AtGames
If you'd told me at the beginning of 2021 that I'd review not one but two virtual pinball options for the home, I would have nodded and said, sure, that sounds entirely unsurprising. A replica arcade experience seems like a great antidote for any nerd going stir-crazy in a pandemic. Yet while stand-up arcade multi-cabinets have rarely gotten me excited, virtual pinball is another story.
When I play classics like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong on a console, I generally feel like it's the same experience as standing up with chunky joysticks (your mileage may vary, in which case, there are tons of products for you). But pinball's orientation, form factor, and tactile nature have always precluded it from feeling authentic when virtualized on something like an Xbox. I don't have the cash or space for a fleet of classic pinball machines, however, so I like the idea of a single system that emulates dozens of tables while maintaining the genre's physicality—staples like flipper buttons, nudge options, and a plunger.
Last month, this led me to test the Arcade1Up Williams Pinball table, and I was left amused, if not charmed. But its great virtual table selection and solid physical construction were marred by enough issues to make it a tough sell to anyone beyond families. Still, I saw its potential as a moddable machine, whether to add more virtual tables or to use its $600 base as a cheap path to a dreamy homemade system.Soon after, I got a friendly email from rival manufacturer AtGames that pointed to its own virtual pinball product. And after a recent testing period, I'm glad they reached out.
You want expandability? You want more options by default? AtGames Legends Pinball delivers. While I would definitely recommend that savvier virtual pinball fans choose AtGames' product between these two options, that recommendation comes with a few crucial asterisks—along with the fact that less-picky players (particularly families) may be better off sticking with Arcade1Up.
Five important differentiators
The box that the primary unit comes packed in.Sam Machkovech
As set up in the author's kitchen.
Closer zoom on how the art appears in the live product. It's high resolution enough. Also, notice that white button. It acts as a "nudge" button, and there's one on each side. It's a great touch.
Sadly, the cardboard on the bottom of the unit arrived with this tear, but the glass on top is the crucial stuff, and that arrived without a single crack or ding.
The default control panel.
The d-pad used to navigate most menus.
Expandability ports near the backglass (which I'll get to in a bit).
This Internet-connected platform is ready for firmware updates.
Picking through a mix of pre-installed tables and DLC content.
Game description.
Gladiators by Gottlieb, as running on Legends Pinball.
A closer look at the main display.
A tighter zoom on the informational sheet, whose text isn't as high-res as I'd like.
Field elements sometimes lack depth in the Gottlieb tables.
Any officially supported Legends Pinball table includes matching backglass art.
Internet-connected score leaderboards are a nice touch.
Much of the Legends Pinball setup process mirrors that of Arcade1Up's cabinet. This set's biggest piece arrives pre-constructed, and it's big and heavy—a little over 100 lbs in a box meant for two people to lug through a doorway with room to spare. The box contains aluminum legs that owners must screw into the primary body to stand it up, while an additional box includes a "backglass" attachment that slaps into the body's top to better resemble the real pinball deal.
Put it all together, plug it in, and a monitor lights up across the top to display virtual, pre-installed pinball tables. Tap some buttons to page through an on-screen menu and pick a game, then use a real, physical plunger to launch the ball and side-of-cabinet buttons to work the flippers. Now you're playing virtual pinball.
While that basic description applies to both of the cabinets we recently tested, AtGames wastes no time differentiating itself from the competition. First, its playfield screen is 33 percent bigger: 32 inches versus Arcade1Up's 24 inches. Second, that screen natively renders at 1080p, compared to Arcade1Up's 720p, and it sports much better color calibration. Third, this screen is covered in a full sheet of glass, which looks handsomer than Arcade1Up's plexiglass topper. Fourth, the flipper buttons aren't alone; next to each is a "nudge" button, so you can virtually bonk your table and nudge a pinball where you want it to go instead of relying on an imprecise accelerometer. (Arcade1Up's product doesn't include these nifty nudge buttons.)
Lastly, AtGames' backglass includes a second LCD monitor, which changes its art based on whatever pre-installed game you play. Arcade1Up's backglass, on the other hand, has a print-out of a single, static picture. Shockingly, AtGames' superior construction launched earlier this year at the same $600 price as Arcade1Up's tables, but once the sets began selling out, AtGames changed its tune. The kit's updated price at AtGames' official store is $150 more—and that's coincidently how much you would've paid for the platform's biggest downloadable table pack, which is now included in the $750 SKU.
Yes, you can add games—in a bunch of ways
AtGames clearly wants you to add content to this thing. Paid DLC packs are the system's most obvious path to expandability, and each pack includes roughly 11 additional virtual tables. Right now, they're limited to tables made by Zaccaria, an Italian manufacturer that made dozens of tables in the '70s and '80s. Williams classics, these ain't, but their digital versions are decent enough.
You have to go to AtGames' website to buy these packs, and once you do, it's a matter of claiming a DLC code from their site then tapping on the system's unwieldy d-pad to pick through an on-screen keyboard and type that entire code out on your table. It's certainly an inelegant solution.
