![]() With Starfield being the center of the Xbox 2023 Showcase last week, Bethesda gave us a deep dive into one of the biggest games this generation. Official tournaments will be held from time to time, indicated by a flashing Tournament option on the main menu. Zen Pinball supports the PlayStation Eye so you can video chat during a game. You have unlimited balls but each lost ball results in a score penalty. Here, everyone plays at the same time in a race to reach a target score (set by the host). But the online games are a bit more interesting. During a local match, players take turns shooting each of their balls, just as they would if they were crowded around an actual pinball machine at an arcade. ![]() Players can engage in either local hotseat or online multiplayer battles. Then there are the feature-heavy multiplayer modes. Switching between menus sees the camera moving to another area of the table rather than loading a new screen. The menus are also slick, designed to look like various parts of a pinball table. While maneuvering menus and waiting for a game to load (tables do take a few moments to load, by the way) you are fed up-to-the minute updates on how people are performing online. The one-minute score is how many points you rack up in your first minute of play, and the score speed is your average points per second. First, there are the extensive online scoreboards that track everyone's high scores, best one-minute scores, and score speed. Zen Pinball was made to be a communal experience and it's filled with friendly ways to interact with other players. If the dot matrix score display is in your way you can move it around the screen, shrink it, or do away with it completely. Players should be able to find an angle that suits them. There are six different camera angles, some that follow the ball and some that are fixed. Getting a good view of the table is often a problem in video pinball, but Zen Pinball handles it pretty well. ![]() Zen has put a lot of care into crafting these tables. The operating menu uses the table's dot matrix display as its interface. Brave pinball super fans can delve into the operating menus and tweak the factory settings, check bookkeeping records, and adjust difficulty levels. Each table comes with its own rule sheet that will explain how the different areas of the machine work and how to manipulate it. The tables are all fun to play, look great, and are hiding all sorts of secrets you'll need to discover if you're going to rack up a high score. More in IGN's Daily Fix Here! (HD available). The PlayStation 3 controller's motion-sensing capabilities are generally stupid, but this is one case where they would seem to make sense. ![]() You can also give the table a nudge with the analog sticks, although it's a bit baffling that this function wasn't mapped to Sixaxis. As ever, your goal is to rack up a high score by keeping a ball in play with just the side flippers. What we have here are four original tables with the promise of more to come as downloadable content. ![]()
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