I dont have a cellular card in my iPad, otherwise I could try to invite people via iMessage. Googled how to add friends and it might work with a few games that way, at least on iOS10. But no idea if it’s gonna work that way with ZEN.
I wish they’d make their game universal over all platforms. Honestly, FX3 is windows while Zen2 is Mac and Zen is iOS, not to mention the dozen other pinball apps they apparently have on iOS that kind of mesh with the main app? I think?
They’re supporting all platforms, it’s not like Zen 2 is dead on Mac, so why not just make one version of pinball and release it on all platforms? What am I missing? I’m just not sure why playing pinball needs to be this complicated.
Speaking of complicated, I just installed Pinball Arcade on my new iPad and it’s only showing that I have 2 tables even though I’ve bought at least 30-40. I pretty much bought every table through season 4-5, and then started getting pickier. Restore purchases doesn’t work. If the tables I did have (ST:TNG made it into My Tables) weren’t so great I’d have to call the entire app a joke. Now, it’s only mostly a joke.
@Mirefox: 176,296,224. I’ll probably just leave it there; Sorcerer is not my favorite.
Sidebar: We could consider the no-extra-balls rule that’s used in physical tournaments.
I’m not sure if any of you guys have ever played/watched a real-life event, but many of the players are good enough to basically earn an extra ball every time … making the events, in theory, endless. So they just let any extra balls drain; they don’t even put their hands on the flippers.
I bring it up because even my paltry score above probably took 20 minutes, and I earned an extra on balls 2 and 3. I’m guessing the billion-plus score above had to have been more than a half an hour. Are we venturing into the territory where this becomes more of endurance contest than anything else?
Of course, Sorcerer is not a hard table, and the real tables in Pinball Arcade are more stingy with extra balls. So maybe it’s not even going to be an issue. But I thought I’d toss it out there.
If extra balls becomes an issue we can consider the rule but there are few tables that I can marathon on in Zen, and almost none that I can play for more than a minute in Pinball Arcade. I think it is more an issue with Sorcerer’s Lair; Zen tables can last a little longer, but few last as long as SL.
I wasn’t counting but it might have been close to 2 hours total. I let the ‘third’ ball drain straight away because I had other stuff I needed to do by then. I’d favour ways to reduce single session play time in future if this becomes a common problem.
My sense of it is @TheDukester is right about weekly or 10 days, there doesn’t seem to be much interest beyond that time frame, given the current level of thread participation / score updates? I don’t mind picking up new tables.
I’m going to grab the Jurassic Park tables when they come out, just post up which one is preferred for the next Stately Play BoS cycle and I’ll work to learn the table. 
I’ve been playing the Alien Vs. Predator table and I think it does a good job of showing off Zen’s strengths. The table is fairly straightforward with a mostly-empty lower half and a whole bunch of ramps and orbits in the top half. The aesthetic is cool if you like the IP, though the voiced callouts are a little lame. The table tends toward the easier side of things, except that lane outs are frequent enough that I’m struggling to get wizard or break the 50m mark. There are a couple fairly weak mini-games, but the missions are, for the most part, cool. One, Vertigo, completely inverts the table and tasks you with ramp shots. Another, Camoflage, actually changes the color of the flippers so that with each shot, the flippers actually become harder to see. I like mechanics like this when used correctly, and it is something that you’ll only find in good digital pinball.
I ended up with something like 260mil on Xbox. That was one good ball where I got to concentrate one morning, then a few more days of playing the remaining balls whenever I could. I think the Xbox and iOS versions play quite differently with the Xbox having many more shits draining cheaply. I’m not sure what makes the difference, the camera angle, the physics, or the controls
I didn’t post yesterday, but the Jurassic Park tables are now available. I haven’t given them a look yet but will probably try them out this weekend just to see which might be best for our next tourney table. Once they are on my iPad, though, I might have trouble prying it out of my dinosaur-obsessed son’s hands.
To be fair, part of my reasoning is that I really don’t like Zen tables that much. But that’s a personal thing.
