TZ: Too easy = fail

[Sean DonCarlos]

Nudging strength (how hard you can nudge the table--in a virtual simulation a nudge is the same strength every time whereas on a real machine you can nudge as soft or hard as you need to, depending on how sensitive the tilt on the machine is set!)

The console versions (and the PC beta if played with a 360 controller) have variable nudging, depending on how far you move the analog stick.

Flipper control: You just can't do the same kinds of flipper maneuvers on TPA as you can on a real machine, e.g., live catches, etc...

Agreed, which is why I'm not insisting the tables be returned all the way to their physical counterparts' difficulty.

Also, I've seen a few machines that have more upper flipper control than a virtual button allows. Often a machine with an upper right flipper will have a flipper button that will flip both flippers if pushed all the way in, but will only release the solenoid on the main lower flipper if you release it fully. In other words, you can partially release the button and activate the solenoid on the upper flipper while keeping the main lower flipper up. This allows you to cradle a ball in the main lower flipper while still giving you full control of the upper flipper at the same time. I've never seen this kind of control in a virtual simulation.

The PS3 version has 2-stage flippers (which most people, incidentally, don't seem to like). The 360 hasn't had an update since before the 2-stage functionality was released. I'll have to try it on the PC beta; while the real TZ has 2-stage flippers, I don't use them and I forgot to test.

 

[151120]

Thanks for the info Sean. I've only played the iOS version on my iPhone 4, which only allows touch screen control (well, nudging by shaking, but not very effectively IMO). I'll have to get a PS3 eventually and check out TPA with more controls!

 

[trachea]

Hasn't this been discussed multiple times before? The digital versions are intentionally made easier... even at the recommendation of the original table creators. The whole reason they are made so difficult in the first place is to get people to pump quarters into them. The digital versions don't have to create income (beyond the initial purchase) which means there's no reason to make them prohibitively difficult. This appeases the casual player and allows more players to reach some of the more difficult game modes (which the creators want people to see).

I agree it would be neat to have a mode more accurately representing the difficulty of a real table, but it's probably not high on the priority list right now. A willingness to pay for it might turn a few heads though. Sadly, the small but vocal minority doesn't always get their way.

 

[tcvpin]

The PS3 version has 2-stage flippers (which most people, incidentally, don't seem to like).

How does the PS3 implement 2-stage? Two distinct buttons like L2/L1?

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

Hasn't this been discussed multiple times before? The digital versions are intentionally made easier... even at the recommendation of the original table creators.

It has, back when Bobby King first revealed in an interview (with WGN, I think) that the tables were altered. But the alterations were relatively moderate: reaching Atlantis on RBION or Battle for the Kingdom on MM is still challenging for most players. I was OK with this, and I think most others were either fine with it or at least grudgingly accepting of the need to accommodate casual players.

This latest uproar happened when Twilight Zone, one of the hardest physical tables, arrived and we discovered it's incredibly easy, to the point where people who had never played a TZ before were reaching Lost in the Zone on their fifth or sixth game. For comparison, I have reached LITZ three times in 1000+ games on the real table. It's fine to say that LITZ should not be as hard to reach as on a physical TZ, and I agree, but it should take more than 6 games for a complete novice to the table to reach its wizard mode.

I have a suggestion going on the general discussion forum on a relatively easy way FarSight could create more challenging versions of the tables without significantly impacting their workload or affecting the current tables, assuming I'm understanding correctly how the tuning process works.

Sadly, the small but vocal minority doesn't always get their way.

Perhaps. But a small and silent minority never will.

How does the PS3 implement 2-stage? Two distinct buttons like L2/L1?

The PS3 controller has analog buttons, so there's a threshold for triggering the lower flipper and a second higher threshold for triggering the upper one.

 

[Gus Smedstad]

The whole reason they are made so difficult in the first place is to get people to pump quarters into them. The digital versions don't have to create income (beyond the initial purchase) which means there's no reason to make them prohibitively difficult.

This.

I've lost my taste for the arcade games of my teenage years, mainly because they're geared toward maximizing income, not player enjoyment. I've never encountered a physical copy of The Twilight Zone, and I suspect that if I encountered one, I'd be so turned off by the painful experience that I'd never learn how interesting the table can be.

