@codinghorror, I’m curious if your opinion on Visual Pinball X has evolved.
I originally got into virtual pinball probably about 4 years ago with The Pinball Arcade (TPA) on the PS3. I was blown away, I couldn’t believe how accurate it seemed, how authentic the models and the colors and the lighting and the sound all seemed. But for some reason my enthusiasm dropped off, not because there is anything wrong with TPA, probably just because of life stuff.
Then about a year ago I got a new work laptop with a powerful GPU and decided to look back into virtual pinball, and that’s when I saw that TPA had lost rights to all those Bally and Williams tables and that those rights had been snatched up by Zen Studios. So I bought the Pinball FX3 first Williams/Bally pack and… yup, seemed just as good if not better. But my searching of forums and also YouTubes I came across made me aware that the hardcore virtual pinball community, mostly, hates TPA and all sing the praises of Zen Studios and Pinball FX3. So I went back and played TPA (after not having played it for a few years) and I must say, I see why. The physics just don’t seem accurate in TPA, the balls move in a kind of “floaty” way. In comparison, Pinball FX3 seems like it’s being developed by people with a real passion for pinball, it just feels “hardcore”. When I go back and play TBA it feels like… they were just resting on their laurels.
This brings me to Visual Pinball X. I looked into it a couple years ago and I couldn’t figure out how to get a table running, so I gave up. But after all the virtual pinball forum lurking I did about a year ago, I decided to give it another try because I saw so much praise for it. Long story short: Pinball FX3 gets a solid ‘A-’ grade from me, but Visual Pinball X… definitely a B, maybe a B+. Some tables are just great, and the weird graphics engine, which I agree seems a little “janky”, it some cases it just seems to not matter. Have you set it up properly and played Diner? Or Indiana Jones? Or Creature from the Black Lagoon (CFTBL)? I could go on and on. Honestly I am shocked about how good some of these tables are. There is one caveat: input/flipper lag. That is a serious detriment and for that reason if there is a Pinball FX3 table available, that’s what I play over the VPX table. But for those tables that aren’t available in PFX3, they can be REALLY fun in VPX. And if you play enough you just end up subconsciously compensating for the input/flipper lag.
So I don’t think that VPX should be dismissed because of it’s shortcomings. I haven’t done a side-by-side comparison, but I want to say that… for instance, CFTBL in VPX is probably better than CFTBL in TPA. But that’s probably a bad example because Zen Studios just put out CFTBL for PFX3 and it is awesome, almost certainly beats the VPX version.
To put it another way, for any given table, if it exists in all three systems, it’s usually the case that PFX3 > VPX > TPA.
Here’s my challenge to you: if you have a gaming laptop (in order to avoid the complexities of setting up VPX on a cabinet), do this:
- install VPX: https://vpinball.com/VPBdownloads/categories/vpx-exes/
- install Diner: https://vpinball.com/VPBdownloads/diner-vpx/
- install Fire! (I’m a new forum user and it won’t let me link to it)
- install Space Shuttle (same)
And give those a shot. I say to use a gaming laptop because you can just run those tables in “desktop” mode in order to avoid having to fiddle with settings to get them running on your actual cabinet. I really think if you play those tables it will illustrate the value being provided by the Visual Pinball community, in spite of the shortcomings.