Anyone have any personal favorites, or know of any that are really good in general?

The only ones I had would always crash on me. :(

I'm no pinball connoisseur, but I remember having a lot of fun with Crystal Caliburn back in the day.

Loony Labyrinth was pretty cool too.

The best ones mac-wise were the Pro-Pinball series.

The Web, TimeShock!, Big Race USA (aka BRUSA), and Fantastic Journey

Ranking order I'd probably say the middle two were the best; the first the most addictive but it's graphics and physics (though ground-breaking in their time) aren't as good retrospectively.

Unfortunately, they're all Classic PPC.

If you're lucky you might be able to still get windows versions running in win xp. You have to be careful though as the windows versions available for (ahem) download don't contain the music tracks, which really detract from the experience. Likewise playing under sheepshaver on the Mac gives a similar problem :(

There's a video TimeShock being played (not terribly well, but not attrociously) here. It's much harder than it looks. He gets a multi-ball session about midway through.

Sadly on the utube res and compression you can't really see the cool effects like the reflection of the table in the steel balls as they move and other cute bits.

You can just about see him epic failing at trying to save the balls when they drain by bumping the table...

Oh, crappy person playing The Web on Sega Saturn here very low graphics and crappy sounds; but the music still comes through.

And someone playing Fantastic Journey starting out amazing with an ultra-combo that's really tricky to pull off and then basically being lame. You do get to see a small multi-ball session though.

Couldn't find anyone playing BRUSA who was even good enough to start a multi-ball...

Meaningless to me and my army of classic machines! :) Any idea on where I might locate them to try them out?

Crystal Caliburn was the favorite of mine in the 90s. Since I'm all about nostalgia when it comes to computer games, it's still my favorite one!

hmm, I own The Web and TimeShock! CDs. If they are truly abandon-ware these days, I might consider imaging them; though the image size would be quite large :(

We had both of those too. Loony Labyrinth was the one we played the most, Crystal Caliburn seemed a little more difficult. They only in OS 9 right?

yes, all OS-9. Crystal Caliburn was quite good for an older game; but it lacked a proper 3D view and decent ball physics. That said; it was the best thing pinball-wise until the Pro-Pinball series came out.

I wouldn't say only OS-9. I'm actually playing Crystal Caliburn through Rosetta on my Snow Leopard right now! Visit http://www.littlewingpinball.com/ and see for yourselves!

It is definitely a bit harder, but so much fun and challenge!

Ah, good shout; you reminded me I was going to mention LittleWing earlier on; but they're still (even fairy tower, which I downloaded the demo of a year or two ago) nowhere near as good as the pro-pinball games [IMHO]. That said; they ought to be encouraged since they're basically a 2-person home shop `for the fun of it' as far as I know; similar to Team Shanghai Alice... *and* they support OS-X. :)

I played one called 8 Ball Deluxe on OS8. It was cool.

Also, this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZCwiNJ4wgo

aye; it was only a matter of time before that song reappeared on this thread :)

I was surprised that I was the first.

I finally wound up buying Golden Logres...the game is pretty darn awesome!

That's cool, but it seems all they did was update the build for OS X. When I open it, it's the same size window I played it with 15 years ago. There is no option I find to increase the screen size, so it only fills a small amount of my screen. And they want $20 for that? I went and dug up the old CD, and it has no license code so I can't try it in the new build. And I imagine that owning it means nothing to them in terms of some discount on the new build. From their FAQ's:

With Golden Logres, my screen auto-switches resolution to 1024x768. Does your resolution not automatically increase? If not, give that a go first.

They probably deserve a lot more than $20 for porting something that was written in system 7 days to OS-X. Of course, their problem is that nobody will pay for it.

Nope, that's one issue that I had with it, is that it doesn't automatically change. Turns out it is mentioned in their FAQ:

I probably will at some point. This game has Dark Castle like memories for me, so I won't be able to hold out too long :) But I did some research today, and there was a story almost a year ago that they were porting some of their pinball games to the iPhone, including a new/additional story to Loony Labyrinth: http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/app...one-ipod-touch/

Pinball on the iPhone could possibly work; along with iPad. You could have a `real' analogue tilt sensor in there. Although not quite the same as a pendulum; it's probably better than trying to guess how hard the user pressed a keyboard key.

Well, I agree with you that we that have a real license for the original game, should definitely not have to pay the full $20, if anything at all.

Maybe some creative license key-Googling will help you here ;) I sure wouldn't feel guilty about it.

After discussing the game here, I got really hooked on the game. Again. Sure, the screen is small, but after 1 minute, you're used to it. Now, I'm playing a few games every day.

So if I interpret that correctly, you are saying that you do not feel that it is worth paying a couple for spending a couple of man years probably mostly rewriting the code...?

I think you should be just continuing to play the original under emulation then. If it performs well enough. If it doesn't, then said performance gain is what you are paying for; and you have proved it is worth it (or at least worth considering). Just because it is so easy to pirate software doesn't make it any more legitimate.

Alternatively, you could contact the authors and see whether you can negotiate yourself a discount...

But if you consider the amount you might pay for your yearly update to photoshop / OS-X / iWork / a-another; $20 for a one-off upgrade after that many years seems pretty good value for me. Plus you are supporting an independent author; not some faceless company; be that Adobe or Microsoft or even Apple.

How about this? http://gameprom.com/thepinball

It's a Mac pinball game with an iPhone controller. One table comes free, and 2 others can be purchased. I have enjoyed it, and as you suggested, shaking the iPhone is the tilt.

No, if I thought it would have been worth it, I would have payed them and played it in OS X instead of in the emulator.

Furthermore, I see no reason why the refactoring would be that extensive. The fact that they did the rewrite is proof for that.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing. This gives the added bonus of keeping my old high scores, as well.

Well, you have a good point there... And as you said, I really proved it IS worth it. It's a great game.

So I'm taking back that part about that I wouldn't feel guilty about license-googling.

Thats bad logic right there. Just because they did something does not make it easy. Everything changed from OS 9 to OSX.

indeed; and the original came out 1993 I think. That's 17 years, and we're talking System 7.1. The change from 7.1 to 8 was pretty huge; although minor compared to the 9->Carbon->OS-X. It would in all likelihood have been a monumental effort to get the game ported.

To put things in perspective. I've just spent the last week of my life porting code not even between operating systems but just getting it working again, that is only 3 years old. Probably only a few thousand lines total as well.

CC will be several hundred-thousand, and would have been about well over a decade old and 3 major (1 enormous) OS releases and API transitions since then.

... but part of the problem we're dealing with is that unless you have spent a year of your life working on a huge legacy C code-base you have absolutely no clue how painful it is compared to keeping higher level language codebases in order. And even that is a huge task that anyone who hasn't actually programmed seriously just cannot comprehend. But there again, I have commented about this ad nauseam during the complaints cycle of the RtDC release.