Is The Pinball Arcade Too "Demanding" on some devices?

I play on an ipod touch 4g which is the "latest model." However, this "latest model" is almost two years old. There was no updated model last year and I'm looking forward to a new one this fall. It seems as if The Pinball Arcade really taxes not only the battery life but this ios device's performance capabilities. Now, this isn't the only game app I have on here that can be power hungry. I got a couple Cave shooters that are demanding as well.

Nonetheless, TPA really seems to push this device. Like many others, I get crashing sometimes while attempting to load the menu and Ripley's has some serious slowdown issues. Note that Game Center is off. Now when I first bought TPA with the original four tables Ripley's played fine without the slowdown issues that I'm seeing currently.

My fiance' has a first gen ipad and TPA operates a bit better on there. I'm asking anyone else who is using "older" ios devices like the ipod touch 4g or iphone 4 or even a first gen ipad if they think TPA is just too taxing? Or is it just bad programming with too many bugs that are making a mess of things?

I have a 1st Gen iPad and TPA is just awful on it. Remember back in the day when LCD monitors came out and had a grey-to-grey response time of about an hour ? remember trying to play games on those ? that's what it feels like playing TPA on my iPad. It's got a kind of ghosted quality on the moving ball @ around 6fps. I have a 4th Gen iPod, but I don't play TPA on it.

Aside from anything else, touchscreen controls annoy me.

laughing_lunatic said:

I have a 1st Gen iPad and TPA is just awful on it.

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Weird. Plays absolutely fine on my 1st gen iPad. Agree that touchscreen controls aren't ideal but feels good and responsive at least (better than PS3 for example).

laughing_lunatic said:

I have a 1st Gen iPad and TPA is just awful on it. Remember back in the day when LCD monitors came out and had a grey-to-grey response time of about an hour ? remember trying to play games on those ? that's what it feels like playing TPA on my iPad. It's got a kind of ghosted quality on the moving ball @ around 6fps. I have a 4th Gen iPod, but I don't play TPA on it.

Aside from anything else, touchscreen controls annoy me.

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Mine plays great. In fact i'm amazed how well it runs on my first gen. Rbion has serious problems though. With gamecenter off the rest run smoothly, with it on mb is a tiny bit laggy but almost unnoticable. Definitely nothing like what you're describing, unless you're only playing ripley's.

By the way this is the best ios game i've played and i've played a lot.

I just heard that the latest Mac point release upped its OS requirements out of the blue.

pinbot said:

Mine plays great. In fact i'm amazed how well it runs on my first gen. Rbion has serious problems though. With gamecenter off the rest run smoothly, with it on mb is a tiny bit laggy but almost unnoticable. Definitely nothing like what you're describing, unless you're only playing ripley's.

By the way this is the best ios game i've played and i've played a lot.

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I don't remember what table I tried. Maybe I should revisit. I'm not a iPad "dude" and don't know any teenagers, so may you guys can help: is there a way of seeing what, if any, app were running in the background ? Or TSR's ? Maybe that was the issue.

Hmmmm, best ios game ? I wiped out the planet the other day on the subway home with **** Pox, playing Plague Inc. That was a lot of fun.

Fuseball said:

Weird. Plays absolutely fine on my 1st gen iPad. Agree that touchscreen controls aren't ideal but feels good and responsive at least (better than PS3 for example).

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I would say my 1st gen iPad is pretty good. I should add that I have game center on. It does get a little jittery at times. RBION is the worst offender, especially during multiball. On the other tables it doesn't bother me so much. I have a bigger problem withe the crappy nudging.

laughing_lunatic said:

I don't remember what table I tried. Maybe I should revisit. I'm not a iPad "dude" and don't know any teenagers, so may you guys can help: is there a way of seeing what, if any, app were running in the background ? Or TSR's ? Maybe that was the issue.

Hmmmm, best ios game ? I wiped out the planet the other day on the subway home with **** Pox, playing Plague Inc. That was a lot of fun.

Click to expand...

