alt Hacker NewsThe Full Tilt version also has multiball which is missing from the Windows version. Lock a ball by shooting into a wormhole where the two lights are the same color, lock 3 balls to start.
If you enjoy playing Space Cadet I would really recommend giving Visual Pinball a try. There are so many more pinball games better than Space Cadet, with amazing tables people have made for them all available for free. I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).
As an aside I tried to hack around with this and found out the programming for Space Cadet is pretty awful (not to disparage them or anything, it works). The state of the lights directly reflects the game state. (This is the cause of the bug where if you drain or start a mission while the rank-up light show is playing, you can skip a rank.)
Replies
I intuitively feel like more realistic games could be more fun, and that I might just have fondness for Space Cadet from growing up with it; but the more I played other pinball games the more I appreciate that space cadet is a simply great game to play, it feels great and there's a great variety of things to keep you hooked.
I wish I could find another pinball game I enjoyed as much. The closest experiences I could find are Xenotitle and Demon's Tilt but I found them harder to get into and get good at.
The next best thing imo is Yoku's Island Express.
I've played a lot of pinball. Space Cadet is a very good pinball game in terms of design, balance, and interest. I wouldn't short it.
> I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).
Fortunately for us, you're wrong :-)
VPX now runs on Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. And it runs great on those platforms thanks to some pioneering work by the dev jsm174. The VBScript bits are handled using just enough Wine to make it happen but the rest of it is all native. Surround sound feedback (SSF), the Direct Output Framework (DOF), Pinup Popper packs (PUP Packs) etc are all supported as well. The GUI that used to be Windows only is now built into Windows / Mac / Linux versions via ImGUI and can be brought up live during play.
If you want to try it out, log into Github and download the latest action for your platform [0]. Most non-Windows users will want to use the latest version in master as this brings the most amount of parity to the Windows version compared to the 10.8.0 release last year. Use the BGFX version as that has the new multithreaded rendering backend that supports Metal and Vulkan. If you want to learn more, best to check out the Virtual Pinball Chat Discord [1] or poke around the wiki [2].
The devs have been putting in a lot of work to generally make VPX cross platform and it shows. I have built my own Pincab [3] based on it and its amazing.
*Edit*: Should have mentioned that VPX is now supported by Batocera as well, though the VPX version in there is getting a bit long in the tooth.
[0] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/actions/workflows/vpinb...
[1] https://discord.gg/BhR9h5aWm
[2] https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki/About-Visual-Pin...
[3] https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/