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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmmagnetic" data-source="post: 24770" data-attributes="member: 558">I really love when the playfield art shows an actual place, with stairs, corridors and such, where it feels like you´re looking at and interacting with a specific little microcosm. A lot of tables from that era had this type of design, and it´s one of these touches I like the most about pinball. The only TPA example for this is Taxi, where you look at the roads and cars from above, and feel like your ball is the taxi you´re driving to pick up passengers. On this machine here it looks like you´re actually fighting through a dungeon, and the playfield is designed like that! Or, take Cyclone for example, where your ball is a visitor on a gigantic fairground. In High Speed / II your little silver ball is a car on a wild chase. And what was the name of that table where you´re firing a big cannon? It had little knights on it and lots of red bricks everywhere.On a lot of modern machines I´m always aware that I´m "just" hitting ramps and shooting stuff. They invested a lot of time and care into DMD animations, sound clips and modes... but then just put some random playfield art on top of it without actually trying to incorporate the structure of the playfield itself. To me it feels like that era between the late 80s and early 90s was where pinball design was at its most creative and playful, though I´m really not qualified to really have a solid viewpoint on this (I´m only into pinball since a few months and only played a handful of real machines), but it looks like that to me.So yeah, I´m 100% behind that table. And I absolutely agree with your viewpoint that TPA isn´t and shouldn´t be about just the so-called best machines ever - charts and ranking are never a good indicator of what´s actually interesting. For example, the other day I was shooting castle after castle in MM, trapping, shooting, nudging, trapping, shooting, nudging, and after a while it got incredibly boring. CV is a very one-trick pony as well. Sorry, but while the presentation of these tables is indeed top-notch, the actual playfield design feels like it only takes advantage of a fraction of what pinball is capable of. The actual scoring might be very interesting to veteran players, challenging and deep, but Swords Of Fury looks way more interesting to me. I´m sure many players will disagree, but to me, pinball isn´t mostly about challenge, it´s about interesting playfields, kinetics that feel good, and great design and atmosphere. If I just wanted pure challenge I´d be playing Tetris The Grandmaster with invisible blocks instead. (Sorry, I got into a little side-rant here... carry on <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" />)</blockquote>

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