 

[Jeff Strong]

I see your point, but many of us who are used to real pinball want the same challenge and shorter games that we're accustomed to, which a harder difficulty would provide, but only as a separate option...no one would be forced to play that way if they didn't want to. As it is now, those of us who want more of a challenge have no such option.

I personally find it unfortunate that video games in general aren't as challenging as they once were, but I live with it as long as there are difficulty options. My main complaint with Zen is that it's too watered down compared to real pinball, with no difficulty options whatsover. So I'd like to see TPA provide an experience that's as close to the real thing as possible, and yet still have an easier mode for those who want that style of play.

 

[brakel]

I see your point, but many of us who are used to real pinball want the same challenge and shorter games that we're accustomed to, which a harder difficulty would provide, but only as a separate option...no one would be forced to play that way if they didn't want to. As it is now, those of us who want more of a challenge have no such option.

I personally find it unfortunate that video games in general aren't as challenging as they once were, but I live with it as long as there are difficulty options. My main complaint with Zen is that it's too watered down compared to real pinball, with no difficulty options whatsover. So I'd like to see TPA provide an experience that's as close to the real thing as possible, and yet still have an easier mode for those who want that style of play.

Now just to get FS' attention on this...

 

[Matt McIrvin]

I've lost my taste for the arcade games of my teenage years, mainly because they're geared toward maximizing income, not player enjoyment. I've never encountered a physical copy of The Twilight Zone, and I suspect that if I encountered one, I'd be so turned off by the painful experience that I'd never learn how interesting the table can be.

Even in those days, it was common for home console versions of arcade videogames to be quite intentionally easier than their coin-op counterparts.

But high difficulty and consequent short game time can also be addicting. It's the old random reward that I've mentioned earlier: if you train a pigeon to peck at a bar to get some food, you can make that pigeon work much harder by only giving it the food some of the time, at random intervals. Something about that tickles a deep "try it one more time" impulse in the mammalian brain, or evidently the bird brain. (AKA the principle of Vegas slots.)

 

[Hinph]

Scared Stiff is one of my favorite tables... I love it... I play it each and every time I go to the pinball museum.

The digital version? "Not bad" is all I can say. It doesn't have the same hook because it is so easy. Something is always more rewarding if you have had to work for it a little... life fact. In real life, I feel a rush of excitement when I get to the point of filling up the stiff-o-meter. In the digital version, that happens multiple times each game and becomes more of a mundane chore than exciting fun.

So if Farsight can retune the physics and offer a more challenging mode, I will pay for it. The developer will get more money, players will get more satisfaction, everybody is happy... well, except the people on Facebook. Nothing pleases that lot. Haha.

 

[Nik Barbour]

So if Farsight can retune the physics and offer a more challenging mode, I will pay for it.

I would also!

If I'm playing during the working week, it's on my dinner break via Android phone, and the break is only 40mins long.
Most of the DMD tables, one game will not get finished in that time, after a bit of practice, so I tend to play the quicker older more brutal games, like BS, BK, Gorgar.

Even at home on the weekends, I play TPA on an xbox.
I was playing FH recently and it was so easy (and I'm not a good player) and with so many extra balls, one game took an hour - I actually got bored and was glad it finished. Yet the real table I averaged about 5mins per game, in the handful of games I got.

It was someone else's suggestion - but if a harder version was selectable in the optional 'Pro' packs, I'd buy every one going!

 

[Hinph]

That was my idea.

I think it is a good one. I don't see myself paying for the Pro versions of many of the tables as of now, but I sure would if they featured Pro Physics that could be toggled on or off. See, and they don't even have to pay me for these great ideas!

 

[Nik Barbour]

That was my idea.

I think it is a good one. I don't see myself paying for the Pro versions of many of the tables as of now, but I sure would if they featured Pro Physics that could be toggled on or off. See, and they don't even have to pay me for these great ideas!

Excellent idea it was too!

I currently own 2 of the 3 available pro tables, and apart from STTNG I probably won't buy any others.
But if a harder difficulty was available within them, I'd buy them all twice (xbox & Android).

 

[Sumez]

The fact that "unpredictable" physics are difficult to simulate definitely plays a huge factor in this. A simulated table would NEVER be as "random" as a real table, and one might argue that it shouldn't.

