Some background: As a life-long fan of video arcades since their beginnings I’m also a tremendous fan of pinball machines. It has only been in the last few years that video emulation of pinball has gotten close to matching the experience. In terms of commercial pinball video games there are two very different camps: On the one hand you have Pinball Arcade that places an emphasis on making reproductions of actual physical machines, on the other you have Zen Pinball that keeps the broad strokes of physical machines in mind but abuses the fact that there are no limitations to what they can do, making only original tables. While, on the whole, I will admit I’m more inclined to enjoy the best converted Pinball Arcade machines there are several Zen Pinball machines I’ve gotten some quality hours with. Rather than have my reviews for these tables go over the merits of the game engines themselves, we’ll assume that the people reading the reviews are familiar with the base games already and are only really interested in a review of just the table itself.
