I recently played through a demo for a game called Pinball Spire on steam, and it put me in the mood for playing pinball games. Unfortunately, and I don’t know if this is just due to me having bad google-foo, there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.
So figured I may as well make a thread asking about what the “state of the art” of pinball video games is. Some of the ones I’ve played:
- Sonic Spinball: Very janky, but very unique and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone try to do anything similar to it.
- Pokémon Pinball and Sonic Pinball Party: Fairly standard pinball games, tbh. They’re both on handhelds so they can’t do that much.
- Demon’s Tilt and Xenotilt: Just really fun feeling arcade pinball games with a really fun tilt mechanic.
So yeah, know any good PC or console pinball games?
Oh, and can someone help me: I vaguely remember seeing a stream of a pinball game for the Mega Drive/SNES where the ball goes through multiple tables. Does anyone know what that game was called, if it even exists?
The OG: Space Cadet Pinball.
There is one I remember hearing about a while back and I want to find it again that was really dope because it was a full on simulator and had a easy to use builder to build your own tables. People were recreating actual tables for it, though only those in the public domain.
Space Cadet was one of Maxis’ Full-Tilt Pinball tables. Afaik it’s not in the public domain, Microsoft licensed it from Maxis. However, I’m not sure EA would actually enforce the copyright unless someone was making a lot of money off it.
By the way, The Windows XP version has been ported to WASM, and you can play it in a browser.
Space cadet has been reverse engineered and can be installed in Linux through flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball