iOS v1.1.2 changes

[Dylan_h]

After the 1.1.2 update today CV wouldn't get past 3 seconds before a crash on my iPad 3. I've now rolled back to 1.1.1 guess I'll have to deal with the multiball plunger problem for a little longer.

 

[Jeff Strong]

After the 1.1.2 update today CV wouldn't get past 3 seconds before a crash on my iPad 3. I've now rolled back to 1.1.1 guess I'll have to deal with the multiball plunger problem for a little longer.

Try completely uninstalling and then redownloading the app. That seems to work for most people.

 

[Jay]

For me, CV is a much tougher table now. I don't recall ever losing a ball down one of the outlanes before. But in the new version, they drained pretty quickly. I'm glad that the second redundant display is gone now.

 

[Peter NYC]

I see the flippers on Medieval Madness have not yet been fixed (they are too far apart). If I recall correctly, I thought the developers acknowledged this problem, but more recent tables with less substantial problems seem to have gotten priority over this.

 

[Freep]

Try completely uninstalling and then redownloading the app. That seems to work for most people.

This was recommended earlier but 3 times trying this has changed nothing for me on my iPhone 4. I (stupidly) updated both in iTunes and on my device. Is there any way I can roll back to 1.1.1? I don't think so...

 

[Dylan_h]

Thanks for the reply but I re-installed 3 times and it didn't seem to fix the problem.

 

[Fungi]

When it comes to basic video game design, when given the choice between realism and fun, always choose fun. This usually applies to shooters. I mean, who wants the reload animation to really last as long as it does in real life, but I digress. Point being, I appreciate the attempt at TPA being as realistic as possible, but the new drain heavy outlanes on CV have ruined the game for me. I can't play a ball for longer than a minute now. Sure, I should practice, but you know what? I won't practice what I don't like, and I no longer like CV.

Am I just being a sore loser here, or are the outlanes excessively drain happy?

 

[Jeff Strong]

When it comes to basic video game design, when given the choice between realism and fun, always choose fun. This usually applies to shooters. I mean, who wants the reload animation to really last as long as it does in real life, but I digress. Point being, I appreciate the attempt at TPA being as realistic as possible, but the new drain heavy outlanes on CV have ruined the game for me. I can't play a ball for longer than a minute now. Sure, I should practice, but you know what? I won't practice what I don't like, and I no longer like CV.

Am I just being a sore loser here, or are the outlanes excessively drain happy?

I see what you're saying....but the outlanes were extremely too forgiving before, and since Farsight is going for a realistic simulation, they had to make the adjustment....

People were complaining about the table being too easy before, so I guess it's hard to please everybody all the time, but Farsight has to stay true to their mission of accurately recreating the real tables, so in his case it was a step in the right direction.

 

[IdontHave50cents]

They did not fix the Funhouse overlapping music tracks problem. It sounds like there 's 3 tracks over playing each other. It only happens when my score gets above 17M or so. It's so annoying to the point where I can't play it with the sound on.

 

[Patrick]

I think (i hope) FS will improve this postprocessing option. Why releasing unusable patch? Framerate divided by 4, colors gone away...
I Thank FS for his work anyway.

Medieval madness lights haven't been fixed :-(

 

[mmmagnetic]

When it comes to basic video game design, when given the choice between realism and fun, always choose fun. This usually applies to shooters. I mean, who wants the reload animation to really last as long as it does in real life, but I digress. Point being, I appreciate the attempt at TPA being as realistic as possible, but the new drain heavy outlanes on CV have ruined the game for me. I can't play a ball for longer than a minute now. Sure, I should practice, but you know what? I won't practice what I don't like, and I no longer like CV.

Am I just being a sore loser here, or are the outlanes excessively drain happy?

You know, this really got me thinking...

In many genres there are discussion about what is "authentic" and what´s not, often intertwined with discussions about what´s fun and what´s not.

Take racing sims for example: Some have a rewind feature, where after a crash or a bad corner you can just rewind and try again. Now, some people say: "Well, that´s not realistic at all! You can´t just rewind in real life either." For these people, the constant looming threat of a fatal crash adds to the excitement of the game. Others just had a hard day at work, want to relax a bit with their racing sim videogame, and after doing great for 19 laps their cat jumps in their face and the race is over.

I`m really new to pinball in general. I started with Zen Pinball on my 3DS and then moved up to TPA on my iPad (quite a big jump!). I absolutely love the dynamics of these tables - long looping shots, trapping the ball, aiming, deadpassing, multiball juggling... but I hate outlane drains. I always have the feeling I got them through no fault of my own (which probably isn´t really true, but at this stage I´m just not experiences enough to always remember that shooting the ball at such and such angle here and there might result in it bouncing off the slingshots and straight into the outlane).

