YMMV / The Pinball Arcade

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• Good Bad Bugs: The "Score at least 1,000,000 Points on 1 Ball" wizard goal on El Dorado: City of Gold would be frustratingly difficult to achieve, if not for the game's tendency to award it at random regardless of how many points you've earned.
• Porting Disaster/Polished Port:
  • A bizarre case of both tropes happening at once due to the proliferation of this game on different platforms and due to the nature of patches and updates, both on Farsight Studios's part and the system manufacturers' part. Looking at the list of updates and patches planned for 2014, it is clear that Farsight prioritizes the PlayStation 3 version. In addition, the Mac version is a direct port of the iPad version. What this means is that the PlayStation 3 version (and by extension, the PlayStation 4 version) plays the best by far while the iOS (the platform it was first released on) and Mac versions languish in neglect. On top of that, as Apple keeps releasing new versions of OSX and iOS, this causes compatibility issues on those platforms, resulting in frequent game crashes and flipper lag. As a result, the versions on the Apple-based platforms wind up rather buggy and unplayable while the PlayStation line's version is smooth and refined.
    • From a content standpoint, the version that gets the shortest end of the stick is the Xbox 360 version. It plays just fine, with no glitches or input lag, but this port only received 3 table packs for up to 10 tables. This isn't Farsight Studios' fault, however. One of Microsoft's more strict policies requires that developers have a separate publisher for their games.^note Big companies might get away with self-publishing, but even this isn't concrete. Since Farsight Studios is a small company, the 360 port was published by Crave. Unfortunately for Farsight, Crave underwent bankruptcy, causing Microsoft to pull The Pinball Arcade from the Xbox Live Arcade. Fortunately, a company known as Alliance Digital Media announced that they were becoming the new publishers for the 360 version, and the Xbox 360 version was re-released on May 11, 2015, after about three years of waiting. The Wii U version does not fare much better: Though it goes up to the first five tables of Season 5, that was because those were what was available up to that point—the Wii U was by far the last platform of its generation to receive the game, and there were no further updates to it. There is no clear reason for it other than the Wii U version being low-priority (to where Farsight's staff, for some reason, spells it with a hyphen, as "Wii-U").
  • The Nintendo Switch version is the most recent version of The Pinball Arcade and followed the then-recent removal of all Williams and Bally tables from the roster of other versions. In other words, it's missing over half of all the tables ever released for the game across every platform.
  • Stern Pinball Arcade on Steam. So many bugs and issues were present when the game launched that the majority of Steam users left thumbs-downs on this title, as well as the obvious lack of testing by the developers.
    • Android had a similar case; it was pulled from the Google Play store before it was publicly available for further refinements.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The original front menu music bears some resemblance to "Pinball Wizard" by The Who. When the new User Interface was released, this pretense was dropped when it was changed to a straight-up cover of the song.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The changing of World Cup Soccer to World Champion Soccer, due to being unable to afford the World Cup license.
  • The release on Switch initially had Bally/Williams tables included, but was pulled and revised because of WMS. The removal of these tables is the first look of what is to come, and some aren't happy about what happened. Without the heavy hitters featured in the game from July 2018 onwards, many believe that The Pinball Arcade won't be as great as it was.

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