's sentiment. High Speed hasn't aged as well as we thought. It's not so exciting after all given that Getaway does pretty much everything better. High Speed was a spectacular landmark for its time and practically invented flow and did invent jackpots, but other games have since vastly improved on that formula.

But I'm still glad TPA did it, it's worthy of a slot in the season lineup, and as others have said Farsight's conversion is very well done indeed (except for the weird bounces up the ramp from the lower flippers which should never happen; probably this means the flippers are too strong, same as Pinbot.) And they had to do High Speed before Getaway or else HS would go completely overlooked.

 

[Shaneus]

The physical machine itself has aged incredibly well. It's just the virtual one allows for easier nudging (my home machine is a ***** to try and get a good shove on) and the ball gets too much speed along some of the ramps/lanes. I've even had a case where the ball went so fast it went up the inlane of the right flipper and into the upper ramp shot. There's no way that's even close to possible IRL.

I suspect some surfaces might be too slick or frictionless in the game to make it a more realistic challenge. And yeah, the hideout kickouts are definitely far too easy for ball trapping. The upper flipper is *way* too powerful, too... a mistimed shot on a real machine would mean the ball only goes part-way up the upper ramp, but the virtual version means if you hit the ramp regardless of angle, you'll pretty much always make it.

 

[kinggo]

but the virtual version means if you hit the ramp regardless of angle, you'll pretty much always make it.

well, no. Not any more. It was like this in beta for android. Any hit with upper flipper was successful ramp shot. But now it's not like that any more, it's much harder. Still easy, but not so ridiculous like before.

 

[superballs]

Yeah i have plenty of failed shots at it now where it rolls back down, but I hope in HS2 they tweak that, the lock is pretty difficult from the upper flipper on almost any machine I've ever played on.

 

[Shaneus]

Yeah i have plenty of failed shots at it now where it rolls back down, but I hope in HS2 they tweak that, the lock is pretty difficult from the upper flipper on almost any machine I've ever played on.

As it should be! That's where the difficulty of the machine is. You make that shot easy, you make the entire table easy (which is why there's a 70m+ score on PC for HS).

I think I mentioned it earlier, but I'm not sure how they can go about making the table score more like a real machine... it does need to be done, though. Some areas just carry far too much speed into them (and yeah, I think the upper flipper shot is one of them, doesn't require enough precision, at least on the PC version).

 

[Kaoru]

It's an alright table, I guess. But really, this extra flipper issue that's been plaguing the game since day one (which would be frickin' two years) finally needs to be resolved. In 6 out of 10 times the ball either goes right through the flipper or acts as if it's been tipped by a feather. I miss out so many jackpot shots due to this bug (and not just on this very table) it's not even funny.

 

[W1LDD ONE]

Boring and I no longer play it.
First bad choice for this Season 3 pack.

 

[mmmagnetic]

I really love it, I´m even surprised how much I`m enjoying it.

I consider myself a pretty mediocre player, but I just counter-stopped it and went right up to 14mil - my second best is a meager 5mil, and the other ones are just the preset scores. I have no idea how I did that, to be honest. I also was surprised that it doesn´t record scores higher than 9.999.999 - I had to make a screenshot with the overflow number still on the display to keep it.

I usually have the problem with some of those orbit shots in Steve Ritchie games being very narrow - Star Trek still really infuriates me because I miss the orbit short 9 times out of 10, messing up the warp shots. Terminator is the same for me, so I´m surprised that the one on High Speed is a bit more forgiving.

I was a bit torn on the "music" at first, but it has a really powerful, tribal feeling to it, especially during the jackpots and extra ball, where it sounds like a toddler slamming some mi-80s Casio keyboard with a hammer It´s pretty annoying and very cool at the same time.

I´m starting to really enjoy the late 80s/ early 90s-style tables, no annoying DMD cutscenes, no dumb video modes, just pure flipping, even if it is indeed a rather simple affair.

 

[Shaneus]

I consider myself a pretty mediocre player, but I just counter-stopped it and went right up to 14mil - my second best is a meager 5mil, and the other ones are just the preset scores. I have no idea how I did that, to be honest. I also was surprised that it doesn´t record scores higher than 9.999.999 - I had to make a screenshot with the overflow number still on the display to keep it.

Trust me, that's nowhere near what you'd get on a real machine. On my own (which I admit, is setup pretty steep and no carryover kickback) my highest score is 5.5mil. I don't think you'd ever find one on location that's rolled over past 10mil, unless it's setup incredibly easy and has extra balls coming out the wazoo (which is one complained I have on the TPA one... there's an extra ball score which IMO breaks it a little).

I´m starting to really enjoy the late 80s/ early 90s-style tables, no annoying DMD cutscenes, no dumb video modes, just pure flipping, even if it is indeed a rather simple affair.

The more people I see with this point of view, the happier I am

 

[mmmagnetic]

Trust me, that's nowhere near what you'd get on a real machine. On my own (which I admit, is setup pretty steep and no carryover kickback) my highest score is 5.5mil. I don't think you'd ever find one on location that's rolled over past 10mil, unless it's setup incredibly easy and has extra balls coming out the wazoo (which is one complained I have on the TPA one... there's an extra ball score which IMO breaks it a little).

Yeah, the TPA renditions are just very predictable by nature. As many here mentioned already, the eject hole drops the ball into a guaranteed trap every single time!

The more people I see with this point of view, the happier I am

It´s definitely an aquired taste! When I initially started playing TPA I was mostly drawn in by the flashy DMD tables. It took me quite a while to even be fully mindful of where shots are going, how a table actually flows, figuring out strategies and all that. Generally I´m much more fascinated by the inherent challenges and "paths" through the table coming from the pure table geometry rather than complicated mode-stacking and stuff like that.

I really began appreciating tables like this when I started watching all those videos on the PAPA site, those gave me a whole new view on those older machines. I think it´s a shame that some people won´t even give old machines a second chance - there´s so much raw power in them.

 

[Zaphod77]

Yeah, score extra ball completely breaks the table. One for initial replay score, one for rolling the table. repeatable.

Nearly all games of this vintage have the same issue with score extra balls. If you can roll the table you can play forever.

 

[kinggo]

well, rolling the table on mobile platforms is everything but something that will make it possible to play forever. It's doable but I didn't make it yet.

 

[vikingerik]

Pinbot does the same thing, re-award the replay special EB every time you roll over to a score of X2,000,000. So does Taxi, but a rollover at 100M is a monumental task on that table. I haven't found any others that do this in TPA.

 

[Zaphod77]

High Speed not only gives you one for the rollover but also lets you recollect the first replay after. so every 10 million you get TWO extra balls.