Zen does it again - “Zen Pinball Party” for Apple Arcade

[Scared Stiff]

It’s out now. But holy heck, it’s not a small app. 3.2 gigabytes! Making it larger than any other app I have on my device!!! And with “more to come”, I guess it will be getting even bigger as time goes on. Yikes.

 

[Scared Stiff]

Okay first impressions:

1. Upon starting, the game throws you into playing Adventure Land. But once you are done with that you can play all other tables...no unlocking anything.

2. Fonts are different for the points earned animations as you are playing. This is a good thing as they are much more readable.

3. The game starts with all the little extra Zen animations turned on by default. There is no need to earn them. You can however turn them off in the settings if you don’t want them.

4. You can adjust the lighting....somewhat. It’s not a huge range, but at least it helps a little and better than nothing. The Getaway looks especially good this way. Medieval Madness benefits from this as well.

5. Both the animations and lighting are set on a per-table basis, so it’s not all or nothing which is good.

6. The ball looks different when it’s behind things. Like an X-ray view of it. It’s very easy to see.

7. Trolls is a really fun table.

Now the bad part: ALL the Williams tables crash the app as soon as Multiball mode was activated on each of them. I haven’t noticed that problem outside of Williams tables but I am still researching that. I’m playing on the latest version of ios, with lots of room so I don’t know why it would be crashing. I am going to try on both my Apple TV and then Mac and see what results I get in that regard.

 

[Scared Stiff]

UPDATE: It crashes on my Apple TV too in the exact same way. I am not even going to bother trying it on the Mac computer as I would have to update to a new OS just to even run Apple Arcade there, and I don’t want to do that right now. So there you have it...out of the gate day one and already broken. Why Zen, why?

At least I can play the other tables still.

 

[Dok5555555]

I don't understand why they can't let you play the game in landscape. It's more comfortable for me to hold my ipdad that way and I like the more zoomed in view of the tables. The Williams app did the same thing, you could only play in portrait.

 

[Scared Stiff]

So more playtime has returned some curious good news/bad news results:

Unlike earlier in the day, tonight I played many games of Attack From Mars and it did not crash. BUT there was now a new problem. Even when the Zen extra animations were turned off (and SAID they were off) they would still be on anyway. I had a heck of a time getting them to really be off. Sometimes they would turn off for one game and then come right back on. And here’s another weird thing: even when they actually kept themselves off, ONE little launching missle animation didn’t get the message and was still going off anyway. So annoying.

So, I thought well, maybe all the tables are magically fixed now and switched to Medieval Madness with the same settings and camera view only to have it crash on multi-ball just like before. (Sigh).

Ugh Zen...you are really making me pull my hair out here. I cannot explain these behaviors but I sure hope they can. And then fix them!

 

[Narc0lep5y]

can't remember. Do we know if this is ZenFX engine or UnrealEngine? Any logos or such that pops up identifying it as such?

 

[Pinballwiz45b]

can't remember. Do we know if this is ZenFX engine or UnrealEngine? Any logos or such that pops up identifying it as such?

Confirmed, Unreal Engine.

 

[Scared Stiff]

I don't understand why they can't let you play the game in landscape. It's more comfortable for me to hold my ipdad that way and I like the more zoomed in view of the tables. The Williams app did the same thing, you could only play in portrait.

I guess they decide this based on the kind of device. Because on my Apple TV it’s (by necessity) in landcape mode. So it’s not like the capability is not there.

can't remember. Do we know if this is ZenFX engine or UnrealEngine? Any logos or such that pops up identifying it as such?

Definitely Unreal. Not only because of the logo on screen, but the fonts are different, the ball looks different, the lighting is improved a bit....it’s just nicer looking all the way around. Now if only the bugs were fixed. (See next post).

 

[Scared Stiff]

UPDATE TIME:

So this week Zen released un updated new version of the app to fix the crashing on Williams Pinball tables. So that’s the good news.

But now the bad....they didn’t fix any of the other bugs and worse seem to have introduced some new ones that I was not encountering before:

iPhone: Left flipper sometimes is unresponsive when using touch screen. I worked around this by using a game controller instead and can play fine that way.

Apple TV: This version is an absolute mess now. First off, it’s not saving my star progress, table settings, or even my high scores. Everything got wiped out EXCEPT my progress in their pinball party season one event. Additionally, once in the game center achievement screen you cannot get out! I tried every single button and nothing works except getting out of the game completely and returning to the springboard/desktop. As such I cannot recommend the Apple TV version right now. Stick with the ios version which doesn’t seem to have these problems.

On both version the problem remains of replays turning all the special Zen animation effects back on even if you turned them off. However, I did find a workaround for this problem. Just exit to the Pinball Party home screen and go back into the table and it will play without the effects (if you turned them offJ. The one exception remains that pesky missile on Attack From Mars multi-ball that always comes out no matter what.

Really frustrating Zen. I don’t know how stuff gets released this way with obvious problems that I found right away. Shouldn’t happen.

