Apparently today is National Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Honestly, the day never had any appeal to me. I’ve never been that interested in piracy as a concept or reality, and the closest I personally ever came to having the term applied to me in the real world had to do with software piracy. Even then, what little piracy I partook in ended something like fifteen years ago, for the most part. I essentially got over the fact that software cost money and realized that the developers needed/deserved to be paid for their efforts. If there was something I needed to do, software-wise, and I couldn’t afford to pay for it, I found and used a free and/or open-source equivalent.

The one difficulty might have been gaming, but the fact of the matter is that gaming is a want, not a need. Price isn’t even that much of an issue anymore, anyway; unless it’s something I want to play right away (in which case I’m willing to pay full price), I can always get it used or on sale via Steam. Even arcade games of old are now easily located in Apple’s app store, whether individually sold (Pac-Man, Space Invaders) or as part of compilations (Atari’s Greatest Hits, Midway Arcade).

Unfortunately, until recently, there was one exception to that rule: pinball games.

I really enjoy playing pinball games, and I tend to eschew the video game-based ones that don’t emulate other tables. Fortunately for me, a game called The Pinball Arcade came out a couple of years ago that exclusively emulated actual pinball machines. While I bought a couple of favorites like Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Monster Bash, I still kept Visual Pinball/VPinMAME installed on my desktop PC for my two all-time favorite pinball games: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Doctor Who. I honestly didn’t see either one coming out for The Pinball Arcade anytime soon.

It turns out I was at least half wrong. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released for The Pinball Arcade this past weekend.

The port itself is pretty good, and I’m finding it to be far closer to the actual table than the Visual Pinball version is. For example, the skill shot timing matches the actual table, and it doesn’t have the same problem with locating and maintaining the balls that the Visual Pinball version does. The only glitch I’ve noticed is that sometimes the ball will launch from the launcher automatically instead of waiting for you to press the “LAUNCH BALL” button; if you’re aiming for big points on the skill shot, then you’re down to luck whether you’ll hit at all when that happens.

The biggest advantage to this port, though, is the platform. Visual Pinball is only available for PC. While The Pinball Arcade is available for PC via Steam, I actually use the iOS version. That way, I can play via my iPad when at home, and via my iPhone when on the road.

Now that I’m down to one table on Visual Pinball, I may as well delete it from my PC. I’ll be going without the Doctor Who table, but to be honest, it’s rare that I play it anyway. (Playing pinball via iOS is far more convenient than booting up the PC.) I also have no expectation of Doctor Who coming to The Pinball Arcade, as the TV show is so popular now that the licensing fees will likely be exorbitant. For that table, I’ll settle for playing it whenever I go to a real arcade like the Game Preserve or Pinballz Arcade.

All in all, I’m a happy camper. One of my favorite tables is now available for me to play on my preferred platform, and in a port that’s closer to the original than I had been playing. Not only that, I’m doing it legitimately now. I may not get Doctor Who anytime soon (if at all), but being able to play Bram Stoker’s Dracula is more than enough for me. :-)