Six tables. All absolutely beautiful-looking, and with a decent mix of complex and simple ones. Actual table design, however, a bit shaky - in Star Quest, for example, you're awarded multiballs for the tricky task of shooting the ball onto the table with the plunger at the start. All the usual features present and correct - multiballs, loops, combos, kickbacks, pretty dot-matrix scoreboards with video sub-games on them, that kind of thing. Lovely music, slightly squeaky, creaky sound effects in that set-your-teeth-on-edge kind of way. Three viewing options - jerky, stupidly fast, unusable 2D plan view; jerky, stupidly fast, unusable, 3D scrolling view; clear, gorgeous 3D full-table-on-screen, what-on-Earth-are-the- other-ones-for? view.

Lush Silicon Graphics rendered in-game sequences at certain points, eg locking a ball. These sometimes cut in even although the main screen clearly shows the ball to be still halfway up a ramp with no chance whatsoever of reaching the place where it's supposed to be locked, but hey. Manual which will cause death through exploding blood vessels of PC novice attempting to use it - the second install instruction, for example, is "Type CD\PINBALL", a line your PC will never understand if both you and it live to be a million. But this is all frippery. The heart, soul, lungs, spleen, liver, kidneys and gall bladder of any pinball game is its ball movement. Let's talk about Tilt's ball movement.

Tilt has the worst ball movement I've ever seen on a computer pinball game, including Time Scanner on the Atari ST. For one thing, this isn't really a pinball game - it's Dragon's Lair on a pinball table. The margin for error allowed when hitting targets is so absurdly generous that the whole game feels as if it's on rails, never more so than when a ball j..u..s..t.. manages to creep up to the beginning of a steep ramp, momentum totally exhausted, only to be suddenly sucked up at colossal speed and hurtled around the ramp at rates of acceleration the crew of Apollo 13 could only dream of. Or, alternatively, when the ball is fired from the plunger on the Funfair table, travels round the completely flat and level launch ramp, almost reaching the end before running out of steam, but is then rocketed backwards along the entire length of the ramp as if attached to a horizontal bungee rope.

This random elastic behaviour plagues the ball all the way through the game, as the normal laws of physics are completely discarded, in favour, presumably, of keeping the game moving. Or just through sheer ineptitude. Who knows? Whatever, it renders entirely useless all the good work that's gone on in the game previously, and makes a laughing stock of any pretensions Tilt may have had as a competitor to The Web, Pinball Illusions, Psycho Pinball or, indeed, any other game of any other kind ever. If you remember how awful video pinball used to be, you may be able to temporarily forget all the opposition and find a few minutes' entertainment from these six varied tables, but sooner or later harsh reality is going to come knocking on your door, and Tilt will go spinning from your CD-ROM drive to the place where dreadful, dreadful computer games go to die.

VERDICT: Nice everything else, shame about the ball movement.