 

[shutyertrap]

I'm happy that the app crash that was happening every single time I got multiball on ToM got fixed. I started playing with my DS4 controller on my iPhone (I had no idea I could do that!) and yep, there's no way to exit out of the achievements screen with the controller. I've never experienced the left flipper issue, so I'll have to make a mental note of that.

I agree, that these very obvious problems shouldn't have existed. It's low hanging fruit that boggles the mind the internal QA folk missed. During the VERY brief beta I played (with launch version software, btw), within an hour of playtime I had a list I fired off to Zen of easily repeatable issues. The good news is some of those have already been taken care of now.

 

[The loafer]

It seems when we discuss pinball apps, that history is repeating itself; that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

 

[Naildriver74]

It’s a shame it’s turned out like this. Most thought that Zen was our pinball savior. I spent 15 minutes with the beta and put it down not wanting to waist anymore time with what they thought was a good game.
On a side note Mammoth Cave has found 8 miles of new cave. Time for another adventure

 

[Gorgias32]

It’s a shame it’s turned out like this. Most thought that Zen was our pinball savior.

It is a real shame how everything stands right now IMO. Zen came out of the gate strong with the Williams tables, fumbled the mobile app but then recovered. But then silence for over a year, and now everything new is coming out exclusive to a platform I don't have access to. And I expect to have to re-buy all of my content once the next version of PinballFX comes out, whenever that might be. Zen's marketing has really taken the wind out of the sails of digital pinball - you can see it in how this entire forum went from active and engaged, to basically a ghost town. Thank goodness for Magic Pixel keeping their franchise alive and vibrant.

 

[The loafer]

Agree on the Magic Pixel reference, they are indeed cool devs/people

Once Zen released PBFX3, I thought I'd never think back to the Farsight days with any fondness. However for all the warts that came with a dated product, lack of communication and bugs, they at least delivered for a long time and at regular intervals content that we loved. They brought Digital pinball to the masses. No offense to this forum, but we can see what a lack of releases does to the community, it just about kills it! After a promising start, IMHO this apathy is totally on Zen

 

[pinfan7]

They got Timmy's $$$ upfront to play his game and Epic has lost 9/10 in their hypocritical bs fight vs Apple, what did you expect? They will support Apple as much boss Tiimy allows it.

Also you must not forget that there isn't such thing as "Zen AND community/fan-base", there never was. It always has been "Zen AND wherever $ blows from".

 

[yespage]

They got Timmy's $$$ upfront to play his game and Epic has lost 9/10 in their hypocritical bs fight vs Apple, what did you expect? They will support Apple as much boss Tiimy allows it.

Also you must not forget that there isn't such thing as "Zen AND community/fan-base", there never was. It always has been "Zen AND wherever $ blows from".

The trouble is Zen appeared to clearly get it, about putting together great models of real pinball tables. They not only made it look great, they made the pinball play even better... and no one thought that'd happen. I certainly didn't want to rebuy all those tables, but I just about have.

So while the Pandemic definitely messed up production timelines, it seems that Zen has almost gone back to what they were before Williams. Hopefully they return to Williams.

 

[Scared Stiff]

It is a real shame how everything stands right now IMO. Zen came out of the gate strong with the Williams tables, fumbled the mobile app but then recovered. But then silence for over a year, and now everything new is coming out exclusive to a platform I don't have access to. And I expect to have to re-buy all of my content once the next version of PinballFX comes out, whenever that might be. Zen's marketing has really taken the wind out of the sails of digital pinball - you can see it in how this entire forum went from active and engaged, to basically a ghost town. Thank goodness for Magic Pixel keeping their franchise alive and vibrant.

Indeed. I wish Zen would understand that. They really didn’t handle things well. And putting things on plaforms that some in the existing community don’t even have access to is rather ridiculous. I mean really, does Zen expect every Android user in the pinball community to go out and buy an Apple device just to play their game on mobile now? I’m lucky in that I was already using Apple stuff, but I really feel for those that don’t. It shouldn’t be this way.

Zen has gone from a company that released content on all major platforms at about the same time to jumping onto a few newer platforms instead, bailing on their fans in some sort of quest for $$$$. I get that everyone needs money, but was this really the only way to go about it?

 

[Scared Stiff]

Wow. I just had quite the achievement on Attack From Mars. I got not only my highest score on Pinball Party, but my highest score EVER on ANY platform including the real life arcade! And saw and heard things I never had before. I guess I have never completed all the cities before. (I love pinball but yeah I’m kind of lame at it…lol.) I didn’t know you could attack Mars back! That was awesome. And I completed that mission too! I love this table but this was the first time I was good at it. And now in top 100 on leaderboard. Nice.

 

[vfpcoder]

Scared Stiff,

Great Stuff!

Were you playing on the iPhone or an iPad or an Apple TV streaming box?

 

[Scared Stiff]

Scared Stiff,

Great Stuff!

Were you playing on the iPhone or an iPad or an Apple TV streaming box?

On my phone with a game controller connected. That’s the only way I can really play currently as the Apple TV version is a real problem right now (outlined in earlier comments above) and touch control on my phone is unreliable for left flipper. But a game controller works like a champ thankfully.