iOS: iPinballs: Gangster Pinball

There's a new pinball title called iPinballs. It's decently done, I suppose, and normally I'd probably buy this. But it's free-to-play bull****. You get one ball for free, and everything else, as far as I can tell, must be purchased using in-game currency. You start with 3,000 coins, I think, and you can get another 3,000 for authenticating with Facebook.

But if you do the Facebook thing, make sure you shut it off right away, because the game is going to ask to post on your wall after every single game. And again, every game is only one ball long, so you'll be doing this pretty often. Well, you'll be doing this for a couple of minutes, at least, until you uninstall the game forever and ever. If you go into Settings.app to disable the app's access to Facebook, you'll get an error message inside of the game. That's cool.



I haven’t bought anything, even with my free coins, but everything looks consumable. It doesn’t seem possible to purchase a complete no-bull**** three pinball game. Here’s the shop:



It's not all bad, though. When you lose, you get to hear the sad Price Is Right "too bad, you just lost" horn sound. So there's that. And there's also some pretty hilarious voiceover work in Eastern-European sounding broken English that's pretty great. I converted the Core Audio voiceover file and threw it into Dropbox for your amusement. You can hear that here. From their App Store description, they imply that your purchase will get you all of their future tables for free. But with their toxic business model and their super low userbase, I’m guessing we might not see anything else. But whatever, it’s free, so give it a download if you want.

Do they really think annoying the hell out of you prospective user base is a sound business model?

I'll try it, but it sounds like too much work to be fun.

You can't even do a dead flipper pass. No bounce in the flippers. And one ball games stink. Yuck!
It is free but still not worth downloading.

thanks for the heads up / review. i will pass on this completely this is not a good trend making it all consumable. Pinball rocks had a "cheats" feature that used this business model that i do not like however you could play the regular game and ignore the end of game popup do you want to use an extra ball (consumable and only by purchase). This example is much worse with one ball only games and coins that can be wiped out in a few "balls" or "games".

Thanks for posting the audio file. The accent is hilarious considering that she describes it as "A view of old American life".

Tried it for a few minutes got bored of it quickly and then deleted it off my iPad.