BEAST MASTER

Beast Master is one of the “bonus” tables of Zaccaria Pinball. For AtGames Legends Pinball, they tossed those pins into the Zaccaria packs as +1 throw-in bonuses for the actual tables people would want (though let it be said that Speed Kings in Zaccaria Pack 8 is likely to enter the Pinball Chick Pantheon of Digital Pinball). Overall, Zaccaria Pack 1 is as good a collection of tables as it gets. Aerobatics is Certified Excellent. Black Belt, Black Belt Remake, and Circus likely will also be issued certificates. That’s a $60 value by our standards. Needless to say, we consider this to be a must-own pack for Legends owners and recommend that you buy it. And if you hear a strange banging noise when you do, pay no heed to it. It’s just Ed Krynski spinning in his grave because the pack comes with Beast Master. In our house, we revere Big Pin Kryn, and this bastardization of his famous 1979 widebody Genie feels like a crime against pinball. Now, it is an interesting thought experiment come to life. “What if you shrank a widebody? What do you get?” And Genie is just about as famous as that subgenre gets. Seems like a good place to start. But, there’s two HUGE problems with this smaller take on Kryn’s Djinn. First: they shrank the flippers, too. So this doesn’t feel like solid state. It feels like a boardwalk style clanker. See, shrinking a flipper doesn’t equally shrink your ability to aim, because aiming isn’t simply a function of where the ball is when you flip. Oh, that matters too, but you also have to consider that smaller flippers mean less surface to run off speed and fewer angles for rebounding. Rebounding is function of shooting. So, shrink a normal flipper by half and you’re reducing the potential to aim by significantly more than half. Like, as much as an eighty percent reduction. Needless to say, you can’t shrink flippers just because you also shrank a widebody into a standard. Thus a layout that should be a sharp shooter is eroded into, at its best, a slap shooter where you’re focused on keeping the ball in play. And that’s being very generous, because I don’t even think fans of slap shooters (as many of Krynski’s pins are) will like this. That’s why the leaderboard scores are so low. Even pros can’t work with these nubby little things. Not that it matters, because the dynamic scoring of Genie is gone completely, replaced by fewer targets that have lock-down scoring and no end-of-ball bonuses. You either hit an entire section of targets, every last one, or you can only get one score from each target. Either of these two factors would be a deal breaker by itself. Together, they make Beast Master one of Magic Pixel’s lowest points. They’re capable of amazing things, but when they phone it in? Oof.
Set: Zaccaria Pinball Pack 1
Type: Zaccaria Solid State – Rebuild
Design DNA: Genie by Gottlieb (1979)
Vice Family High: Sasha the Kid “KID” 44,900 (Top 20 All Time)
Cathy: THE PITS (1 out of 5)
Sasha the Kid: THE PITS
Angela: THE PITS
Oscar: THE PITS
Jordi: THE PITS*
Dave: THE PITS*
Scoring Average: 1.0 – CERTIFIED TURD
*Played on Zaccaria Pinball for Consoles/PC