Despite my previous rant about Techball, there can be situations where reducing the physical aspect of the game can be a good thing.

The Winnipeg Sun reports on a specially designed pinball table being used to help disabled kids. The table is located at the Rehabilitation Centre for Children and has been modified to allow use by a wide range of people including those in wheelchairs. The flipper buttons are very large and require only minimal pressure to operate, if necessary the whole control panel can be removed from the machine for wheelchair use.

The pinball itself isn’t directly therapeutic, instead it’s used to relax kids attending the centre. The special table cost $8500 (Canadian) and was paid for with the help of a local business group.

This is a really great idea, I wonder if there’s any chance of places in the UK taking it up? It wouldn’t need to be restricted to disabled kids - or even kids at all. Anywhere that people get tense whilst waiting, for example a dental surgery, could potentially benefit from having an unmodified table on freeplay. Might this be a way of rehabilitating not just patients but also pinball itself?

The gadget blogs are alight with word of the new Techball Remote Controlled Upright Pinball game, available to buy now at the Hammacher Schlemmer website.

To call this “pinball” is a travesty on so many levels. The table looks naff - OK, that’s to be expected from a toy. But a vertical table?!? That’s not pinball, that’s pachinko with flippers! Even the flippers are curved, presumably because that’s the only way to hit certain things on a vertical table.

The worst thing of all is the fact that it’s remote controlled. No, no, no, no, no!

Pinball is a fundamentally physical activity, becoming one with the table. That’s one thing that otherwise excellent PC simulators like Future Pinball still can’t manage. At least toy plastic tables have physical flippers - pressing buttons from a distance can’t possibly compete. Removing the flipper buttons and replacing them with a remote control is a step backwards, not forwards.

This isn’t pinball in any form I recognise.

Welcome to The Silver Ball, my pinball blog. To start things off I thought I’d introduce myself with a brief summary of my pinball experience.

I started playing occasionally as a very young kid - whenever I went to a fairground or seaside arcade with my parents my Dad played pinball and I soon picked it up. However I only really began playing properly at University.

The University of Warwick in the early ’80s was a great place for a pinball fan and the Games Room was my usual haunt. Half a dozen pinball machine, often including the latest models, and all kept in good nick by friendly engineers who would often leave credits on them. I became a competent player - never one of the best, but definitely competent. My speciality was saving the ball from a seemingly impossible situation. Which sounds impressive until you remember that a really good player wouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place!

After university I was still able to play pinball - back then almost every pub had a table. But shortly afterwards the Decline began. Tables became rarer in pubs, being replaced by cheaper and easier to maintain video games. Instead of choosing a pub based on which machine it had, I was choosing a pub based on whether it had a machine at all.

My opportunities to play continued to become fewer and fewer until today - living in Edinburgh - I don’t know a single pub with a playable machine.

So I’ve been forced to play simulations instead, on the PC and consoles such as the PS2 and Wii. They’re nowhere near as good as the real thing but for now they’ll have to do.