why non-functional pinball machines in Pocket D?

Because DJ Zero uses the quarters they steal to keep the club afloat when it's not full of Virtuites.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea!

The suggestion has come up before. It's also been shot out of the sky with a howitzer.

The simple answer is: the game engine doesn't work like that.

Here's the complex answer:

Technical Hurdle #1: Keyboard Input

There are a couple of engine requirements for mini-games inside of an outside game to work. One of those is the ability to capture and re-route the input commands from the player. Currently there is no exposed method for the developers to capture player input and map that input to I/O commands for a sub-game.

Technical Hurdle #2: Indirect Video Capture and Re-routing

Nor is there any particular method to capture the player's camera and zoom in on a specific object. Yes, the game does have cut-scene capabilities that can take control of the player's camera. However, you can still activate keyboard commands, such as text macro's, while in a cut-scene, and your own personal text will render into the camera viewpoint. Nothing like shouting "Fuzzy Furry Purry Kittens will Kick Romi Tail!" half a dozen times during the Romulous / Nictus cut-scene.

Technical Hurdle #3: Mouse Capture and Re-routing.

Mouse driven interaction isn't a solution either. Currently in the game objects that can be interacted with by the mouse, such as glowing boxes, computer panels, train doors, and the like have a three dimensional depth and are surrounded in a bubble. Why? Network latency. In terms of processing time and network transmission, it is much easier and much less performance expensive to create a bubble effect that can be clicked on and simply change the object rendered inside of that bubble effect.

The bubble effect on objects effectively makes mouse-driving mini-games impossible. Mouse driven effects are only given full precision for certain portions of the User-interface that are localized on the user's client and don't require transmission back to the server. E.G. selecting a text field in the Auction House Interface, interacting with the options menu, or clicking in the text box. None of those mouse movements or clicks have to be transmitted back to the server, although they can create events that ARE transmitted back to the server. There IS a difference.

These are just 3 of the technical hurdles the developers would have to overcome in order to produce a viable mini-game experience, and as of right now, there's no particular need for the developers to implement these kinds of changes in the existing engine.

Yes, Sony got around many of these hurdles with their Sony PS3 Home project. Sony also had a much larger budget for command processing, as well as a much larger network budget. Each Playstation 3 has a multi-core PowerPC processor with a high clock rate and a requirement of broadband internet. Sony didn't have to worry about somebody with a Socket A Sempron and a Geforce FX 5200 trying to run PS3 Home on a 56k connection.

Paragon Studios DOES have to worry about players with Socket A Sempron and a Geforce FX 5200 trying to play this game, City of Heroes, on a 56k connection, since a not entirely insignificant number of players still use that class of hardware and network support (Brighthouse cable and AT&T DSL, I'm glaring at you here) to play the game.

So, nice idea. Would be nice.

But it's not happening.