UPDATE: Dave Sanders, our resident designer/expert, believes what happened in this clip is what’s called a “slam tilt.” Basically, Zen Studios made the shaking too violent and too non-stop. Even though the game is a simulation of a real table, they accounted for the tilt mechanism, and since it shakes more than a real life table, it activated the slam tilt which reboots the ROM back to the attract screen. Zen, you need to disable the slam tilt in the ROM.
How’s this for quick thoughts on Earthshaker for Pinball FX? This is literally the second game we’d played of Earthshaker. Two games in, and this happened:
Two games and doing nothing but playing the table and hitting shots caused the ROM to reset back to the attract screen, ending the game. We’re not the only ones who have experienced this either. Does anyone play test at Zen Studios anymore? Black Knight 2000 and Banzai Run both are supposed to give you an extra ball when you score 4.5 Million (Black Knight) or 1.8 million (Banzai Run). Neither extra ball happens. It takes like, at most, ten minutes of average skill gameplay to find that out. This is getting so tiring. You know, Zen Studios, maybe it’s not just the double dipping on pricing of legacy tables or pinball pass that caused the users to evaporate. Maybe casual fans are annoyed that they buy the tables NOW but they won’t be in full working order until later. And even that’s not a certainty. I mean, it’s been how long since Sky Pirates released? Or Jurassic World, which dumps balls straight down the drain. So this Earthshaker glitch doesn’t surprise me. I want to say “I expect better from Zen Studios.” It’s what I would have said in 2020. I wouldn’t say it anymore, because I don’t expect better from them. This is exactly what I expect.
This is a tailspin I don’t see Zen pulling out of because all signs point to it getting worse and worse. With this crash from Earthshaker, all three Williams 8 tables have super frustrating annoyances (the missing extra balls in the previous tables really lessen the enjoyment of those pins makes it feel like Zen simply does not give a f*ck). Nobody wants to bitch about glitches. I don’t. I love Zen Studios’ pinball. But a non-working game is a non-working game, and I don’t want to invest time in any table that has a random chance of ending in the middle of the game. I’ve lost world record games to glitches before, and because I contend on leaderboards, that really feels like a punch to the gut. That’s the whole point, right? To score a lot of points? And yet, I’ve experienced more anger from Pinball FX “fans” than I have any sense of comradery. I don’t get this “so what if it’s glitchy?” mentality. This is the same company that got pissy at content creators who were using Visual Pinball and PinMAME because it was stealing games they owned the right to, for free. But the paid product Zen offers is unstable and kind of bad these days. Especially when new tables come out. To you “fans” who get angry at any glitch report, I ask you “do you want Zen Studios to go belly-up?” Because studios that can’t put out working games don’t last. No matter how long they’ve been around. Getting angry at people reporting bugs is like an automotive fan getting angry at the driver because their car spontaneously exploded while driving down the freeway. What are you mad at THEM for when they were just doing what the product is supposed to do?
The Pinball Chick 
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