The tables I enjoyed the most on TPA so far are the ones where I can keep the ball going for at least a reasonable amount of time - Funhouse, RBION, (pre-update) CV or ToM (thanks, Magnasave!). In contrast, I really love to get more time with TotAN (it looks so gorgeous!), but for some reason the game just hates me and I get outlane drains all the time.

Now, maybe that´s realistic, I wouldn´t doubt it. I´ve been playing a lot of shootemups in the past, another arcade game genre. I know these games can be over extremely fast if you´re not careful. But when I take a little break from work, sit down with TPA and the first three balls end after a minute due to the ball just racing to the outlanes it can get quite frustrating. Arcade operators surely love to see that the average novice player is done with his or her credit after just a couple of minutes (pro players obviously can get going way longer, but I bet that even during the heydays of pinball these were rare enough to not be a threat to the arcade owners bottom line), but I´m not at an arcade, nobody is making more money because I drain more often.

So, this is already getting much longer than I planned, so how about this:

Add a baby mode.

Let me choose to just seal these outlanes shut. Will this make the tables almost stupidly easy? Probably. Experienced players won´t touch that with a ten foot pole. But it would give novice players like me a chance to concentrate on the table objectives, on the actual flipper techniques, and not worry about the outlane drains all the time. Add a seperate score board, or maybe only do local scorekeeping, I wouldn´t mind. I´m no programmer, but I can´t imagine this being anything tough to do, and it would be just another feature that pro players can happily ignore.
I mean, it´s even worse on iOS where I just completely ignore nudging because by the time I shook my iPad or do whatever weird swipes the game wants me to do, the ball is already gone.

In the end, as much as TPA is a simulation, it´s also a videogame - it´s always good to have options. I´m fully willing to learn to play pinball properly, so far it´s been a blast, and doing loop combos on ToM or nailing shots in RBION or Funhouse is such a great feeling, but having a baby mode (easy mode, novice mode, whatever you wanna call it) option would be great for some more relaxed rounds of pinball. And as I said, veterans could completely ignore it.

 

[Jay]

For restoring an older version: when you update an app, the old version is automatically dumped into the trash. If you haven't emptied your trash, go to your iTunes folder; you can find the new version of the app in a folder there. Delete it, and drag the old version from the trash back into your iTunes folder. Then re-sync.

 

[Kevlar]

@mmmagnetic, I definately agree with a lot of what you say, the outlanes kill me. What always astounds me is reading something like ' Black Hole is the largest grossing table of all time ' or something like that, when to me its so brutal there is no way I would have put more than one credit in it. I'm amazed anyone other than a really good player very adept at nudging was willing to shovel money into it, especially as it was the game that brought in a price increase per credit, as I understand.

 

[Jay]

They did not fix the Funhouse overlapping music tracks problem.

On my iPad it seems much better than before, but something new is happening: on Funhouse and CV, there's another music track playing very faintly in the background. There also seem to be more drop-outs, where the main music track suddenly becomes faint. Hitting a target will usually restore it.

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

When it comes to basic video game design, when given the choice between realism and fun, always choose fun. This usually applies to shooters. I mean, who wants the reload animation to really last as long as it does in real life, but I digress. Point being, I appreciate the attempt at TPA being as realistic as possible, but the new drain heavy outlanes on CV have ruined the game for me. I can't play a ball for longer than a minute now. Sure, I should practice, but you know what? I won't practice what I don't like, and I no longer like CV.

Am I just being a sore loser here, or are the outlanes excessively drain happy?

They're now about where they would be on a real machine. The ones before were almost completely closed, so people with no prior experience with CV were making it to the wizard mode on ball 1. While CV's wizard mode is very accessible (compared to something like MM's Battle for the Kingdom), this was a bit much.

CV's outlanes are still a lot less hungry than TotAN's or Ripley's. Also, there's a lot of rubber in the outlanes and you have a liberal tilt, so even semi-random nudging (the only kind possible on iOS right now) will usually get the ball out of danger.

If you have one of the consoles, you might also give CV another go once it's finally released there. While I enjoy the iOS version, the lack of precise nudging and physical buttons limits my high scores to about one-fifth of what I can do on the console (which is why MM/BoP/CV/FH got "reset" to 00 in my signature). The way I see it, the mobile versions are for a quick 5- or 10-minute game on the go, whereas the consoles are for more serious play.