The app is great, just to be clear. And it’s cool how they’ve scooped up Marvel and Star Wars licenses. But I just can’t get past the fact that these are totally made-up tables (with some occasional shaky physics).
So I’m more excited to play the “real” tables found in Pinball Arcade. Which, sadly, is not a good app.
You’ve got that right! Pinball Arcade is a really weak app and it it rough for me to go from Zen to that. Once the ball is on the table I’m fine, but everything up to that is unpleasant.
Early impressions of the Jurassic Park tables based more on aesthetic and layout than mechanics:
First, just like the Universal tables, there is no music from the IP, which is a giant shame considering the iconic Jurassic Park overature. On top of that, the generic voices are really rough. Mr. DNA sounds drunk.
Jurassic World uses voice callouts from the movies, which is great, but I’m not a fan of how the table is laid out at the moment. I also don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or if there is really no plunger, but I can’t stand the launch. I like the water area in the upper left but this table needs some interesting modes to make it any good.
Jurassic Park also uses voice callouts from the movie and automatically gets points for featuring the Goldblum. The table itself is very crowded and is an absolute mess of ramps and orbits on the top 2/3 of the table. It is fairly symmetrical and might make for a combo-heavy table. I usually prefer more open space on my tables, so we will see how this one goes.
JP Mayhem features cringeworthy voice work but may be my favorite table design at first blush. It is asymmetric and does have two large dinosaurs on the table. There are also some great sound effects from the movie.
I know this isn’t much to go on, but I haven’t been able to devote much time to the tables yet.
This is a little better. Getting the feel for it now, but also getting numb fingers. Pinball games shouldn’t be lasting an hour…
Are those of you playing hour + games trapping the ball a lot? I’ll grant that Sorcerer’s Lair can run long, but even my longest games aren’t an hour. My nearly-1B game was just pushing that 60min mark, I think.
Edit: For reference, I checked my table stats and 76% of my games on SL are between 8-30 minutes and none have gone over an hour. 54% of my games are between 150-400M, 22% are higher. My average playtime is 18:28.
By trapping the ball you mean using the flipper to kill the momentum, so you can line up the shot? Then yeah absolutely. Ive not managed it on a zen table, but on a real table you can trap the ball on one flipper and gently flick it over to the other flipper. That’s so important of youre trying to target something specific like the mission start.
Yeah, I’d imagine trapping can slow the game down quite a bit. I actually find it easy to do in Zen because of the flipper angle, though I don’t do it much. Transfers are a lot harder for me in Zen, though.
My recollection from a video I saw of a Zen table was that it appeared that the person would “casually” transfer the ball from one flipper to the other by nudging/bumping the table. I don’t do that so I don’t know how hard it actually is, nor do I know if that’s the intentional design of these “fictional” digital Zen tables. Not a criticism, just wondering if that’s the approach that the developers used to implement their virtual version of the physical transfer.
As far as Zen vs. Pinball Arcade, I’ve found the Zen tables more enjoyable personally, as far as a gaming experience. I do appreciate the “real” tables being implemented digitally, but other than the enjoyment of history, I’m finding that they are as hard for a novice to progress on as I recall from the arcades … fortunately their “aggressive” draining of balls to keep themselves in business financially does not equate to draining of my quarters now. 
No, my marathon sessions are more due to me not figuring out that sorcerers mode or whatever the final mission is called us the best way to rack up a shit-ton of points. I just didn’t delve into the table rules and nickel and dimed points until I figured that out.
Looking forward, I’m trying to come up with a day to make this a budget-friendly as possible. I think what we will do is play a Zen table in the first two weeks of the month, then a Pinball Arcade table in the second. Pinball Arcade tables are sold in bundles of two, I believe, so we will probably just play one of the two one month, then the second of the two the next month. Zen complicates things a little because most of the tables are sold individually on iOS, but sold in bundles on console. I suppose I’ll be asking the console players for their input so that we can play though all the tables in any given bundle before purchasing more.
I had planned on playing a Jurassic Park table at the start of March. Can anyone on console confirm if those are bundled? If that’s the case, should we scrap the JP plans and work through some of the Zen originals, which are generally more inexpensive?