Game:

Zaccaria Pinball (2013)

Category:

Review

Duration: 4:38

842 views

19

Source of the pictures that appeared throughout the video:
http://www.pinballnews.com/learn/zaccaria/
(And also a very intereseting interview to Natale Zaccaria!)

Apparently they are very popular in Hungary, all the websites I ended up while searching were hungarian.
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REVIEW SCRIPT:
When I first saw the name of this game, Zaccaria Pinball, it immediately caught my attention. Since Zaccaria is an Italian name, I wondered “May this have something to deal with my country?”

As it turned out it was. Zaccaria was founded in 1974 by three brothers, Marino, Franco and Natale near Bologna. Between 1974 and 1988 they designed and manifactured about 47 pinball machines and 37 arcade games, mostly clones of already existing titles, and their pinballs managed to keep up with the more famous companies like Williams or Bally Manifacturing. In 1988 they reorganized under the Mr. Game label, producing some more pinballs and after bankruptcy the Zaccaria factory was sold to Tecnoplay, and it’s still active as an all around amusement games importer and mantainer, and its current manager is Mauro Zaccaria, the son of Marino, the founder.

Zaccaria Pinball was released in June 2016 by the Hungarian Magic Pixel Kft. for PC and Android.
On the topic of the game itself, is pretty much like the Pinball Arcade if you already know it, if not imagine playable virtual reproduction of real pinball machines, in this case reproduction of pinball machines manifactured by Zaccaria across its commercial activity.
Much like Pinball arcade only one table, Time Machine, is available for free while the others have to be bought or can be played for free until the score limit is reached.

Compared to Pinball Arcade, brace yourselves because there will be plenty of comparisons, the tables are cheaper, two euros compared to the four to five euros for Pinball Arcade tables, not to mention the Pro versions. For reference, pro version allows you you look freely around the table and access the operator’s control panel.

In Zaccaria Pinball the amount of customization available is impressive, a lot more compared to Pinball arcade, most of the stuff though is locked, and can be accessed only by buying the Bronze Membership pack for ten euros. Unless you are really interested in fine tweaking your pinball experience or experiment with some of the offered cosmetic features you won’t really need it.

One big step ahead compared to Pinball Arcade is the amount of gamemodes. Unlike the simple free play mode, Zaccaria Pinball also includes other gamemodes, mosly timed or objective based for instance you have to complete a task before time runs out to earn extra time, a great mode for the pinball wizards out there, or you have 90 seconds to score as many points as possible, but the most interesting is the Light Hunter, in which you have to turn off all the lights on the table by rolling the ball over them.

Another feature, that this time around was characteristic of some of the Zaccaria machines, that I personally enjoyed, is that on the third ball by scoring points a timer is also increased. When the third ball drains the player can keep on playing with extra balls as long as the timer doesn’t run out.

I’m not an expert of pinballs, I played them just two or three times in my lifetime, but the physics of the ball seems to be if not accurate at least realistic, even though I’m sure it’s not the same of a real machine, especially when playing with a controller compared to the actual buttons on the side of the pinball. A thing that disappointed me a bit is the fact that to lower the room lights, a very important aspect to fully enjoy the pinball lights in action, you have to buy the Bronze membership. A shame, really. Also, the interface is rough around the edges and the poor english is a big turn off.

Worth or not? Of course, a necessary condition is that you need to be a pinball fan, or at least someone who enjoys them, on the topic of the content of the game itself, it has less variety of model types, almost all of them are solid state models, although the developers plan to add more recent Zaccaria models, but the cheaper prices compared to the Pinball Arcade make them an interesting choice if you aren’t looking for a very specific pinball. And in any case, an excellent product to preserve the history of Zaccaria and its pinballs.

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