Complicating matters, the huge potential of Williams’ new line of video slot machines left investors wondering why Williams was wasting its time on a product seemingly on its last legs. CEO Neil Nicastro delivered an ultimatum: come up with a new kind of pinball machine so stunning as to make existing pin-games seem obsolete. Quantic Pinball is the perfect fusion between a pinball game and arcade classic gameplays. Complete all the tables and test your skill with the Special table and its invaders' infinite waves!

Simfarm remake. Remake of SimFarm. I would love it if someone made a farming management simulator akin to what SimFarm was. Farming Simulator series you do the farming yourself, but I'd love to do the management instead of the farming! Save hide report. 100% Upvoted. I was impressed with SimFarm at first because of the wide variety of crops available to grow, in any region or climate of the United States. Also, there are many temperature guages and budgets and things that show you all sides of running a farm. HOWEVER there was one major glitch in this game- it's too much work. Has there ever been a proper remake of Sim Farm? I enjoyed Sim Farm immense when I was a kid, and going back to the game using dosbox is just not the same. I wonder if there ever has been a proper remake with the same kind of gameplay. Start small and expand property and such.

THE WIZARDS OF PINBALL: Pat Lawlor and George Gomez next to their handmade Holo-Pin prototype.George Gomez wasn’t a fan of pinball, exactly; he was a fan of making things. An industrial designer by training, he’d spent the beginning of his career creating toys and coin-operated video games. (He was the guy behind Midway classics like Tron and Spy Hunter, and even had a hand in that cool Gorf joystick.)But, as Gomez says, “I’d always wanted to do a pinball machine.

With conventional toys, you’re working with an LED and a 9-volt battery, and you’re working on something that has to cost $19.95. So here’s this thing that costs $4,000, and there’s range there to do some cool stuff.”Following his pinball dream, Gomez joined industry giant Williams, the company behind hit games like Terminator 2 and The Addams Family. The year was 1993, and counter to those who thought Pac-Man and Street Fighter had killed pinball, the industry had just experienced its biggest boom in decades thanks to sales in Europe and novel technologies like dot-matrix score displays.But by 1997, the novelty had worn off; so, too, had ever-more-complicated rule sets that alienated the casual pinball player.

Kids were glued to PlayStation and Nintendo G4 home consoles. The pinball market was saturated. Complicating matters, the huge potential of Williams’ new line of video slot machines left investors wondering why Williams was wasting its time on a product seemingly on its last legs.CEO Neil Nicastro delivered an ultimatum: come up with a new kind of pinball machine so stunning as to make existing pin-games seem obsolete. The penalty for failure? Watch Williams’ renowned pinball business close for good.Desperate pinball employees churned out ideas, and the concept that emerged was one that replaced pinball’s backglass with a 27-inch CRT that could show animation and video games to complement the pinball gameplay. The new platform — christened “Pinball 2000” — seemed promising. At least, it did to most people.

But not to George Gomez.Gomez worried that the concept would feel like substandard pinball welded to a substandard video game. “It didn’t do justice to either format,” he says.

So he took his concerns to legendary Williams designer Pat Lawlor.The solution, they thought, lay in the recent past, using a thing called a “combining mirror.” Video games like Space Invaders and Asteroids Deluxe had used a half-silvered glass positioned at an angle to make a video image float in front of a painted cardboard background.“The combining mirror trick was used in the early days to make video images appear more full than what the hardware was really capable of,” says Lawlor. Applying this technique to pinball could let video images interact with the ball, something that felt like a quantum leap beyond the current plan’s separate monitor and playfield.Gomez and Lawlor shopped their idea around to co-workers, but no one got it. Nobody thought the image would be bright enough, or that the interaction between the ball and the video image would be satisfactory. Beyond the skepticism, the pinball group was resentful: by suggesting a change in direction mid-course, Gomez and Lawlor were effectively casting a vote of no confidence in the team’s efforts to keep pinball afloat.The two weren’t deterred, but given the hostile environment at Williams, they knew they’d need to go somewhere else to develop their idea.

