sethsez: Nope, not at all. I like the difficulty... the difficulty, in fact, is what makes the game compelling at all. Otherwise you end up with tedious Zen Pinball forever-games where an activity that's meant to take fifteen to twenty minutes max winds up taking two hours and becomes tedious beyond all belief.
Complaining about incredibly difficult reaction times and mechanical difficulty in pinball is like complaining about luck in poker or overwhelming options in a 4X: I understand where you're coming from, but the genre just clearly isn't for you.
You have mentioned "beating" the game multiple times. That's not how the genre even works. It's a score attack, and the difficulty is in place to make the score meaningful. Even the wizard mode isn't "beating" the game, it's just another big pile of points. Pinball does not have a win state, so yeah, no wonder you're getting frustrated, you're playing for something that doesn't exist. It's like being pissed because you just can't get a high score in Final Fantasy.
I mean... you keep saying it's impossible and humans just can't do it and so on... yet there's plenty of people who play pinball and, with practice, get EXTREMELY good at it. It's not unplayable, it's just difficult. I hate to say "learn to play" as a response to criticisms because I generally fin it dismissive, but that's really the solution to your complaints here. It's a reaction-based score attack, making that easy would defeat the entire purpose of the exercise. If you have bad reactions, it's not the genre for you.
I've been playing pinball for years so this is clearly the genre for me. I see your point but I think pinball for me is like what vertical shooters are for Ross Scott: they are awesome but very few get it completely right. even your favourites have horrible issues too, but can still be fun when you finally master them, like Marathon on Total Carnage or Halo on Legendary. (sans Halo 2) I think I earned the right to point out flaws I never even thought about or considered for 19 1/2 years.
That said, I locked my first crystal fragment just now and time travelled for the first time as well soon after reading your post. It took 19 1/2 years to do it as I've only seen other time zones by adding more players and choosing the laughably named "novice" mode (which gives you more continents and a longer ball saver, but only one ball).
Maybe I am just finally getting a little better but I still want a savegame feature done Tyrian 2000 style to make it less unforgiving.
Besides, some people have done it but only a select few. the pinball wizard might be one,
and he was blind, but he was just a rock opera character from a song by the Who.
I am able to beat wizard mode on Sonic Pinball party because that table is a bit easier with clear extra-ball and unlimited non-useless nudge mechanics to abuse, as well as an easy rule to follow for unlocking wizard mode. (play Ring mode on every table stage) A shame that other tables don't do the same.
EDIT: here's a link to Ross's Tyrian game dungeon episode for a better explanation of what I mean.
http://www.accursedfarms.com/movies/rgd/tyrian/
Full disclosure: I really, really don't like Tyrian. I find it has the same problem as easy pinball: it takes a genre that thrives on quick bursts of intense action and, by making them easier and longer, stretches the runtime beyond what the simple mechanics can support, and by easing up on the difficulty you're removing the adrenaline rush, which is all they really have to offer. It also makes score completely meaningless, because setting a high score is so trivial that it fails to be an accurate measurement of skill, and instead just acts as a motivational gold star. Feels nice to get, but you can't really compete based on it, and pinball is all about indirect competition through score.
Making pinball (or shmups) easier is a bit like making a car chase in a movie longer by having everyone drive at half the speed. I mean, yeah, it's lasting longer, but the excitement is gone, and without that I don't have much reason to watch an action movie.
Basically, pinball NEEDS to have an extremely high skill ceiling, because if it doesn't you get the Zen Pinball problem where people can just play indefinitely. Since there's no ending condition, the game ending relies on the player failing, and if the basic mechanics aren't going to kill the player you either need to rely on unfair bullshit out of nowhere (like a lot of virtual pinball does) or just... accept that scores are going to based on endurance rather than skill. Neither of those are terribly good options.
Timeshock is a difficult game, but it's perfectly fair. It lets you know exactly what it's going to do and has controls responsive and predictable enough to make it possible to consistently do what it wants... but it's difficult and punishes mistakes harshly. However, as you noted, it IS possible to get better, and doing so will get you a better score, which is the entire point!
Now, granted, there ARE pinball games that do what you want. The Pokemon Pinball games were incredibly easy but added alternate goals, Rollers of the Realm on Steam is an adventure game played via pinball, Sonic Pinball Party is one of these as you said, and I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting... but in all of those cases they're purposefully abandoning the score aspect to do something else with the mechanics. Timeshock is a score-oriented game, and as such, it needs to be balanced to properly measure skill. And to do THAT, it needs a very high skill ceiling, or else it fails as a measurement.
If you want pinball AS AN EXPERIENCE, rather than AS A METHOD OF COMPETITION VIA SCORE, then Timeshock isn't the game for you, and neither is most real-world pinball. But that's not a failure on their part... you're just looking for different things than they're looking to provide. Same goes for Tyrian versus something like DoDonPachi.
