BlahCade 226: Lost in the Woods with Arcooda Pinball Forest

This episode’s main event is a curious development with arcade machine producer Arcooda and a tweet stream leaking out over the last few weeks. There are some interesting revelations in this block of tweets that we dive head-first into and explore. It is all leading somewhere, but you will need to listen to the episode to find out more.

It’s also time to address the elephant in the room and talk about The Pinball Show from Zen’s marketing division. The show is awkward, lacks host chemistry, and needs some tweaks to make it worth tuning into. Like, actual information.

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Show notes

05:00 - How could Zen Studios improve The Pinball Show

We’ve been holding off making any comments about The Pinball Show, but we can’t really hold back anymore.

Chris and I give a few bits of constructive criticism about what Zen could consider doing to uplift the show.

12:00 - Star Wars Pinball VR "Droids"

So this was a lovely surprise from Zen Studios. The VR version of Star Wars now includes the "Droids" table as a free inclusion.

But there are a few issues with the game. The parts collection in C-3PO mode doesn’t work, and the right kickback also is broken.

We ask the question: "What has happened to quality at Zen Studios?"

24:00 - Rollers of the Realm: Reunion is announced

If you loved the first iteration of this game, the second version looks really great.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1628120/Rollers_of_the_Realm_Reunion/

The core gameplay mechanics seem to be there still, but a few new surprises are thrown in for good measure.

32:00 - Arcooda spill the beans on Farsight and Zen Studios

You might remember Arcooda way back in 2017 when they started to announce these really great-looking pinball cabinets called the Arcooda Pinball Arcade.

The company recently began a lengthy Twitter campaign that outed a fair few alleged conversations between Farsight Studios and Zen Studios about dealings with the pinball cabinet market.

We were trying to create an all-in-one style full sized pinball machine which would support “off the shelf” PC games, home-brew, and Arcooda version software. The idea shared with Zen was that the customers could purchase their games from Steam and play normally on our cabinet...
— Arcooda (@arcooda) June 28, 2021

But you don’t need to worry about reading the threads: we go through them all in order and try to make sense of it all.

1:13:00 - What is all this Arcooda talk leading up to?

As it turns out, Arcooda is offering an interesting proposition for pinball table designers.

The notion is that you can use their Pinball Forest software to create and develop pinball table designs.

You then upload your pinball tables to the Pinball Apps ecosystem. People who own an Arcooda cabinet can install your design and playtest it.

Once you have got enough feedback from your users, you can use the Pinball Builder service to create your digital table in physical form.

Yep, an actual pinball table from design to testing to production.

That sounds great, right? Sure it does. But it may not be as easy as that.

There are already competitors in this space. Multimorphic P3 springs to mind immediately. Even AtGames lets VPX community developers submit their titles for play on their AtGames Legends Pinball product.

Thanks for listening

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Cabinet backbox art: If you want to make your digital pinball cabinet look amazing, why not use some of our free backglass images in your build.