Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett From: c.j.coulson@newcastle.ac.uk (C. J. Coulson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Pinball Illusions version 1.5 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 20 Apr 1995 18:11:37 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 325 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <3n684p$bef@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: c.j.coulson@newcastle.ac.uk (C. J. Coulson) NNTP-Posting-Host: astro.cs.umass.edu Keywords: game, arcade, pinball, simulation, AGA, commercial Originator: barrett@astro.cs.umass.edu PRODUCT NAME Pinball Illusions - Version 1.5 BRIEF DESCRIPTION The third game in the pinball simulator family from Digital Illusions, and the first to be AGA-only. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: 21st Century Entertainment Address: Westbrook Street Blewbury Oxon. OX11 9QB ENGLAND Telephone: (01235) 851533 - English speaking help line FAX: (01235) 851473 E-mail: Not known LIST PRICE 29.99 UK Pounds SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Amiga with AGA chipset Hard drive optional If running from Workbench, you need around 1.7MB of Chip RAM free. SOFTWARE None COPY PROTECTION None at all! Yes, you heard me right. NO PROTECTION. :-) Furthermore, the game installs cleanly onto a hard drive, without the need to use a key disk. Other companies take note! MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000/030/882, 2MB Chip RAM, 16MB Fast RAM Seagate 120MB Hard Drive Samsung 410MB Hard Drive Workbench 3.0 (39.29), Kickstart 3.0 (39.106) A large and varied selection of commodities and system hacks. INSTALLATION The provided Installer script makes this task simplicity itself. One note: The supplied documentation directs you to Disk 1 to find the Installer. It is actually on Disk 4. Note that the default location for high scores (nv_location for those ENVARC: enthusiasts out there) is not the same as the location specified by Pinball Fantasies. If you already have Fantasies installed on your system, you'll need to change the default directory for Illusions to point to the existing highscore directory. If you don't, then the next time you play Fantasies, your old high scores won't appear. REVIEW Well, this is the third game in the series. What, you may ask, could Digital Illusions do to warrant the release (and purchase) of yet another pinball simulator? The answer is this: They've polished the simulation engine until it shines brighter than a very bright thing indeed. Then they've added new features like multi-ball (yeah!) and hi-res mode. Finally, making the game AGA only allowed them to really work on the graphics until they look fantastic. If you were a bit disappointed with the AGA visuals in Fantasies, prepare for a shock to the vision system. Illusions looks every inch an AGA game. So, it's worth buying. Go out and buy it then. For the two and a half of you out there that aren't quite convinced by all that, here's a slightly more in-depth review. Unlike its predecessors, Illusions provides only three tables. But don't let that put you off, since each table has been worked on until it plays like a dream: something that was not always true of all the tables in the previous releases. For instance, although I just love Stones n Bones and Partyland from Fantasies, I very rarely play Billion Dollar Gameshow or Speed Devils. On the other hand, all three Illusions tables get regular use; so for me, Illusions is better value for money, as I get three great tables rather than two great and two so-so tables. Of course, some of you might still have preferred four tables, and I'll admit that if Digital Illusions had provided four tables, I wouldn't have complained. However, this is absolutely NO REASON for not buying the game. A quick description of each table seems in order: "Law n Justice": This table is based around a nightmare future of lawlessness (as portrayed in Robocop) and places you in the position of a police officer, trying to keep the peace whilst all around you villains are doing their best to break it. My least favourite of the three, but that's only because the other two tables are so good. (Featured in the playable demo available on Aminet.) "Babewatch": One for the Beach Boys fans, this table sees you as a beach bum, trying to impress the babes by various means (surfing, muscle building, gambling etc. etc.). Fun, fun, fun 'till my Daddy took the T'Bird away... ........My second favourite table. Extreme Sports: WHOOOAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! I just LOVE this table. You are a grungy kind of guy who likes nothing better than a bit of bungee jumping or skydiving. (For UK readers, think of the Pepsi Max adverts....) Everything about this table screams EXTREME, from the music, via the sound effects, to the scoreboard animations. I could play this table all day. So, three tables, each with a different theme. What about the common elements to the game? Firstly, if you're used to the single-shade score panels in Fantasies or Dreams, the multi-shade panels in Illusions will be a bit of a surprise. The extra shades are used for purely cosmetic uses, to enhance the bonus/special mode animations. But so what, if DI want to give us better looking graphics, then so be it. At least they haven't short changed us on the gameplay side of things. The flippers seem to work slightly differently to the earlier games, in that they "feel" different. If you press and hold down the flipper key, the effect seems to be different to when you press and release the key. This effect isn't mentioned in the manual, so it might just be psychological, and then I might just be going crazy.................well, I have just bought a PC :-( Finally we get multi-ball, and boy is it fun! Up to three balls in play at once, you just won't be able to flip fast enough at times. It works beautifully and shows no signs of slowdown (though note my system configuration above -- I cannot vouch for the