Another thing is the basic engineering of the table. There's a lot of genious at work when designing a table, and a lot of it probably came from just placing objects on it, making the shots and seeing how they work. Simulating the exact difficulty of each shot is nearly impossible, even with extremely skilled physics programming - just like if you were to build a physical copy of the same table.
On real tables too, the difficulty might easily vary due to slight physical differences. For a digital comparison of this, see Funhouse in PHoF compared to TPA, which is the same table, but hitting Rudy's head is incredibly much more easy in the TPA version, while controlling those shots was close to impossible in the HoF version, making it easier to complete the magic mirror on TPA, while jackpot (trapdoor) shots are a lot more difficult.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

I suspect that putting in some more randomness in, say, the kickout returns would not be that hard; just fiddle with the initial velocity vector a little bit. Tuning the randomness to be realistic might be the hard bit, though.

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

I suspect that putting in some more randomness in, say, the kickout returns would not be that hard; just fiddle with the initial velocity vector a little bit. Tuning the randomness to be realistic might be the hard bit, though.

It's harder than it looks. Adding some normally-distributed randomness to the physics calcs isn't difficult; it's optimizing those calculations to be fast enough so that the game doesn't slow down waiting for the physics results that's the hard part.

 

[Sumez]

That doesn't make sense. What Matt McIrvin said makes perfect sense - just applying some random factor to the kickout returns (which is obviously where the lack of "randomness" is most apparent!) _would_ be really easy, and there wouldn't be anything to "calculate", so no slow down in this.

What would be an issue however, is that it would be totally missing the point. The idea in TPA is to actually simulate the actual pinball tables, and without knowing the details, I'm fairly sure the ball is actually traveling through those under-table lanes etc. when travelling to the lockout. It's just that a computer will do this perfectly every time, almost always placing the ball in the same position before activating the kickout, hitting it from the exact same angle. Tampering with that in order to make the kickout more random would require them to apply some weird random factor that doesn't really simulate the behavior of the real table.

I'm sure FarSight are applying plenty of other "cheat factors" on their various table elements, in order to make the ball react to them more like it would to their real life counterparts, but going the opposite direction and deliberately make them less like the real thing, doesn't seem to be in check with FS's philosophy.
Of course, I shouldn't speak for the developers. I'm just guessing here.

 

[Sean DonCarlos]

That doesn't make sense. What Matt McIrvin said makes perfect sense - just applying some random factor to the kickout returns (which is obviously where the lack of "randomness" is most apparent!) _would_ be really easy, and there wouldn't be anything to "calculate", so no slow down in this.

That depends on how accurate you want to model the randomness of the kickout on the physical table. There's different kinds of randomness, and the standard "take a sample from a uniform distribution" isn't the way to go in this case. But that's both a statistical and a coding question, and I don't want to derail the thread with a technical sidebar unless there's some great demand for a discussion on optimal error modeling of three-dimensional random variables. I'm guessing there's not... (And yes, I could actually talk about that semi-intelligently. I have a mathematics minor, specializing in statistics.)

But we may be getting more variation down the road anyway: http://digitalpinballfans.com/showthread.php/2696-Round-5-Q-amp-A-With-Bobby-King-Answers (See Question #5.)

 

[Alex]

Biggest difficulty problem on TZ is that infidel ring between the lower left jets. I know it was there in the original few machines but it was pulled and the game is better for it. Beyond that the difficulty seems quite accurate to me except MAYBE it could use a little more heat off all the standups (especially the slot one), and the left ramp a bit less of a gimme. But really it feels close, and it screws me the same kinds of ways.

I find that the most major difficulty problem with TPA in general is the conversion of replay scores and specials to extra balls. I always tilt those away -- the games weren't designed for that many extra balls and things start to stack up out of control -- and the games tend to be a lot more satisfying that way.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

Beyond that the difficulty seems quite accurate to me except MAYBE it could use a little more heat off all the standups (especially the slot one), and the left ramp a bit less of a gimme. But really it feels close, and it screws me the same kinds of ways.

As you can tell from the leaderboards, I'm far from an expert player, but the other thing that I noticed is that the Powerfield seems significantly easier than in real life. If you have the ball held on the right magnet, then let it go and flip almost immediately, it'll shoot right into the top hole most of the time. On the real table it's a lot chancier.