While they spent their days at Williams, in the evenings they pursued their Pinball 2000 alternative in the more hospitable setting of Lawlor’s garage.Says Lawlor, “We could very quickly model, throw away, model, throw away, many iterations of what we were doing and not have a crowd asking for meetings, claiming failure.”Rough sketches led to an encouraging test with a 1-scale foamcore model. Next up was a full-scale prototype. “Pat had a pretty well-equipped place, but mostly we used simple shop and hand tools on that project: table saw, band saw, drill press,” says Gomez.The bottom cabinet and playfield came from an old pinball machine Lawlor had at home, but the other, more novel parts of their prototype required some ingenuity. Video images were supplied by 2D artwork Gomez had stored on an old Amiga 1000, displayed on a salvaged 19-inch arcade monitor. To reflect the monitor image, the prototype needed a playfield glass that was semi-reflective. “We mirrored the glass with off-the-shelf limo window tint film from the local auto parts store,” says Gomez.After two months of hard work, they got their “eureka” moment when they saw an image — in this case, a bitmapped illustration of a robot — seemingly standing on the pinball playfield.

Says Gomez, “I still remember the excitement when I realized that it was really going to work.”Their prototype was still crude — the game’s static video images didn’t interact with the ball — but there wasn’t time to take the idea further. The original Pinball 2000 concept was advancing, and Gomez and Lawlor got the hint that it was now or never for their alternative.They packed up their “Holo-Pin” prototype and headed back to Williams to unveil it to management and engineering teams. The anticipated reaction?“I had no idea,” says Lawlor. He and Gomez had already flatly rejected the concept their co-workers were now throwing all their effort behind. What is the mandate of the church. “Politically, what we were doing was very upsetting to many people.”But any rancor vanished when the two men showed what they’d done. Everyone loved it, even the team developing the current version of Pinball 2000.“I was blown away,” says former engineering director Larry DeMar, no stranger to coin-opsuccess as the co-creator of video hits Defender and Robotron: 2084.

“The prototype worked so well that it was instantly clear to me that this was big.”But not only was it a big idea: it was an enormous undertaking. “Pinball teams would acquire a video game component,” notes Gomez. “We needed display technology, artists, animators, cinema guys; the software team would have to expand with dedicated programmers for the video elements. We’d have to redesign assembly lines. The thing needed a new box. We were asking the company to turn its entire world upside down.”Williams’ 50-person pinball team went into overdrive converting the prototype into a real product and 18 months later, the first of the Gomez-Lawlor breed of Pinball 2000 machines, Revenge From Mars, launched in March 1999.It was an unquestionable success, selling about 7,000 units.

Given the economics of the time, 2,000 or 3,000 units was considered “break-even”; 5,000 denoted a hit.The second Pinball 2000 machine, based on Star Wars: Episode I, sold well but underperformed relative to outsized expectations. In a market that wouldn’t tolerate mistakes, Pinball 2000 had faltered, resulting in a surprise announcement from Williams: on Oct. 25, 1999, only eight months after Pinball 2000’s introduction, the company would end its 55-year run in the pinball business to focus on video slots.One can argue whether Pinball 2000 ultimately could have saved pinball at Williams; it’s easier to make the case that the odds were so stacked against the product that it was destined to fail.

Still, in the time they spent handcrafting Pinball 2000, Gomez and Lawlor achieved something remarkable in an industry not known for breakthrough innovation.Today, Lawlor runs his own game design firm. He initially focused on designing pinball for Chicago’s Stern Pinball.

Countless features, including:- Non-stop arcade action- 10 different game modes- 7 original tables.and a special one for retro-arcade addicts!Each game mode features a special gameplay:- Shoot them up- Multiball- Balls teleportation- Magnetic fields- Black out- Ramps hide and seek.Quantic Pinball is the perfect fusion between a pinball game and arcade classic gameplays.A must have!touch arcade teaser 03.jpgThe ANDROID version is availablelinksfull versiondemo version// Error: Image 239852 not found //our other pinball game: BABYLON PINBALL 2055babylon coming soon 2.jpg. Welp.this game is pretty bada$$ so far buuuuuuut I can't make it passed the alpha level as its crashed on me everytime I've played it (3 times). I got all the way to black out pinball and freeze, no play, than crashI am running it on my 1st gen iPad but I meet the requirements for playing this app. Some cool ideas here.digging the telekinetic atmosphere, phosphoric graphics, and club-esqu sountrack.things get moving fast!!One bug I encountered (besides this major one) was that when the ball is shot back into the plunger lane (or you dont get a full plunge to get the ball up and out out the land)the plunger flap doesn't keep the ball from getting back to the plunger causing the ball to disappear and reappear at the left ramp.unless this is the way it's intended to play. To me that doesn't seem right.Wish I could play more!