It’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into. It’s why I never expect frozen pizza to taste like a slice from Famous Ray’s in New York City. It’s also why I was initially thrown by sci-fi first-person, open world action / adventure game Cyberpunk 2077 (Xbox Series X / S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC, Stadia), which I expected to be a gun-based action-packed role-playing game like Borderlands 3, The Outer Worlds, and especially Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, but enjoyed much more when I realized it was actually a futuristic Grand Theft Auto V.
Mel Brooks once said that sex was like pizza, even when it’s bad it’s good. Or maybe it was Sharon Stone. Whoever it was, though, they were wrong. I’ve had some truly terrible pizza, and I’ve watched enough Law & Order: SVU to know there’s plenty of bad sex. In fact, the only things that are good even when they’re bad are old sci-fi movies and third-person, hack & slash, action-oriented role-playing games that are blatant clones of Diablo III. Which brings me to Warhammer: Chaosbane: Slayer Edition, the Xbox Series X / S and PlayStation 5 version of a Diablo III clone that came out last year on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. While it’s not as good as Diablo III, and has a lot of problems, it still manages to be mindless fun if you enjoy button mashing your way to victory.
While fans of first-person shooters, survival horror games, and even sci-fi racing games have all gotten to play new versions of old favorites lately, the same hasn’t been true for people who want to virtually race real-world cars on realistic streets or race tracks. Which seems like a real oversight, if Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered is any indication. Remade for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC, this new version of the 2010 classic is as much fun as the original, even if it does lack some of the depth of modern racing games.
As someone who was a socially- and politically-aware teenager in the 1980s, I can tell you that living during The Cold War wasn’t always fun. Just ask me about night I thought New York had been nuked. But shooting people in the first-person shooter Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC) — that’s a lot of fun. And in no small part because of the game’s ’80s timeframe.
Man, it’s not a good time to be a fan of realistic racing simulations. Just months after fans of Project CARS series were dismayed to learn that Project CARS 3 was eschewing its realistic approach for a more arcade-like one, fans of the DiRT racing series are now suffering a somewhat similar indignity with DIRT 5 (Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC), which is replacing rally racing with more straight-forward racing (and a capital “I”).
But while DiRT fans will hate this sequel, those into more traditional racing games (like me) will have even more fun with this than we did with, well, Project CARS 3.
It’s been eight long years since we’ve gotten a new Wipeout game (2012’s Wipeout 2048), six since the last F-Zero (F-Zero Climax), and eighteen since Star Wars Racer Revenge let us yell, “Now this is podracing!” unironically. And there’s no sign that will change anytime soon.
Which is why I found myself being so forgiving when playing Pacer (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC), a futuristic and combative racing game that’s a rather blatant rip-off of Wipeout…and is just as fun.
At a time when chaos reigns supreme, and every week brings another heartbreak (R.I.P. Eddie Van Halen), there’s something nice about playing a vintage pinball machine while sitting on your own couch. Which is exactly what you get from Williams Pinball Volume 6, the latest collection of classic pinball machines for both Pinball FX3 (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Switch, PC) and the Williams Pinball app (iOS, Android). But while all three have their appeal, some of these virtual pinball machines are decidedly better than others.
For those who haven’t played the previous volumes, the three pinball machines included in Williams Pinball Volume 6 — 1990’s “Funhouse,” 1987’s “Space Station,” and 1990’s “Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray” — are spot-on recreations of these classic pinball tables. Not only do they boast the real sound effects and visuals (as well as the option to see reality augmented, which we’ll get to in a moment), but they also have realistic physics. Which is why the ball flying across the Space Station table doesn’t just sound like a rolling metal sphere, it moves like one, too.
As for the aforementioned tables, let’s start with “Funhouse,” which is not to be confused with the table “Fun House“ that Williams released in 1956 (though wouldn’t including that have been a trip).