speed of this game on an unexpanded A1200 :)). Nudging the table is somewhat more involved now, with the old and faithful vertical nudge being joined by left and right nudges, which can be combined to produce diagonal nudges as well. I found that nudging the ball has less effect on it than in the earlier games, which can be frustrating at times, but with a bit of practice you can get out of most nasty situations. If you've launched the game from Workbench, you can return to Workbench during play by pausing the game and pressing the Tab key. This places you back on the Workbench and adds an extra option to the Tools menu. Selecting this option returns you to the game. Slightly neater than some of the methods used in other games, and it seems to be stable. I've run Illusions without any problems from a Workbench overloaded with commodities (including screen blankers, normally the first thing to cause a problem). The only thing I have to do is free up around 1.7MB of Chip RAM, which is easy enough to do. Unlike Fantasies, I've never seen Illusions crash, though I haven't been playing Illusions nearly as long as Fantasies. The scoring system has been changed to produce scores roughly 10 times higher than those in the earlier games, so whereas previously the highest preset highscore was 100,000,000, it's now 1,000,000,000. Is this just a gimmick to make you think you're doing better than you really are? I don't know, but it doesn't make much difference to the gameplay, which is excellent. I guess a few of you are wondering about the game dynamics. Well, the ball rolls around with much more realism than ever before. Ramps actually work like ramps, multiballs collide into one another and rebound satisfyingly, and generally the game feels more like the real thing than either of the prequels. This is helped somewhat by the hi-res mode....... Yes, hi-res mode makes its appearance here. Now you can almost entirely say goodbye to vertical scrolling (since each table is slightly taller than two low-res screens, there is still a little bit of scrolling necessary). The advantages are multiple. Firstly, you can actually see where the ball is going to go, rather than having to learn the layout of the table in order to be able to hit a certain ramp or target. Secondly, you get more warning when the ball is about to reach the flippers, which in multi-ball mode is crucial. Finally it's more realistic; how many of you play real pinball looking through a letterbox? No, I didn't think many of you would own up, so why should you have to play simulated pinball with a letterbox view of the table... well, no more. Some of you folks may be concerned about interlace flicker. I know I was before I played the sim, especially as I very rarely use interlace now (the joys of multiscan). Well, on a decent monitor you'll hardly notice the flicker at all. I've played for hours in hi-res mode and I haven't felt any ill effects, whereas after 10 minutes or so using a word processor in interlace gives me a headache. So, unless you are using a cacky TV which flickers badly to start with, or you are ultra-sensitive to interlace flicker, hi-res mode is just as easy on the eye as low-res. Of course, if Illusions supported multiscan screenmodes, life would be even better, but they don't. Bummer. What more can I say? The background music and effects are better than ever before, the ball really looks like a polished metal ball, erm, erm......I can't think of anything else. Pinball Illusions is just one of those games you'll either love or hate. If you like simulated pinball and you have an A1200/A4000, this is most definitely the next game on your purchase list. DOCUMENTATION A 64 page multilingual (English, French, German and Italian) manual featuring descriptions of each table. A multilingual card describing the loading procedure, and how to install the game onto hard drive (though note my earlier comment about the location of the installer) What more do you want? This is a pinball simulator, not a flight simulator. LIKES Quite simply it is the best pinball simulator I have played on ANY system. Furthermore, it seems to be as system friendly as it can be, and it installs to hard drive. No protection at all. At last we get treated like the responsible and law-abiding people we all are... DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS Maybe a fourth table should have been included; but then again, the three that are supplied are so good -- who cares? No table editor. It would be fun to try designing your own tables, though I'm not so sure how practical it would be. Hi-res mode doesn't offer a multiscan mode, which is a minor black mark. If the interlace flicker had been more intrusive, I'd have really made a fuss about this. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS All through this review I've been using Pinball Fantasies as a relative benchmark. Illusions beats it hands down. Pinball Dreams doesn't even get a look in. BUGS One bug noted. If you press both the left and right nudge keys together, the program registers this as a tilt. Better be careful with those combination nudges then. VENDOR SUPPORT Unknown. WARRANTY Unknown. CONCLUSIONS You've read the review, you know what I think. Pinball Illusions is THE FINEST pinball simulator. If you even remotely liked either Pinball Dreams or Fantasies, and you have the required hardware, then Illusions is a must buy. I'll give it 4.9 out of 5 stars. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Review created on 18th April 1995 by Chris Coulson. Use it for your own pleasure (oo-er), use it for fun, wave it in the air, stick it in a bun. If you want to use it in a publication, do so. I'd appreciate an email telling me about it though. Be seeing you....... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chris Coulson | A4000/030/882 - 18MB/530MB Postgraduate - Robotics Group | A500 - 1MB email: c.j.coulson@ncl.ac.uk | Pentium 60 - 16MB/540MB -------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews