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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> Also it is just me or do pinball games just never seem to get the physics of the ball right?

It sure seems that way, but I think it's more nuanced. With a top-notch video version of pinball, I don't they get the physics wrong enough to notice. But what they are is incomplete.

The physicality of playing a pinball game is an integral part of the experience. Standing at the machine, pressing the flipper buttons, feeling the vibrations of the ball and mechanisms, etc. If you don't have that stuff, then the game is going to feel wrong even if the physics of the playfield are 100% accurate.

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There's also just the fundamental difference in motives— PC pinball is designed to be fun, while arcade pinball, at least historically, was designed to eat your money.

Agreed.

But let me add the caveat that a lot of arcade videogames were designed to eat your money as well, something I always found infuriating as a teenager. Some were fair -- things like Golden Axe, TMNT or Sunset Riders can be won with a single coin if you know what you're doing. But plenty of arcades are unwinnable (or require unreasonable expertise) for you to have a good time without spending lots of coins.

Which is why I always ended up playing Double Dragon, TMNT or Sunset Riders ;)

Mortal Kombat was designed to be Pay to Win. Someone reverse engineered the arcade version and later-stage opponents were programmed to strike you like 2 frames before you would have hit them, and there was a decay each time you put a quarter into the machine.

I liked the Fighting Game PvP model, where if you won, you play your next game for free. You could go to the machine with one quarter and play all night if you were skilled.

I don't think there's a single game in the MAME collection that truly can't be 1CC'ed. Of course what degree of expertise should be considered 'reasonable' is subject to debate and our expectations how enemy AIs should behave.

I'm pretty sure many games cheated or you could only truly master them after you had spent way too many quarters (enough that any casual player wouldn't have any fun with them).

There were also difficulty settings. I remember back then when we played TMNT (which mind you, it's one of the "fairer" games) we could tell which cabinets were "tweaked" at the highest difficulty level and avoided them. One tell was the highway levels, the way to truly win with one quarter was to avoid the helicopters instead of fighting them (which spawns more and more dangerous helis), but tweaked cabinets would spawn tons of helis no matter what you did, so it was best to avoid them. God I hated that.

Other games had similar problems, but sometimes you could tell "this game is set to impossible difficulty".

supposedly gauntlet was too. https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/back-in-the-days-we-h...

The games where your HP constantly dropped over time and was replenished by inserting more coins were the worst!

Pinball's great at eating the money of casuals, while letting even moderately-experience players have a pretty good time for very little money :-)

Machines I was good at, I used to not-infrequently leave with a credit on them, after paying for one game and playing two. And I am not a very good pinball player.

If you'd ever talked to a pinball designer you'd know that their primary goal, without question, is making a fun game. No designer ever designed a game with coin drop in mind, except for things like appealing to a broad audience.

Fun games make money. That's all you need.

> while arcade pinball, at least historically, was designed to eat your money.

It is a nuanced tradeoff. You need to make it entertaining enough so that players will continue to play, but also difficult enough that they regularly lose and put in more quarters. Getting that balance right is hard.

Instead of getting the balance right, the obvious answer is this is a business proposition, so cheat. Instead of having a fixed difficulty, you decide on a minimum coins-per-hour revenue, and tilt the table ever so subtley against the player if it looks like that revenue target isn't going to be hit.

I've played pinball for most of my life, and definitely agree with this. At a certain point the physicality is not reproducible—there are too many layers to it. No two machines are identical, and they change over time. The state of the playfield, including when it was cleaned/waxed, the strength of the flippers, and everything else about the machine impact play in ways which good players can and do account for. For instance, it's possible to anticipate how much english is on the ball when it comes off a rubber at an angle and how it will react when it hits the next surface, but it won't be consistent between machines, so you need to play enough to get a read on it. Great players can do this quickly, and then adjust their play accordingly. It's bit like rebounding in basketball in that you have to anticipate where the ball is going to bounce based on very small trajectory deltas, but the advantage is you can move the machine.

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