Stern Pinball Arcade

Stern Pinball Arcade for PC, PS4 and etc. is an arcade game that offers a choice of pinball tables manufactured by Stern, a North American pinball manufacturer established in 1977. The game was developed by FarSight Studios, a studio known from numerous arcade titles, such as The Pinball Arcade, Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection, or Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection.

Mechanics

Stern Pinball Arcade does not differ much from other pinball titles, focusing on realistic recreation of the look and feel of a classic flipper machine. Our task is to keep the ball in play and rack the highest score possible with the help of player-controlled bats known as flippers. As you can imagine, the task is not that simple – the player has to aim for special areas and bumpers that award extra points when hit.

Game Modes

Stern Pinball Arcade for PC, PS4 and etc. offers a standard set of gameplay modes. Aside from the singleplayer, we are given a local multiplayer mode for up to three players. Unfortunately, the game lacks any online functionalities – the player can view official scoreboards to compare his results with other users.

The game shares the distribution system utilized by other games of the same genre, including Zen Pinball 2 or Pinball FX2. The arcade, free of charge version of the game contains a single table named Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The remaining tables (including Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, AC/DC, Harley Davidson, Last Action Hero, Phantom of the Opera, High Roller Casino, or Mustang) are distributed as paid DLCs. Each table is a faithful recreation of its real counterpart, including the legacy ROM based on the original code, as well as detailed walkthrough, which should be useful to players who haven’t had any contact with real pinball machines.

Technical Aspects

Stern Pinball Arcade offers decent visuals, which unfortunately give way to the games from the rival Zen Studios, focusing on old-school feel in favor of quality. Moreover, the authors have focused on introducing realistic gameplay and realistic physics of the ball and the individual fragments of each table. The tables are full of colors and flashing lamps and are complemented by sound effects that accompanied their real counterparts.

Last updated on 10 April 2017