I've been waiting for this...this afternoon Jersey Jack Pinball finally showed off a picture of the Collector's Edition of its latest game Avatar The Battle for Pandora on the production line. Some machines have already made their way to Europe, but these are CEs for the U.S. Market.
"US orders for Avatar: The Battle for Pandora ‘Collector’s Edition’ are shipping now!"
You don't often hear rumors about potential themes for the Multimorphic P3 pinball system, so I was surprised to hear one yesterday. Word on the street is that the Company is working on a module based on the video game series "Portal." The first entry in the series of games was released on 2007 by the developer Valve, which is now more widely known for its PC game retail store Steam.
I play a lot of video games, but I almost never play First Person Shooter (FPS) games because they make me feel sick. So unfortunately, I am not personally all that familiar with Portal. Here's a description of the game from Wikipedia:
"Portal consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player's character and simple objects using "the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device", also referred to as the "portal gun", a device that can create intra-spatial portals between two flat planes. The player-character, Chell, is challenged and taunted by an artificial intelligence named GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) to complete each puzzle in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center using the portal gun with the promise of receiving cake when all the puzzles are completed. The Source Engine's physics system allows kinetic energy to be retained through portals, requiring creative use of portals to maneuver through the test chambers. This gameplay element is based on a similar concept from the game Narbacular Drop; many of the team members from the DigiPen Institute of Technology who worked on Narbacular Drop were hired by Valve for the creation of Portal, making it a spiritual successor to the game."
The whole concept of teleporting the pinball all over the upper portion of the playfield sounds pretty cool. It reminds me of the 1988 Gottlieb pinball machine TX Sector.
Zen Studios created a Portal "table" for its Pinball FX game a while ago, so there is a precedent of the Portal license being used in conjunction with pinball. Below is a video of the Zen Portal table.
A TX Sector brochure, courtesy of Pinside:
The arcade news site, Arcade Heroes, is reporting that Atari and Alan-1 are going to bring the 1980 Atari classic arcade game Missile Command back to arcades in the form of its remastered game Missile Command Recharged. The new version of the game has been available to play on Steam for a year or so. I've played it on my Steam Deck a bunch of times. It's pretty cool. The new cabinet that Alan-1 designed for it is wild, too. Check this thing out:
