PINBALL 95

EXTREME PINBALL 

Around this point, I might have an amusing comedy argument with myself about the merits or otherwise of putting pinball on a computer. I might, on the one hand, argue that most pinball machines give you four games for a quid, and that I can’t think of a single machine in living memory I’ve played 120 times (as you’d have to to get your money’s worth out of the single £30 table of The Web). Then again, on the other hand, I might point out that it’s nice to be able to play a pretty convincing simulation of pinball when the arcades are shut, or when you don’t want to trek all the way down to the ("Youth club" - Ed) and get your clothes all smelly, or when you haven’t got room in your house for up to four different machines. But the chances are you’ve heard all that stuff before, and I’m sure you’ve got your own feelings on the matter. You don’t need me to explain to you what computer pinball is. You probably only want to know a few specific details about these particular computer pinball games. So here you are. Call it a Christmas present. I’ll do a couple of jokes at the end if there’s time.

NUMBER OF TABLES

Extreme Pinball - Four

Pinball 95 - Three

The Web - One

MULTIBALL

Extreme Pinball - Yes, up to five balls, screen stays with lowest ball so you can’t see what’s going on in the upper half of the table.

Pinball 95 - Yes, up to three balls. Whole table onscreen.

The Web - Yes, up to six balls, although you’ll have to do astonishingly well to get that many. Whole table onscreen.

CUTE DOT-MATRIX SCOREBOARDS

Extreme Pinball - Yes, and you can customise the game so that the scoreboard stays onscreen all the time, or stays offscreen all the time, or flips up when something interesting happens. This allows you to see more of the table on the screen at a time which, for reasons I’ll come to, is particularly important here.

Pinball 95 - No.

The Web - Yes, and a completely fantastic one. It looks and acts like the real thing, there are lots of cute graphical displays when you light features (as there are in Extreme Pinball), and there’s even a smart video game mode feature, where you use the flipper buttons to shoot mines and collect bonuses. It’s just like the real thing, missus.

BALL CHARACTERISTICS

Extreme Pinball - Realistic, as long as you assume you’re playing on a table that’s been nailed vertically to a wall rather than stood on legs on the floor, then polished with wax to a depth of three inches. The ball in Extreme Pinball rockets around at such an utterly ridiculous pace that half the time you’ll flip it off one of your flippers, there’ll be a too-fast-too-see blur of scrolling, and it’ll fly all the way round the table and down the hole between the flippers before you’ve even taken your finger off the key. ‘Extreme’ was never used more accurately. The ball itself is big and shiny (although it glides rather than rolls), and, entertainingly, sometimes turns into something else - a little gold ring on the Medieval Knights table, a fantastic spinning globe on the Rock Fantasy (cough) table.

Pinball 95 - Very good movement of a little dull grey ball, although prone to extremely dramatic sudden lurches when your hard drive accesses for no obvious reason halfway through a game.

The Web - Flawless. The best movement ever, and the ball looks, for the first time, like a proper polished rolling metal sphere, reflecting the table lights as it goes. It’s gorgeous.

TABLE DESIGN

Extreme Pinball - Well, it’s a bit hard to tell. The game moves so fast you very rarely get a chance to look at the upper half of the table and see what’s actually on it, and combined with the busy, over-detailed and brightly-coloured background illustrations, the overall effect is eye-watering. Studying the screenshots, though, it all looks fairly interesting, although much more like what you’d expect to see on a computer pinball game than a real pinball machine - most of the tables are far too spartan to succeed in an arcade.

Pinball 95 - Quite nice, in an austere early-1980s kind of way (except Space Cadet, which is palpably mid-to-late 70s). One of the three tables, though, is just an updated version of the one that came with the Plus! add-on for Windows 95. All three share a common problem of seemingly arbitrary scoring - jackpots can suddenly come out of nowhere 20 seconds into a game.

The Web - Superb. There’s loads to do, a good balance of ramps, loops, rollovers, magnets and drop-targets, a multitude of features and skill shots, tons of secret stuff and plenty of opportunities to run up ridiculous scores in the hundreds of millions without trying very hard. This would effortlessly take pots of money as a real coin-op.

AVERAGE LENGTH OF A SINGLE GAME

Extreme Pinball - About a minute and a half. If you’re good.

Pinball 95 - Five to 10 minutes. Pretty average.

The Web - Major flaw alert. After a day or two, you’ll be making one credit stretch for anything up to three quarters of an hour, scoring upwards of 18 billion points - it’s just a bit too generous with the extra balls, the replays, the kickout lanes and the ball-saver. Damn. Just when it was all going so well, too.

HIGH SCORE TABLES

(Look, it matters. Pinball can’t be ‘completed’, so the whole point of it is to score, er, points. If it doesn’t save your scores, what’s the, um, point?)

Extreme Pinball - Saves the top 10 on each machine.

Pinball 95 - Saves the top five on each machine, but on an ugly Windows screen which spoils the atmosphere somewhat.

The Web - Genius. Saves the best four scores of all time, plus the ‘Grand Champion’. Also saves the best four scores of ‘today’, ie since you last loaded it up, and the best four ‘buy-in’ scores, the arcade feature where you can use a credit to buy a single extra ball to continue your current game. Also saves single individual records for highest number of consecutive loops, highest number of consecutive combos and so on, just like a real machine. Awards replays for breaking any of these records, and only allows you to use replay credits for ‘buy-in’ games, so you can’t rack up a huge buy-in score until you’ve earned enough credits to pay for it. (Just playing the game normally doesn’t cost any credits). That summary again: Genius.

SOUND AND MUSIC

Extreme Pinball - The actual sound quality was pretty nasty on my PC, and the music is straight out of 101 Duff Computer Pinball Game Tunes Made Easy textbook, but the effects and speech rescue things to some extent, especially the sirens and radio voices on the Urban Chaos table.

Pinball 95 - Yeuch. Music you’ll switch off in seconds, and the cheesiest, campest speech samples you’ve ever heard.

The Web - Ace. Empire employed proper actors and actresses for the speech, and proper pop stars (Bruce Foxton out of The Jam and Jake Burns out of, er, Stiff Little Fingers (ask your dad)) for the music, and it shows. The female voice is classic hello-nurse jet-fighter-computer material, and the male booms out in complementary macho style. Hitting a couple of loops in quick succession to hear the woman seductively breathe "Power Level One", immediately contradicted by the full-throated roar of the bloke’s "Power Level Two!", is stupidly entertaining.

USER-FRIENDLINESS

Extreme Pinball - Good. You can interrupt bonus counts (and almost everything else) to get on with the game, you can change the colour of the scoreboard (actually important here - the game moves so fast you can’t spare more than a microsecond to look at the scoreboard, so you need it to be in a strong, instantly-readable colour), you can change the number of balls per game to give yourself half a chance, and you can alter the balance between music and sound. The whole thing installs on hard drive too (12 Mb), and runs from Win95.

Pinball 95 - Not good. You can’t interrupt anything, so the bonus counts take ages between balls, the music can be on or off and that’s it, and you can’t do anything about the fantastically annoying over-loud noise your flippers make. It is fully hard-drive installable, though (23 Mb), is the only one of the three games with redefinable keys, and runs (obviously) from Win95.

The Web - Interruptable bonuses, variable music/sound balance, six different angles to view the table, but it reads the music from the CD and hence can’t be completely installed, which is a bit annoying. Runs from DOS only.

The Web: The slickest, best and most lifelike PC pinball yet. But it’s a bit easy, and a word of warning - a single table, even one this good, is really asking for trouble lifespan-wise against Pinball Illusions and Psycho Pinball. 91%

Pinball 95: Alright in a 1980s retro kind of way, but comes off badly in a fight with almost any other PC pinball game. Cheap, though. 66%