On ios devices about the only thing you can do, short of hacking it, to see what's running in the background is to clear the multi tasking bar. To do that double tap the home button which brings up the bar at the bottom of the screen with the most recent apps that you have been running. Hold your finger on one till it starts shaking and has the "delete" x on it. Delete everything that's in that bar and it sometimes helps with performance issues.

dtown8532 said:

On ios devices about the only thing you can do, short of hacking it, to see what's running in the background is to clear the multi tasking bar. To do that double tap the home button which brings up the bar at the bottom of the screen with the most recent apps that you have been running. Hold your finger on one till it starts shaking and has the "delete" x on it. Delete everything that's in that bar and it sometimes helps with performance issues.

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yes, this. i have found that doing this to close apps instead of just hitting the "home" button drastically improves battery life and game performance. it's a really silly quirk of the IOS that it doesn't really close apps unless you force it to.

a lot of times, i'll load up Pinball Arcade and notice it's moving a bit sluggish on my iPad 2. i'll then double-tap the home button and usually see a dozen phineas and ferb, PBS kids, nick jr, and disney apps open. my daughter strikes again! i shut them all down, and game performance suddenly improves.

dtown8532 said:

On ios devices about the only thing you can do, short of hacking it, to see what's running in the background is to clear the multi tasking bar. To do that double tap the home button which brings up the bar at the bottom of the screen with the most recent apps that you have been running. Hold your finger on one till it starts shaking and has the "delete" x on it. Delete everything that's in that bar and it sometimes helps with performance issues.

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cool, thanks for the tip...

Edit: Worked a treat, by the way. Took me about a minute to clear all the apps. I think everything I ever opened was in that list. Very playable after I was done !

laughing_lunatic said:

cool, thanks for the tip...

Edit: Worked a treat, by the way. Took me about a minute to clear all the apps. I think everything I ever opened was in that list. Very playable after I was done !

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Yes i've become obsessive about closing all apps from the background. Wish there was a button to clear all.
Anyway another thing that i find helps performance at least temporarily especially after installing/deleting a bunch of things is to do a forced shutdown cycle. Just press and hold the home and power btns at the same time. Hold both until you see the apple in center of screen and release. Takes a min or two. Usually comes back a bit peppy-er.

All I know is that once upon a time I had an iPod 4th gen just like yours that was smooth and snappy as butter.

Then I put a new version of iOS on it, and now when I hit the lock button, the lock sound would sometimes comes two or three seconds later. Scrolling in my photoscreen was choppy as well. A newer version kinda fixed this, but still, it´s not running as smoothly as it used to.

I´ve heard similar stories about users of older iPhones, and to be honest, not being able to revert the upgrade makes me strongly consider just never updating my iPad 3 at all. It runs absolutely lovely right now, and I don´t need any of that new stuff in iOS 6.

Thanks for the iOS tip! I only had like a million things running...

The worst is push notifications coming up during a game...

laughing_lunatic said:

I don't remember what table I tried. Maybe I should revisit. I'm not a iPad "dude" and don't know any teenagers, so may you guys can help: is there a way of seeing what, if any, app were running in the background ? Or TSR's ? Maybe that was the issue.

Hmmmm, best ios game ? I wiped out the planet the other day on the subway home with **** Pox, playing Plague Inc. That was a lot of fun.

Click to expand...

Wow, you are old. I don't remember hearing anyone use the term TSR since before Windows came out.
The game plays great on my iPad 1 and I don't worry about anything running in the background.
If you want to be sure that every single thing is closed on your iPad, Double tap the home button and you will see a little task bar. Hold down on one of the icons until a red X appears, then close every single one. There will be a ton if you have never done this. Don't worry, not all of them are actually running in the background, but if one is, this will be sure to close it. The only things I have actually seen run in the background are navigation software like MapQuest, Pedometers, alarm clocks, and music players.

TSR = "Terminate and Stay Resident". One of the first ever background apps for MS-DOS, Borland's "Sidekick", made it's fortune using that quirk since it made calendars, calculators, and notes appear to multitask in a primarily single-tasking environment. I hadn't thought about it in a long time, but the way Apple has implemented multi-tasking in iOS does seem a lot like TSR from the old DOS days. It’s just that, in effect, every app TSR's by default!

It's most definitely a demanding game. It's full 60 frames per second with good geometry, textures, and lighting. Runs perfectly and looks absolutely gorgeous on my Iphone 4s.