(a long discussion on the merits of fun vs. accuracy in simulations)

One part of me would say something along the lines of "back in my day, we didn't have TPA and we had to spend 50 cents a game to practice our pinball on poorly-maintained tables with evil tilts and on machines with no ball savers and wide-open outlanes, while walking in the snow uphill both ways to the arcade, blah blah blah." The other part of me says "why should I care whether someone else learns to play pinball properly or not?"

This is why I hope FarSight decides to go ahead with the operator's menu (and it sounds like they're at least going to attempt the experiment with TZ) on all tables, along with adjustable physical features (outlane posts, tilt sensitivity, etc.). Novices/casual players can have their fun without the obligation to learn the finer points of the game while more experienced players can go with the default settings or harder. I do think table goals/achievements/high scores should be disabled unless the table is at least in its default configuration, though.

@mmmagnetic, I definately agree with a lot of what you say, the outlanes kill me. What always astounds me is reading something like ' Black Hole is the largest grossing table of all time ' or something like that, when to me its so brutal there is no way I would have put more than one credit in it. I'm amazed anyone other than a really good player very adept at nudging was willing to shovel money into it, especially as it was the game that brought in a price increase per credit, as I understand.

Try playing it now that the gate stays open properly on the lower level. It should be considerably easier now.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

@mmmagnetic, I definately agree with a lot of what you say, the outlanes kill me. What always astounds me is reading something like ' Black Hole is the largest grossing table of all time ' or something like that, when to me its so brutal there is no way I would have put more than one credit in it.

From the old electromechanical games I've played, I get the impression that most of the tables of the EM era tended to be real drain monsters by modern standards. The expectations engendered by that carried over to the early solid-state era, and you can see it in games like Gorgar and Black Hole. People didn't expect to be able to play for a long time unless they were wizards.

If you want to see a really brutal one, play Jive Time, the 1970 EM game in PHoF: Williams Collection. The outlanes are like the Grand Canyon. There's a shot that just closes up one of them, and it's a relief while it's happening.

 

[mmmagnetic]

Serenseven, I too like the idea of the operators menu, even if they just make presets (if that helps keeping out gamestopping bugs). And yeah, I assume I will get better at pinball so that the outlane drains won't bother me as much I would love if we even could set other things like rubber strenght on the flippers and stuff like that, just out of curiosity!

Oh, and Black Hole is definitely easier now that the lower screen gate isn't so brutal anymore. Closing thr gates via the bumper always seemed unreasonably sadistic to me, even by oldschool pinball standards... I'm glad that this wasn't actually a part of the original design!

I have to add that I might have whined about outlanes a bit too much - they certainly are part of pinballs design history, maybe it wouldn't bother me so much if nudging would work reliably on iOS. And as a lover of bullet hell games I'm certainly used to punishment

 

[Fungi]

so people with no prior experience with CV were making it to the wizard mode on ball 1..

Hey! That's what happened to me! I never even got to see what the goals were before I opened up the Wizard goals. I still had fun though, and played CV 80% of the time. Now with the more accurate outlanes, I'm done. They may be more real, but they're vicious. The fun is gone. Having fun is kinda the reason I drop money into this.

 

[Heretic]

About outlanes, op menus and pinballin skills...

I got very little chance to play real pinball as a kid so this is almost like another chance lol.

Last couple of years ive become so jaded with games that i can barely play my favourites most of the time.

Suddenly a couple o months ago i was stalking jeff minter after the release of gridrunner and he happened to mention playing rbion so im like oh that novel.

2 months later im still not very good, but i have bought all tables with an it hankerin for more and put at least a good hour into the thing a day.

(directed at bop) come on baby light my fire etc lol

Anyway what im getting at is for presets the game SHOULD kick our arses tbh unless weve put in as much time as some here , we are babys from the womb. And i for one like our shiney new if unforgiving overlords lol.

Id love an options to mess around but whatever TPA is tickling i dnt want it to stop.

Talk about special when lit

Signed

A very happy former videogame player

Not that i would object to the option of course .

Rambling

While true accuracy may make some things a living hell, i guess what im saying is its been a fun ride.

Without the risk of drops etc it may be less frustrating but we loose the thrill of a billion in bop or kickin a dragons arse etc

 

[Freep]

Thanks for the reply but I re-installed 3 times and it didn't seem to fix the problem.

After several attempts reinstalling 1.1.2, I also tried rolling back to 1.1.1. The problem with CV crashing right away persists. I assume it's because while the app is a different version, the tables downloaded are still the same? (IE. Funhouse has a blue interior on both software versions now.) So, Table of the Month version of CV still crashing on iPhone 4, iOS 5.1.1 after all all efforts. :/