Play The PS4 Version Today ! (In Select Locations)

Experienceplaystation.com

Live near a Sony store? You can sample the PS4 at a demo qiosk, and one of the selected demo games is Pinball Arcade!

The website isn't working on my phone but ill be checking soon to see if I have a Sony store in my area.

Granted I haven't been to a mall in ages, well see.

No idea which table/tables are playable.

Great news!

Thanks for the heads up.

Yw.

The website is, in fact, working. I literally do not have one of these stores within a hundred miles.

Hopefully someone can do some scouting for us if they have a store nearby.

I think it's very cool that pinball arcade is one of the games demoed.

Ill be in the DC area next week if we don't get impressions, there's a store out there so ill have pictures video and impressions next week. Excite!

Mini review of the beta (which was on beta PS4 demo kits):

I have about 15 TPA tables, and really enjoyed the Williams Collection, so I was eager to check this out. I headed out to one of the local Sony stores that had three demo units. I took my time examining the controller first, and it is indeed an amazing little unit as the write-ups have said. I then selected TPA out of the six demos on the machine.

Cirqus Voltaire is the only machine option. I never liked the machine and rarely played it before. It looks fantastic, especially for a launch title. The new lighting engine is absolutely beautiful. The vast majority of gamers will be pleased by this release.

I let the fly-over demo go for a bit, appreciating the new look, but was disappointed at the closeup of the stored pinballs in the top area - they were textured (poorly) instead of wrapped in a chrome texture. During the action it isn't an issue at all, and the balls rolling around are very reflective of the playfield.

Before launching the ball, I played around with the left analog stick a bit for tilt control. The new analog design removed the old PS3 controller's dead zone, and I could tell immediately. You can BAAAARELY touch the stick and the table will barely nudge. The harder you hit it, the harder the nudge. Up, down, left, right, and diagonal nudges were all working well.

I can't comment on input lag or not because I don't know the settings of the 55" machine I played, but the game felt really, really good. The sounds were off, so no comment there, but as I played the game I appreciated the overall quality work that obviously went into it. Even the playfield texture, commented by others early, looked really good as the event camera zoomed in and out. The physics seemed to be on point, with no weird trajectory angles affecting the ball that I could tell (PS3 Attack From Mars, I'm looking at you!). I was able to easily control my shots, do post passes, etc. with little effort in the one, 100 million+ game that I played.

Now for the bad news. Whenever the lights start going crazy during multiball (and this table can have at least four balls on the field at once), the frame rate can drop. How bad? Most times when it happened, it slipped from 60 fps to the 30s. At its worst it literally dropped down into the low teens!

Now, before we attack Farsight with torches and pitchforks, keep in mind that this is a beta game on a beta console - nothing is final. It takes a minute to exit a game to go back to the limited PS4 main menu. Also, during development of any game, optimizations is the last step. No doubt Farsight is cleaning things up now. We'll have to wait for the final results though, but I'll stay encouraged since we know how much they love pinball to settle for iPhone2 frame rates on the PS4.

Thanks for the report, joe! A little worrying about the multiball framerate there, but optimization is often one of the last things to get done, so...fingers crossed. : o

If you use Facebook it might be interesting to go to their page ask them about the framerate you experienced and whether or not they think they'll have that smoothed out for launch.

Thanks for the info. I'm glad to hear that it looks and plays well, but yeah, the drop in frames should never be able issue with an 8 core CPU and a GPU shader running at 1.8TeraFLOPS.

It should be able to handle pinball at 1080p/60fps (locked), while supporting stereoscopic 3D with ease.

I'm pretty sure head are the versions we will see on 11/15. I doubt Farsight will get another revision approved by Sony in less than a month.


Also,
I find it slightly alarming that the PS4 version of TPA is 28 days away and yet there is no high quality direct video showing more than a flash of gameplay from a few of the tables.

Thanks for posting your impressions Joe, much appreciated!

spoonman said:

I'm pretty sure head are the versions we will see on 11/15. I doubt Farsight will get another revision approved by Sony in less than a month.

