Today, Thursday November 30, 2023, Zen is launching their newest pinball engine, Pinball M, which they say will allow them to release more hardcore tables than they can/will publish under their Pinball FX. To quote the Steam description:
Get ready to tilt into terror. The new horror-inspired pinball platform for fearless players. Prove your skills on the most sinister, gory, and badass tables ever brought to life.
Steam/PC Pinball M description
Day 1 Pinball M will have cabinet mode for PC owners, and have compiled all the details in this post. Will continue to update this post after the launch and possibly be streaming it live later at twitch.tv/todd_russell, although Xfinity is having issues where we are locally, and it’s down as of this writing (am using a hotspot). Keep on eye today, because if you see me streaming, it will be cabinet mode Pinball M in glorious 4K. I’m planning on buying all the tables available, which appear to be the following:
CABINET BACKGLASS IMAGES
Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball 176
Dead by Daylight™ Pinball 174
The Thing Pinball 175
Chucky’s Killer Pinball 171
(FREE) Wrath of the Elder Gods – Director’s Cut 147
Note: the numbers at the end are the table IDs for backglass images. MCAP’s Corner Arcade Discord already already has backglasses up and available pinned in his subchannel located here (also backglasses available for all FX3 and FX tables):
https://discord.com/channels/843151453413441616/959451121120850011/1179788758309150834
These images need to be saved similarly to where the Pinball FX images were saved, only under the Pinball M directory.
Pinball M comes with one of these free (Wrath of the Elder Gods – Director’s Cut), and four will be DLC purchase separately, prices were announced as “same pricing as single table FX pricing” – and reportedly a Death Save Bundle will sell all four for $20 USD, as Steam has separate listings for the following:
- Pinball M – Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball on Steam (steampowered.com)
- Pinball M – Dead by Daylight™ Pinball on Steam (steampowered.com)
- Pinball M – The Thing Pinball on Steam (steampowered.com)
- Pinball M – Chucky’s Killer Pinball on Steam (steampowered.com)
I don’t see a link for the Death Save Bundle as of this writing, but will update here when there is a link to where to buy that for $20 USD. That will probably be the best way to go.
UPDATE 11/302/2023 @ 9:23am PST: Pinball M went live at 8am PST 11/30/2023 along with a 10% sale on all DLC. Here is the Death Save Bundle:
Save 18% on Pinball M – Death Save Bundle on Steam (steampowered.com) ($18.00 USD at launch)
The base Pinball M with Elder Gods is free, so at the very least one can play that in cabinet mode without spending any money. If you want to play the other four tables, $20 is not out of range of Zen’s other pinball table prices. The quality of these tables looks very, very good, so there’s that, too. They could have tried to up the prices and didn’t. Kudos to them on that.
This is launching across multiple platforms, not just for Steam/PC, also: PS5, PS4, Xbox and Epic Games for PC as well.
As for the #1 question if you are reading this but don’t yet see Pinball M – the full version, not the demo which has been available for awhile now – my guess is that it will launch at 10am PST (GMT-8), although it’s been saying it will be released in “less than an hour” on Steam for well over an hour. UPDATE: it launched at 8am PST.
Have noticed many Steam new releases are like this. I don’t know the inner workings and don’t see any official announcement as of this writing when these will push out to Steam, but presumably it will be available by the time you read this and/or very soon thereafter.
In the meantime, here are some teaser videos Zen put out showcasing these new Pinball M tables. The most recent was THE THING:
Prior to that they released a promo vid for Duke Nuke ‘Em’s Big Shot Pinball:
Two months ago, Zen shared a teaser/promo video for Pinball M as well as released the demo that you can download and play Wrath of the Elder Gods.
Are you planning on playing Pinball M at/near launch today? At least the free table? Let us know in the comments.
UPDATE 11/30/2023 @ 9:34am PST: Similar to Day 1 Cabinet Mode on Pinball Fx — and people were annoyed by this — every time you login you need to re-enable cabinet mode. PGM member Vader4633 shares the following on his cab setup:
As of this writing unfortunately I still don’t have internet working at home where my cabinet is located (Xfinity is estimating by 4pm it should be up), but a couple PGM members are streaming Pinball M live right now (check their VOD, if they aren’t live any more when you read this):
(USA) Bob & Fae – Luc1f3rB0b – Twitch
(France) Yesai_Gaming – Yesai_Gaming – Twitch
UPDATE 12/9/2023 @ 11:25am PST: Two days ago on 12/7, PGM Member MCAP posted to the Discord that Zen has updated Pinball M and fixed the cab mode being remembered and tournaments can also be entered from cab mode.
Cool, thhey moved fast on fixing this!