Should you wish to move beyond official DLC, though, AtGames leads you there via three noticeable ports on the top of the base unit: two for USB, one for HDMI.
Expandability ports, on the top of AtGames' Legends Pinball machine.Sam Machkovech
A sampling of MAME games I added to my machine, as per the linked instructions.
Save states!
Golden Tee games don't benefit from vertical orientation, but they're a good excuse to use the $200 AtGames Control Panel add-on.
If you want to download official DLC, you'll need a USB flash drive in one of the slots, since Legends Pinball comes with scant internal storage. But you only need roughly 3GB for the DLC packs that are available thus far, and you may very well have room for many, many more files on your average USB stick. Plus, if you split said stick into a smaller FAT32 partition and a larger ExFat one, the latter becomes a perfect dumping ground for games you might want to emulate.
AtGames' interface includes a tab for "BYOG" content, or Bring Your Own Game, though the set's instruction manual doesn't clarify exactly how this works. Instead, you'll have to do some online digging to find out. I relied on a comprehensive, intimidating guide from Wagner's TechTalk, which clarifies that the Legends Pinball machine, like other AtGames Legends products, supports emulation cores from the Retroarch family. You have to create "package" files for every classic game you might want to play then put them into your USB stick's ExFat partition.
Once you've done this, sync a Bluetooth gamepad, and you have a robust 32" vertical screen to play classic games on. Most classic console games will look silly on this, since they're cropped to landscape orientation and waste much of the screen. But MAME games that run in portrait mode (sometimes referred to in the arcade community as TATE games) look great on this set, including megaton "shmups" and classics like Ms. Pac-Man. It's not perfect, thanks to a lack of pure integer scaling and some sound-emulation quirks, but the SoC is powerful enough for the MAME games I threw at it, and the monitor's default color calibration is decent.
All told, I wouldn't recommend buying Legends Pinball to play Donkey Kong in its original aspect ratio. But it's a nice perk on top.
Even more virtual pinball, as a default option
Still, this BYOG system won't add many more pinball games (beyond emulated ones from old game consoles). For that, you'll need to lean into the HDMI connection.
Connect a spare computer to Legends Pinball's HDMI and USB Type-A slots, and you'll expose the main 32" screen as a second screen for your PC. You'll need to go into your OS at that point to play with the screen's orientation—and possibly connect a wireless keyboard and mouse, so you can manage the OS while perched at a pinball table.
Pinball FX3 is running on a connected laptop. Joy2Key syncs perfectly to this software on Windows, making it easy to use every built-in button to navigate its various menus.
Pinball FX3 running at 1080p resolution, 60 fps. Without an additional control box, however, I can't feed related imagery like a scoreboard to the backglass screen just yet.
A closer look at how 1080p resolves when connecting via HDMI.
The system's array of buttons will appear in your OS as a "game controller," albeit not an XInput pad in Windows, so you'll want to look into an app like Joy2Key to map its various buttons. Do this, and then you can load software like Pinball FX3 and access some of the best virtual pinball table options on the market. (Conveniently, right now, Pinball FX3's tables are all marked down for Steam's Summer Sale, so if you see this review before July 8 and have designs on something like virtual pinball, I recommend grabbing a few Pinball FX3 packs ASAP.)
The sky's the limit with community-built virtual pinball options, as well, particularly never-ending rabbit holes like Future Pinball and Visual Pinball. Whatever you choose to play, you'll find comparable 60 fps refreshes to the system's built-in games, as opposed to a penalty for external-connection processing.The catch for this much additional content is having to connect and store an extra computer. You can take Legends Pinball's main body apart and toss a PC into the empty cavity beneath the primary screen if you want, but I don't necessarily recommend that, should you need to physically access said computer for any reason. Still, I prefer this awkwardness over leveraging Legends Pinball's optional local-streaming, which lets you wirelessly stream games from a home computer. While that's handy, it comes at the cost of button-tap latency—and it requires installing a proprietary AtGames app on your PC to work, which the direct HDMI connection does not.
Iffy sound, wonky menus
You'll notice I've talked a lot about expandability to start out, and there's a big reason why: that quality makes up for the default set's issues, which range from tolerable to dealbreakers.
Let's get the bad news out of the way: The audio on this kit isn't great. The backglass piece includes two embedded speakers that pale when compared to Arcade1Up's stellar stereo sound. While AtGames' set is serviceable enough, I'm already tempted to look up a replacement pair of speakers. Also, in my initial testing, I noticed that AtGames puts a pair of speakers in the front of the unit to simulate mid-game rumbling, as opposed to the "solenoid" effect on Arcade1Up's product. In my first week of testing, AtGames's "exciter" speakers made the entire system buzz and rattle when any music played at a volume above a whisper.
AtGames reps say they're working on a firmware update that will target this issue and limit what kind of sound data is pumped to these exciter speakers, which might make them work as expected. And an update that appeared in my final day of testing seems to have tuned the speakers to stop rattling at least on my kit. Whether this fixes other users' complaints about rattling isn't necessarily clear at this stage. Should I run into rattling again, I know how easy it is to unscrew the system's top and disconnect the exciter speakers outright, at least.
