It’s been a while but Pinball FX2 released a pack of pinball tables, so if you’ve yet to try this game out this would be a good place to start. For 800 microsoft points on the Xbox of $9.99 on PS3 you can get 4 marvel tables. The pack is called Vengeance and Virtue and it contains the tables Ghost Rider, X-Men, Moon Knight and Thor. I played each table through about five times and these are my thoughts on each one.
Out of the four tables Ghost Rider was the table I initially found I was best at. The thing which came naturally to me with this table is that there are a lot of times in which you can activate the ball saver so if you happen to make a mistake you’re doing fine because it seemed to be pretty hard to lose a ball. One of the other nice things is there is a pretty easy way to get a random bonus and I’ve gotten the extra ball almost every time I’ve played. Having four balls over three really improves my overall score. The multiball is somewhat easy to get so I tend to be able to get at least one every time I play. One of the things which I must warn about though is there is a moment where Lucifer will give you an option to go for 500,000 points or 5 million points. If you choose 5 million you have to hit your shot or the ball is gone, as I’ve only been able to hit it once I always choose the lower option because it gives you a ball save in case you miss. It was a little hard to figure out how to start the missions so once you get the feel of the table make sure to go into the help and options and then rule sheet to figure it out. The other way I have been able to get as many points as I have is because it’s easy to get the bonus multipliers up and so just keep doing that, the highest I’ve gotten it up to is x15. Ghost Rider was one of the first comics I got into as a kid and I even now have a good collection of the really early Ghost Rider so this table was definitely my first choice when deciding what to play.
The X-Men table was a bit trickier for me to figure out. It’s mostly learning all of the ramp shots so it takes being calm and making the right shots. I found doing a different view then normal helped with this one and holding onto the balls by holding them in the flippers helped me to make the ramp shots. The most important part of this table in my mind is the UNITE ramp, hitting it six times allows you to add a member of the x-men to your team. Each of them have special bonuses and I found the ones which are just essential for me are Jean Grey and Nightcrawler, because with each of them you get outer lane saves x3. Those pesky outer lanes are what have been leading to the most balls out for me. As you get to know this table get to know which of the x-men correspond to which ramp, when you get that down doing the missions and multiballs tend to get a lot easier and that’s when you really start racking in the points.
In preparing to write this I decided I needed to give every table a fair shot and Moon Knight was one I didn’t expect to do very well on. I had tried it about 3-4 times and gotten very little in terms of scoring. I’ve always thought Moon Knight was a cool character but I’m not at all familiar with his story and so everyone on his table was completely new to me. Well suddenly I got into a rhythm with the table and I got closer to Wizard Mode on this one table then I ever have on any other table I’ve been on. I completed all four of the missions and I was very close to finishing all of the side missions and I even pulled off about 5 extra balls while playing the table. It was crazy, in one play through I had upped my score from a measly 20M up to just under 100M. Once you get the hang of this table is it non stop, and there are a lot of things to do. When I started this I expected to come out saying Ghost Rider was my favorite table but now unless Thor wows me, Moon Knight may be my favorite.
Finally we have Thor, and after giving it a fair shake I am baffled by this table. I had a very hard time with this table, though a friend did tell me this was his favorite table. The nice thing about this table is it’s very easy to start missions, what was really hard for me is when shooting the ball I would constantly hit something instead of a ramp and it would bounce right into the middle and I would lose the ball. The Thor vs. Loki mission was the only one I had any success with and it gave me a good amount of points so I do have a decent score, I just left it feeling a bit frustrated. It seems this will be one I’ll have to practice quite a bit before I can get.
So my personal favorite is Moon Knight. Ghost Rider comes in a close second, and then X-Men in third and Thor in fourth. It’s a good pack, it’s pretty cheap and it is hours of fun.
Also if you have not heard yet, anyone with an iphone can go to the apple store and search for Zen Pinball, if you download the app for your iphone there is one free table included on it so you can get your pinball fix in on the go.