PINBALL FEATURE - October 1999
| There’s no doubt about it – when it comes to
games machines, PCs are just one giant pain in the arse. They’re always crashing ,
you have to play sat at a desk in front of a poxy little monitor instead of on a comfy
sofa in front of a great big telly, and most of the games are anoraky Dungeons &
Dragons shit with titles like Imperium Galactica 2 or Warhammer: Shadow Of The Horned Rat
(those are both real ones, by the way), which don’t let you actually play until
you’ve read 400 pages of instruction manual while everyone else is pissed-up in the
living room enjoying Wipeout 3. Traditionally, PC owners have always droned on about how only PCs can access the Web and play games over the Internet (like anyone cared), but with the new Sega Dreamcast and the imminent Playstation 2 both offering online gaming and Web-surfing from a console, there’s now only one thing left that PCs do better than proper games machines, and that’s pinball. Pinball has always been pretty big on PC, but now that the machine is capable of drawing tables that look and sound just like the real thing and can cope with the complex physics of chucking up to 10 balls around at a time in a scientifically-accurate way, developers have gone to town. Empire’s Pro Pinball series of games have traditionally been the undisputed kings of the genre, and rightly so. Their latest, Big Race USA, is a fantastically inventive and action-packed game based on a massive coast-to-coast rally which you rather stupidly enter in a taxi (in between races you shunt passengers around various cities to make money to soup your cab up for the next race). The Pro Pinball games have fierce competition, though, from snappily-named developers Pinball Games Ltd, whose latest Pinball Revolution features a fantastic table themed around The Avengers (original 60s version, not the hideous 90s movie) and an absolutely awful one based on the Roswell Incident. The standard generally isn’t up to the Pro games, but it’s not far off and it’s a quarter of the price. (Pro Pinball’s been criticised for years for only having one table per release, but Empire don’t care. They’re that hard.) Cheaper yet is Addiction Pinball, another two-game pack, this time from veteran UK developer Team 17, famous for their Worms (so to speak). The little pink guys (the worms, that is) make a reappearance on their own, a brilliantly-designed effort with bucketloads of excellent features (the best being the one where you have to make shots in order to shut up a terrible pub accordion player), and you also get the inferior (but not nearly as bad as Roswell) World Rally Fever table thrown in too. The funny, clever Worms table is worth the cash on its own, though. Last but most interesting is Microsoft’s Pinball Arcade, a collection of painstaking recreations of seven genuine arcade pins, covering the history of pinball from the present day right back to games from the 1930s that even your grandad doesn’t remember. The early games (some of which are so primitive they don’t even have flippers) are a lot more fun than they look, helped along by the cheesy period tunes of the game soundtracks, and the whole thing’s a bargain at 20 quid. It’s almost impossible to find real, physical pinball machines in arcades or pubs these days, but any of these are a top substitute. Plus, when you tilt them, the bar owner doesn’t come over and smash your face in. And that’s always a bonus. Pinball Revolution, £15 from GT Interactive Big Race USA, £35 from Empire Addiction Pinball, £10 from Hasbro Pinball Arcade, £20 from Microsoft |
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