Legends Pinball also suffers from a clunky menu interface, which you control by default using a combination of a d-pad affixed to the control panel piece and the buttons on the fake coin door. If you're simply picking from built-in games, it's fine enough, but as soon as you add a downloadable pack of pinball tables and a USB stick full of ROMs, you're left with a bunch of icons that can only be sorted alphabetically. Legends Pinball doesn't let you sort its contents by year or genre, and it doesn't include a way to create a "favorites" folder and reduce the tap-tap-tap needed to get through the built-in contents.
Also, on my system, I'm prompted upon every power-on to log into my AtGames account. This requires either tapping both my email address and password through a QWERTY keyboard with a d-pad, or taking a photo of a QR code on my logged-in smartphone. Every. Single. Time. AtGames reps weren't able to resolve why this keeps happening, despite the account in question having its email address verified among other various steps. Thankfully, every installed game works on my rig even when I skip this log-in notice.
A Wipeout, in terms of built-in games
Gottlieb tables pre-installed with AtGames' Legends Pinball cabinet.AtGames / Gottlieb
I showed one of the better-looking Gottlieb tables earlier, but this is what you can expect at their worst: unflattering, low-resolution scans.
This blurriness isn't the camera's fault. That's the shoddy scan.
Playfield fares a bit better, but it's still blurrier than I'd like—and all of the Gottlieb tables are generally very, very flat in action.
Haunted House's multi-level arrangement looks particularly iffy with AtGames' flat presentation.
The "sunken" playfield floats weirdly in the center.
A tighter zoom of the iffy presentation.
Compare that to an average Zaccaria table, which hums with depth and lighting effects.
Closer zoom shows light bouncing off these elements.
You can change the "time of day" with Zaccaria tables, which is a nice touch to reveal their depth further.
Nighttime is the right time.
My last complaint revolves around the built-in games, all designed by Gottlieb. You may best remember Gottlieb's licensed '80s and '90s pins, but unsurprisingly, AtGames has opted not to acquire the rights for the likes of Super Mario Bros., Stargate, and Street Fighter II. Yet even the manufacturer's original IP is sporadic in this machine, with some famous and solid machines (Black Hole, Cactus Jack, Gladiators, Lights... Camera... Action!, Wipeout) making an appearance, while others (Genie, Joker Poker, Countdown) are absent.
I'd argue that only about 10 of the built-in cabinets are worth more than a passing glance, but even with these, the production values are weak. Some of the machine art has been scanned at a shockingly low resolution, and the engine powering the virtual pinball action errs on the side of minimal visual flourish. There are stodgy animations on some tables and a hilariously flat-shaded pinball cursing every single title. This ball has no shadow or depth, and the result looks worse than what you'd find in an average '90s PC pinball compilation. At least the gameplay itself is robust, even if the ball physics are a smidge floaty and I've seen some occasional polygonal collision weirdness while playing them.
Thankfully, the system's Zaccaria add-on packs prove that this isn't an issue with the built-in SoC, as these all run at a crisp 60 fps refresh with higher-res art and a dynamic lighting system. On most Zaccaria tables, you can select a "time of day" toggle before playing, and this will bathe the entire table in ambient light that reflects "morning," "afternoon," or "evening." It's a fantastic touch in terms of adding perceptible depth to your new, virtual rig. If you purchase the hardware without any Zaccaria packs included by default, they each contain a mix of timeless, intricate tables and ho-hum duds lost to time, so I can't necessarily recommend any of the five packs (each $50 a pop, outside of sales) in particular. You can see for yourself on a PC, as the same virtual tables are available on Steam—and, like Pinball FX3, these tables are heavily discounted during the current Steam Summer Sale. (The recommended "Starter Pack" is 90 percent off as of press time.)
Verdict: The better virtual pinball choice, if you fuss with it
AtGames wins on paper with expandability, Internet connectivity, a bigger, better default screen, a secondary screen, a better SoC, built-in "nudge" buttons, a cadence of frequent firmware and feature updates, and the option to add either Bluetooth controllers or a built-in arcade control suite.
Arcade1Up, meanwhile, has everything a family might want in a set-and-forget system. The sound is better. The default games have wider appeal and run on a better engine than the aforementioned Gottlieb slew. The menu system is far simpler. And its solenoid- and speaker-powered sensation of virtual pinball is better.
If you've gotten this far in an Ars review of virtual pinball, you're more likely to appreciate AtGames' value proposition, period. This is the system you want in this price category, and if you were planning on modding whichever system you buy anyway, AtGames' option starts you off on a better foot.
But if you have designs on propping this up as an awesome showcase in your home arcade, ready for any visiting friends to play with zero friction, you have some work to do whether you rely on AtGames' built-in OS or whether you create a perfectly tailored connected-PC experience. In the latter case, that will require a nearby mouse, Joy2Key fussing, and some sort of top-level game-loader system, lest you make your friends futz with a PC OS when they want to switch from pinball to Pengo. Hey—finicky as that may sound, it's still more convenient than storing hundreds of working pinball machines in a single hangar.https://ift.tt/3AtSvYD
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