Been playing a lot of vidya Pinball. Although the feel of real machines will never be properly replicated, some of the stuff out there is pretty good. It's a shame that the licensing situation is a quagmire, so a lot of great RL tables are not really available at the moment, or suffer from outdated conversions in stuff like The Pinball Arcade (stuff from SEGA or Data East).
The obvious product out right now is Pinball FX, but they've done some really dumb stuff lately and I've never been a fan of their original designs. Their Williams recreations are pretty good overall but suffer from a fatal flaw in extremely bouncy flipper physics - if a ball drops from a ball trap 3 inches above on a held flipper it doesn't bounce all the way back to the middle of the playfield in RL. That's enough to ruin a lot of tables IMO. I also don't think they've done a good job with the sound in their pins - in RL you get a lot of feedback from the sound of the ball rolling against wood, and that's almost not replicated in Zen's product.
The new iteration of the Pinball FX platform looks worse in many respects than FX3, and they expect you to rebuy all tables, so fuck 'em.
A welcome surprise for me has been Zaccaria Pinball, which seems to be tragically obscure. Zaccaria was a Hungarian pinball manufacturer in the 70s and 80s, and they had some pretty solid tables that remind me of Gottlieb designs. Their output spans both electromechanical and solid state tables, and the videogame version is really nice, with great physics (definitely more realistic flipper physics than FX) and a lot of configurable options like time of day, lighting, etc. which might seem superfluous but it actually makes a significant difference while playing. There's a ton of tables, and I think you can unlock a bunch simply by playing. There are more modes than in Pinball FX, including a weird campaign mode and a story mode, which give you some challenges and are a nice way of running through the whole catalog.
The sound is also spot on and very satisfying - the ball speeding through the wooden playfield sounds perfect and voices/music aren't as obnoxious as in FX. There are some truly excellent tables like Time Machine (I think that's the free table, incidentally), a remake of Time Machine, Zandor, etc. In addition to remakes, they've also done "modern" deluxe versions of some of their old designs in the FX vein (they even had a full colour display instead of the DMD before FX did), these are hit and miss but some are pretty cool. So some tables have 3 or even 4 versions (there's also a weird "retro" version of more modern designs to harken back to EM). I tend more towards the simpler, more elegant designs instead of the spazzy shit in FX originals, and there's a lot to like here. Even the old EM tables are fun if you're in the right mindset and are prepared to do a lot more nudging than usual (people who play vpin tend to underestimate how much nudging is an integral part of RL pinball).
Overall a great package and tables are much cheaper than the competition. It's a small company (Magic Pixel) but Zen could really learn a lot from this product. They haven't been updating very much recently, which makes me think it didn't sell well at all. It's a shame. Check it out with an open mind.
Currently there's a sale (50% off) on the Platinum Pack, which features all tables , it's around 50 USD in my region but might be significantly more in the US. At 50 bucks it's a steal.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/3672/Zaccaria_Pinball__Platinum_Pack/
, other than that superb level.
