Rogue Pinball
Visual Pinball Releases => Full Screen Tables => Topic started by: Itchigo on November 30, 2014, 07:22:20 PM
-
Preview Gottlieb 1962 FS DirectB2s
My exploration via recreating the early post-war games of Williams and Gottlieb to experience the evolution of flipper pinball design and innovation hands-on continues with Gottlieb's Preview. Preview was released in August 1962. Designed by Wayne Neyens with Roy Parker artwork, 1,900 Preview games were produced so this game is not very rare to find today.
The only real goal with Preview is points as there are no specials available. The closest thing to a special is the carry-over feature of lighting the lower buttons by hitting the five targets which lights the drain for 100 points and makes the buttons count for 10 points instead of 1 point. I've seen Preview called a "mean pinball game" because if you aren’t careful it is very easy to lose the ball. But that should just give you a feeling of satisfaction when you finally beat it. As with all my games, pressing the "R" key gives you game rules.
I am not an artist of any kind, but rather a real-time and systems programmer. So my art is the essence of Photoshop "hacking" (term used here in the same way it is used in hacking code). In appearance, I am striving for the slightly dirty, heavily played look that the real games had in the 1960's when I was living in the pinball parlors. I am trying as much as possible to make it feel like you are playing an older pinball game, not a video game.
As anyone who has done VP games knows, playability is a tough compromise in VP. The ball in general is "too light" and the only way I have found to compensate for that is to over-incline the playfield. Once you do that, however, the ball tends to accelerate too rapidly to properly simulate one of these old EM games where the playfield was inclined at 3.5 to 4 degrees. I have done many "cheats" to get close, but close seems all that is available. So at times the ball will move far faster than in the real games. I have tried to adjust things so that it still feels like playing an older EM game, and mostly like the real thing did, just faster.
The key to a good "real world" EM game was to have lively rubbers, and the ability to shake the table a bit before it would tilt for good game play. VP makes that tough as once the ball is moving too fast (as a result of not simulating its proper weight) the elasticity in VP becomes a very non-linear game. I have sought to tune the various surface elasticities in a compromise that makes the game feel as close as I can to the real thing, and as realistic (even if a bit wrong) as I can make it. Again, my goal is to make it feel like you are playing a pinball game, not a video game.
Sound is a big part of the EM experience, as the old relay and motor logic units created a sense that a pinball game was truly a machine that was playing against you. Where possible I have found videos of these games and used sound editing software to extract the actual sounds, including room ambience. I am learning with each step how to better integrate the sounds of both the parts you see (rollovers, chimes, etc.) and the underlying mechanisms that created those sounds to recreate the feel of an EM machine.
As with all VP work I do, anyone is welcome to use anything in the artwork or scripts of these games as they wish. Since downsizing my actual Pinball machine collection to the few machines I now have room for, The VP work of others has brought me many hours of joy, and in return anyone is welcome to whatever they can learn or use from my efforts. I am posting these games in the hope that others will enjoy them as much as I have, and to keep the memory of these older machines alive just a bit longer.
Included is my commentary, and a flyer. Enjoy!
FS Conversion and backglass by Itchigo.
(http://roguepinball.com/downloads/0/medium_1_30_11_14_7_22_19_0.png) (http://roguepinball.com/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=335)
http://roguepinball.com/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=335 (http://roguepinball.com/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=335)