Finding Pinball Games on the Net

Pinball machines as we know them have been around for many years now, most maybe remember them at the local arcades and grill bars where one could consume hours with mates and play to beat the highscore. The early tables, jumping back to 1850 where not coin operated or electricity powered, they didn't have flippers like we recognize them today. With the time of electromechanical bells, chimes, bumpers and buzzers in the late 1930's, the interest of pinball machines grew quickly. Humpty Dumpty from 1947 was the earliest table to have flippers, this is considered the golden years of pinball. From then on tables later expanded with features like ramps, multi balls, dot matrix displays and digital sound. The older tables where mostly quite difficult but for 1 game you get 5 balls, where as on later tables you only get 3 balls per game. Pinball are not as available today as the golden era. Stern are the only company still creating tables and it seems a rare sight to bump into a playable pinball machine. The good news is it is possible to play these tables on a computer, even the old ones from 1930's. Many tables are emulated. Titles like Pinball Wizard, Star Trek, Balls-a-Poppin and countless others are available. So if anyone is in the hunt for Pinball games for your computer, look no further. Visual Pinball is free and people recreate or even make their own original tables which are available to find online. It is a fine community. If you like, you can also begin making your own pinball game and share with other pinball freaks. The graphic interface allows you to simply drop ramps, flippers, bumbers and other Pinball elements. You can design the graphics with your favourite image editing program and later import them in VP. Sounds are also easy to import. As for the technical side such as a scoring system, this will have to be programmed. It can help to open other peoples tables as references and learn from these.

Irina Pinball is an original table programmed in Visual Pinball which tries to maintain focus on the feel from the old pinball's while still mixing in the later features as we see them today. There are bumpers, skillshots and multi balls. Irina Pinball has topic of a Russian Ice Skater and a lot of the music and sound in the game are tunes of classical music. The goal in this game is to get the highscore. This is done by winning a gold medal, scoring the highest 6.0!. All in all a friendly pinball game playable for all ages. Find the pinball wizard in you!

About the Author

Article by Koral Wilkins. Creator of the free pinball game Irina Pinball.