I’m sure many of you remember Pinball tables from the arcades or local grill bars. Here we could consume time with friends and try to beat highscores. The older tables where mostly difficult to play but for each game you get 5 balls, where most of today’s tables you have 3 balls. When the introduction of electromechanical bells, chimes, lights and buzzers in the mid 1930′s, the popularity of pinball machines grew dramatically. Humpty Dumpty from 1947 was the first table to include flippers, it was considered the golden era of Pinball. From then on tables included features like ramps, multiballs, dot-matrix displays and digital soundeffects.

Stern is the only company still producing tables today and its becoming a rare sight to discover a pinball table. Luckily it is possible to play these pinball’s on a PC, also the ones from 1930′s. A large varietry of tables are simulated, tables such as 4 Square, The Simpson’s and Indiana Jones. So anyone out there looking for Pinball games for your computer, look no further. Visual Pinball is free and people recreate or even make their own, so called original tables which are available to find on the web. When you have the time, you can also begin creating your own pinball machine. Its graphical interface allows you to simply drop plungers, flippers, targets and other Pinball elements onto the playfield. You can design the graphics using your favorite image editing program and afterwords import them in VP, the same for sounds effects. To mention the more technical aspect such as a scoring system this will need to be programmed. It can help to import other peoples tables to refer to as examples and inspiration.
Irina Pinball 6.0 is one example of an original table created with Visual Pinball. It tries to capture the gameplay from both old and new Pinball’s. The pinball table has theme of a Russian ice skater and the majority of the music in game are tunes of classical music. The goal in the game is to beat the Highscore. This is done by winning a gold medal and scoring a 6.0!. Have fun with a friendly Pinball game suitable for all ages and challenge your inner Pinball skills!

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