By Todd Russell
Yesterday, on the (NO) Blue Monday stream I decided to check out the PS5+ Premium that I spent like $185 for the year and see how worth it — or not — it was. Scrolling through the long list of playable games, classics and modern ,came to the ccnclusion there was plenty there to play for the money.
Then, I played for hours a game I’ve owned for years now: Stern Pinball Arcade (https://store.playstation.com/en-us/concept/227232)
Originally bought this for the PS4 and played it a bit on there. My memory was the physics in the game were jacked up, but the games still were fun to play. I mean, they are based on some great original tables like AC DC (Stern) Star Trek and one of my favorite Sega pins: Starship Trooper.
Something occurred to me about halfway through the stream that I haven’t really written about here before: sometimes fun in a game is not over nitpicking the mechanics of gameplay.
We’ve covered hopes that Stern would release a new virtual pinball version that has some/many/all of their SPIKE 2 games: Stern feels previous licensed Virtual Pinball versions were “not to [our] standards” but open to exploring again. Hard to believe it’s been almost 10 years since those games were published.
You can still buy most of the DLC tables, just not AC DC because the license has run out. Most, maybe all of these games can be played through VPX, much better versions, too, and yet if you still have this old game kicking around, even if the Steam ratings are “mostly negative” maybe running it one more time and looking at what’s there will give you a bit of nostalgia, as done for me yesterday.
Surprised me somewhat that I spent literally hours playing this game when other versions exist that are better. Maybe it’s the convenience of just firing up your PS5 or PS4, choosing the icon and playing? VPX an FP can be that experience, once the newest version is installed, configured and running, but it’s not exactly plug and play ready like Zen Pinball, Zaccaria and both versions of the Pinball Arcade.
Think at the end of the day, I just like playing all types of pinball: virtual pinball, old and new, good and, yes, even sometimes bad. Some time ago I spent time playing the rather crude Atari 2600 Video Pinball. In 2025, this game seems very outdated, and yet it’s still fun to play. You can find and play this game on the excellent Atari 50 DLC – ‘The First Console War’. This game should have been included with the original Atari 50: collection, but they made up for it with the DLC pack. This remains one of my favorite games to play on the Steam Deck, see: Replay Game Spotlight (RGS #6): Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection.
Maybe yesterday’s stream was more about wanting to travel back in time and play those games again. It’s a recurring theme that is subtle at times. Meanwhile, I received a negative review for an AI Kills song “Artificial Hell” off the new album STILLBIRTH that we’re doing the listening party tomorrow that reads as follows:
This is available to listen to and stream on Slaps, Distrokid’s social network as of this writing, but I’m not planning on keeping it there, hence not linking here. You’ll be able to listen to this everywhere on Friday and tomorrow on the listening party.
The comment isn’t without merit, but was still marked it as “not helpful” because:
- I didn’t ask AI to write a Dio song. Nor did I ask it to write a song that was “like Dio”. Dio is an influence, I love Ronnie James DIo music and have bought all his albums over the years. Wore the T-shirts, watched videos, you name it. Dio is the man, but copying him wasn’t the plan
- I wrote — very much a human being — lyrics that were part of an original story and asked Suno (the AI) v4.5 to write a song in a certain style and theme and it returned a song that does sounds a lot like Dio.
- Sadly, we can’t get any more new Dio music, unless there is some that his wife/manager Wendy has unreleased in the vault. Ronnie passed away sadly from pancreatic cancer on May 16, 2010. He’s not singing any new songs. Wendy tried to do a virtual experience thing and it was met with mixed reactions from fans
Reality check: eventually everybody reading this at the time it was published will be dead, too. If people at some time in the future can never make music inspired by this great music, is that a good or bad thing?
Just like we can’t get any more Stern Pinball Arcade. Some will say that’s good and some, like me, think that’s a bummer. For all of AI gen warts that exist, the one that some people seem to forget is it can give us new content that is similar in style and substance, but heavily influenced.
Isn’t that what fuels all creative expression?
Oh, and by the way, there have been 3 of 18 requested reviews on SubmitHub for this song. The other two are positive, so 66% of them are positive and one is negative. Here are the other two received:
Some reading might think, why did you mark these two positive ratings as “helpful” and the negative one as “not helpful”, am I only looking for positive reviews? No. Submithub allows filtering out of music that is AI generated and I checked the box that said it was AI generated. This musician chose not to filter out AI gen music from a band that is clearly and transparently labeled as AI gen and then rated it negatively because it was AI. By my book, that’s not helpful. Others might disagree and in fairness to the musician that chose to rate this negatively, maybe s/he simply is looking for something AI that doesn’t sound like Dio and yet is categorized as Hard Rock.
We may never know. Am going to keep pressing on, playing older games that some (many) people don’t like, making music, yes, AI and human generated that some don’t like either, because it’s not about the people that don’t like something, it’s about the people who do.
Happy gaming to you!