“Funhouse”
Inspired by carnivals, “Funhouse” (not surprisingly) has a bit of an old school flavor to it. It’s rather sparse at the bottom — save for the flippers and some bumpers of course — while the top part has a series of alleyways, including one that looks like The Love Tester from The Simpsons, and another that looks like a ventriloquist dummy’s head. There’s also a railway connecting the top and bottom, though little else prevents the ball from just rolling down. Which it does, often and quickly, making this is a challenging if somewhat predictable table.
That said, its simplicity is its undoing, as this isn’t as much fun as some more complicated tables we’ve played, but also doesn’t have the excuse of being a really, really old table…y’know, like “Fun House.”
“Space Station”
Taking a similarly simplistic approach as “Funhouse,” but to better effect, “Space Station” is also complicated on the upper half and spartan on the lower. Inspired more by NASA than Starfleet, the table has numerous images of the space shuttle, as well as two long railways and a very long ramp. It also has a good number of bumpers and targets, and together, they really send the ball flying.
What makes this table work better than “Funhouse,” despite taking the similar approach, is that the upper half of “Space Station” is even more intricate, which means the ball’s return path is far less predictable. It’s a subtle difference, sure, but it’s the difference between playing the table for a couple hours and playing it for days.
“Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray”
As with the other two, this third table is also like a mullet: party on the top, business on the bottom. Except that its top part is even more complicated, as it has a mix of alleyways and railways, as well as a section of bumpers that can catch the ball nicely for a while. It’s also the only one that has alleyways leading to the flippers. This, again, gives the ball plenty of opportunity to not only pick up speed, but to come at you from unexpected angles as well.
Unfortunately, this table does have one major weakness, one that requires a bit of explanation.
As I alluded to earlier, the tables in Williams Pinball series give you two visual options: classic and non-classic. (Which are not to be confused with the viewpoints you can play from, of which each table has many). In the former, the tables look like they did when they were in bars and arcades and the backs of bowling areas by the snack bar. But in the latter, the tables are visually augmented in ways you couldn’t have done back then, and probably couldn’t do now either, unless you had a ton of money and could bend the laws of physics.
In the case of “Space Station,” for instance, switching from classic to non-classic — which you can do with the touch of a button, just like the anniversary versions of Halo and Halo 2 in The Master Chief Collection — adds an astronaut, some space shuttles, a space station, and some asteroids floating above the table.
Unfortunately, this can backfire, as we see on the “Dr. Dude And His Excellent Ray” table. On its non-classic edition, it has a figure of the good doctor hanging out by the plunger. Though I have doubts about his medical credentials, and his street cred, given how he looks like Beavis if he grew up to be a used car salesman, makes goofy faces like Jim Carey from The Mask, and generally just goofs around, which makes more of a distraction than an augmentation.
That said, the visual augmentations in Williams Pinball Volume 6, like the previous five volumes, are just that: visual. They don’t change the way the table works in any way. So while Dr. Dude may be annoying when he’s goofing around his eponymous table, he’s easily dismissed, and with no impact on the actual table.
In the end, all three of the tables in Williams Pinball Volume 6 do provide the same kind of fun they did when they were in the back of a smoky pool hall, waiting for some kid with a pocketful of quarters. Granted, two of them won’t get as many of mine when I play this game again, but all three will get some the next time I need a break from the chaos of the day.
With Halo: Shadows Of Reach (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), author Troy Denning continues to be the writer with the most stories set in the universe of Master Chief, The Covenant, and the other denizens of this sci-fi first-person shooter series. In the following email interview, Denning discusses how this military science fiction story connects to the games and the other Halo novels, his and others, as well as why he enjoys visiting this turbulent universe of someone else’s creation so much.
While it obviously has its fans, the racing game series Project CARS has always felt inconsequential to me. So much so that I honestly can’t remember anything about the first two installments, even though I know I played the first one and, I think, some of the second. But Project CARS 3 (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC) not only managed to catch my attention, but keep it as well, even if it does have some annoying flaws.
