Visual Pinball game show tables

[MikeK]

Someone created original pinball tables for Visual Pinball with game show themes:

The Price is Right
Match Game
The Joker's Wild
Wheel of Fortune (different from Stern's 2007 release)
Jeopardy!

I haven't tried these yet as I need to install Visual Pinball on this PC.  Once I do, I'll give my thoughts.

[rockinricky]

Those sound interesting, I'll have to check them out. I just need to install Visual Pinball 9, I only have VP 8 installed now.

[Sodboy13]

Those look... bad.

[pacdude]

Not only do they look like ass, but they also don't look like they have good lines or engaging gameplay. I may be wrong, but if these were real, I'd pass.

[Jeremy Nelson]

Not only do they look like ass, but they also don't look like they have good lines or engaging gameplay. I may be wrong, but if these were real, I'd pass.

Now I've always loved pinball, but I've never heard the term "good lines" before. Care to explain?

[MikeK]

The games are very rudimentary.  I did not expect any of the masterpieces available for Visual Pinball.  The one thing this guy really needs to work on is sound management.  Every single action had a sound attached to it and the sounds were frequently long, loud, and annoying, especially when you have 10 or more sounds playing at once.

[Sodboy13]

Not only do they look like ass, but they also don't look like they have good lines or engaging gameplay. I may be wrong, but if these were real, I'd pass.

Now I've always loved pinball, but I've never heard the term "good lines" before. Care to explain?

Pathway of the ball off of flippers and other objects.  Those six bumpers on The Joker's Wild seem especially egregious.

[Joe Mello]

I can't even tell where some of the ramps are going, and some of the visual schemes, while faithful(?), look horrible.

[BrandonFG]

It's just too much going on, esp. with such uneven graphics. The set elements in the background make it even messier.

Even without that, there's still too much going on with the playing field. I think TJW was the "cleanest" looking one.

I applaud his efforts, seeing as how I don't know jack about game design, but yeah, less is more.

[bscripps]

No longer shall we wonder what pinball would look like if it merged with GeoCities.

[clemon79]

Not only do they look like ass, but they also don't look like they have good lines or engaging gameplay. I may be wrong, but if these were real, I'd pass.

Now I've always loved pinball, but I've never heard the term "good lines" before. Care to explain?

Pathway of the ball off of flippers and other objects.  Those six bumpers on The Joker's Wild seem especially egregious.

I'll expand a little, if I may.

The difference between a really good pinball machine and a really bad one: on a good machine, the skill shots are long and sweeping and very satisfying to accomplish, while still being forgiving; the ball "feels" like it's being collected into the flippers when it comes back down. On a bad one, they're short and choppy and feel random, and if you miss them by just a tiny bit, it feels like they're redirected straight to the outlanes with no hope of saving the ball. So a machine with the former tendencies is said to have "good lines".

I suppose it's kinda like pr0n: hard to explain what it is in words, but Gawd do you know it when you see it.

[Bob Zager]

I don't know if there actually was a full-size pinball arcade game based on TPIR, but I do recall seeing a small kid's-size toy pinball game based on TPIR back in the late 1990s on eBay.  

IIRC, it was manufactured by Tomy, and featured graphics from the short-lived 1994 syndicated show, including host Doug Davidson's image.

[pacdude]

I don't know if there actually was a full-size pinball arcade game based on TPIR, but I do recall seeing a small kid's-size toy pinball game based on TPIR back in the late 1990s on eBay.  

IIRC, it was manufactured by Tomy, and featured graphics from the short-lived 1994 syndicated show, including host Doug Davidson's image.

From Jeff's Pinball Pages comes this image of it. Seems to be extremely rare.

[Sodboy13]

I don't know if there actually was a full-size pinball arcade game based on TPIR, but I do recall seeing a small kid's-size toy pinball game based on TPIR back in the late 1990s on eBay.  

IIRC, it was manufactured by Tomy, and featured graphics from the short-lived 1994 syndicated show, including host Doug Davidson's image.

From Jeff's Pinball Pages comes this image of it. Seems to be extremely rare.

I owned the "Astro Shooter" version of this one as a kid, and later on in life, as a 20-something kid with disposable income, got the American Pinball version on eBay for about 12 bucks. (Both used the same outer-spacey sound effects, oddly.) Loads of fun, and the bumpers actually bumped, unlike the usual "brush the electrode and watch the ball drop down" toy machines.

[bradhig]

Has someone made a table based on The Magnificent Marble Machine?