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Sony has said that their approval process for PS4 stuff will be much more streamlined than on PS3; also, this is a system launch, they want to get it right, I tend to think the whole company is going to be in testing and approval mode for their digital launch titles all the way up to launch. More to the point though, what makes you think that this demo wasn't put together months ago?

~~~~~

I think it's also worth pointing out that as with the TPA "coming soon to PS4" video Sony released, FarSight has been mum about this. One explanation that occurs to me is that the push to get these marketing glimpses out is coming from Sony, not FarSight, and that FarSight are really just concerned about working on getting the game itself done, so these preliminary versions we've seen from Sony haven't really represented versions of the game FarSight wants to sign their names to. I realize this theory is somewhat wishful thinking on my part. : P

smbhax said:

Sony has said that their approval process for PS4 stuff will be much more streamlined than on PS3; also, this is a system launch, they want to get it right, I tend to think the whole company is going to be in testing and approval mode for their digital launch titles all the way up to launch. More to the point though, what makes you think that this demo wasn't put together months ago?

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True, but wouldn't the same hold true for the all important demos which are being prominently featured in the Sony stores?
I would think they would have the most up to date revisions possible to showcase.

Regardless, I don't believe there should be any reason for slowdown on a pinball game being run on a PS4 system. Perhaps on the very first alpha build or something, but I highly doubt Farsight would send Sony an alpha build for demoing.

Either way... I just hope they get it worked out. My PS4 will be here next month and I plan on getting TPA for it.

Wow slowdown on a PS4 game... I knew the 1.6ghz CPU was going to be an issue. I don't care how many cores it has, that's pathetic CPU. Should have been up clocked to at least 1.8Ghz preferably 2.0Ghz, and ram taken down to 6 gigs (to balance the extra heat). Killzone, the premier PS4 game, is a screen tearing fest. And this is the PS4, imagine how the Xbox One will fair!!!

Not blaming Farsight at all. Just very disappointed to hear this.

Yadda yadda gpgpu compute but it's too early I guess coding tools immature.

I say bake the damn lighting. Dynamic real time is overrated. Frame rate is #1 especially in a game like this.

I'm seriously thinking of cancelling my pre order ps4, there's hardly anything worth playing, especially at 350 quid, and gaming isn't very high on my list these days. This version should not run like this, hardly anything to show the ps4 's' power ' is it?
Not happy.

I think that you should all keep in mind that the kiosk demo version could be 6 weeks older than the launch version and all the resource optimizations could be accomplished towards the end of the development cycle. I'm sure FS knows what framerates are acceptable and wouldn't release a version that they themselves wouldn't enjoy playing. I suggest that we all wait for the official gameplay footage and the final version of the hardware and software to be released, before we make judgments.

I'm hoping to see what they have at the Chicago Pinball Expo today. Will report back.

brakel said:

I'm hoping to see what they have at the Chicago Pinball Expo today. Will report back.

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Ooh!

Sounds good, brakel.

We just got back home to take a break for a few hours and then we're going back after midnight. I played TPA on the PS4 for about 15 minutes. I played 4 different machines and played with the light settings a bit. There are three light settings dark, neutral and bright. The bright setting lights up the play field quite evenly with a nice diffused light. For those that want to see the art and toys in bright living color, this setting will work well. The neutral setting is like playing a table during the day with the lights off but a distant window lighting up the room. The dark setting is pretty nice with a more darkened table but not quite total lights out. Details can be seen even when not lit up by table lights. I thought that the neutral setting wasn't really needed and that there should be a darker setting than dark and that dark should be neutral. Bright can remain bright. The guy working the booth agreed and said that he didn't think the dark was dark enough and that you shouldn't be able to see the floor in the dark setting. He also said that the only person that mattered on the issue agreed that the dark setting should be darker. But darkness settings! Yea!

I didn't detect any flipper lag. I noticed that my shots were a little early at times so I'm thinking that it's going to be good on this issue.

I didn't see any frame rate slowdowns. I only got multiball going on STTNG and Gophers but I didn't see any issues.

I think the weird blooming effects that we've seen in some pictures have been toned down. I thought that the lighting was gorgeous.

My only real disappointment had nothing to do with the game. I didn't really like the controller. It seems smaller than the PS3 controller with smaller shoulder buttons. I'm sure I can get used to it. I didn't like the PS3 controllers at first either.

brakel said:

We just got back home to take a break for a few hours and then we're going back after midnight. I played TPA on the PS4 for about 15 minutes. I played 4 different machines and played with the light settings a bit. There are three light settings dark, neutral and bright. The bright setting lights up the play field quite evenly with a nice diffused light. For those that want to see the art and toys in bright living color, this setting will work well. The neutral setting is like playing a table during the day with the lights off but a distant window lighting up the room. The dark setting is pretty nice with a more darkened table but not quite total lights out. Details can be seen even when not lit up by table lights. I thought that the neutral setting wasn't really needed and that there should be a darker setting than dark and that dark should be neutral. Bright can remain bright. The guy working the booth agreed and said that he didn't think the dark was dark enough and that you shouldn't be able to see the floor in the dark setting. He also said that the only person that mattered on the issue agreed that the dark setting should be darker. But darkness settings! Yea!

I didn't detect any flipper lag. I noticed that my shots were a little early at times so I'm thinking that it's going to be good on this issue.

I didn't see any frame rate slowdowns. I only got multiball going on STTNG and Gophers but I didn't see any issues.

I think the weird blooming effects that we've seen in some pictures have been toned down. I thought that the lighting was gorgeous.

My only real disappointment had nothing to do with the game. I didn't really like the controller. It seems smaller than the PS3 controller with smaller shoulder buttons. I'm sure I can get used to it. I didn't like the PS3 controllers at first either.

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Thanks for the report man. I am glad to hear you didn't notice any slowdown. Perhaps it was a newer patched version of TPA running on that kiosk.

Mark Wyda said:

Wow slowdown on a PS4 game... I knew the 1.6ghz CPU was going to be an issue. I don't care how many cores it has, that's pathetic CPU. Should have been up clocked to at least 1.8Ghz preferably 2.0Ghz, and ram taken down to 6 gigs (to balance the extra heat). Killzone, the premier PS4 game, is a screen tearing fest. And this is the PS4, imagine how the Xbox One will fair!!!

Not blaming Farsight at all. Just very disappointed to hear this.

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Really?! I can't tell if you are being serious or sarcastic.. hopefully the latter.

Housemarque's Resogun has no problems animating 500,000 voxels at once plus particle effects, point sprites, each with their own geometry, collisions and physics, and each has its own lighting and casts it's own shadow as well.

No slowdown here:

1080p video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XGwZ0kGO28#t=24

Other games that show off it's "pathetic CPU"
Watch Dogs 1080p PS4 14 minute demo
Tom Clancy's The Division 1080p PS4 7 minute demo
inFAMOUS: Second Son E3 Live Demo HD