Time to hunt down the sequel.Many of us who were born in the 80s and grew up at the same time as personal computers, consoles, and the Internet evolved, used to spend hours and hours playing a simple pinball game that came installed on Windows 95 and later on Windows XP that was a great success: Full Tilt! Pinball. The mid-90s were flush with pinball games, and while Sierra's 3D Ultra Pinball is the most inventive, Empire Interactive's Pro Pinball the best looking and Digital Illusions' Pinball Fantasies the most revered, Maxis' Full Tilt! Pinball is - to me at least - the best all-round package of its time. Beeps, bloops and the occasional voice sample and audio cue invest you into the game, as does the unassuming, table-specific background music. To accompany the looks is a series of very nostalgic sound effects. At its highest possible resolution - 1024x768 - it looks stunning, making you wish for a physical pinball machine based on it. While it remains a static single screen, this table really shows the great art style and pre-rendered graphical design. Skullduggery has a pirate theme with branching habitrails and a little jungle section filled with mushroom bumpers at the top. You still have to reach over to the keyboard to hit SPACE to launch the ball or the three different methods to nudge the table. Even so, I actually preferred to use the two mouse buttons which are always accessable any way. These can be re-mapped but for some reason, the left and right Shift keys are recognised as the same, so that's a pain. It takes skill to manipulate the three flippers, which default to the Z and / keys. When its mouth opens, defeat it by getting your ball to dive down its throat for a butt-load of points. It's not quite what we'd expect with modern pinball games, but compared to Sierra's 3D Ultra series, it's a huge step up in this regard.ĭragon's Keep is a lot more fanciful in its design, featuring all three of those extra features I said were missing in Space Cadet as well as a bloody great dragon head. The ball reacts to each bump in a believable, if not entirely realistic way and it's a testament to the developer's skill that they never once feel wrong. It's not unusual for your ball to be careening between these circular cylinders racking up hundreds of points in one go. What is does have is a simple, well thought out playfield with carefully positioned mushroom bumpers that rack up your score in a satisfying way. Space Cadet has no extra flippers, no habitrails and zero magnetic gimmicks. It sure holds up as one of the most entertaining pinball games of the era - and perhaps all time. It would be many years until I realised that it was part of a full game (called Pinball '95 over here), and many more years after that until I finally played all it had to offer. One of the tables, a fully featured demo called 3D Pinball: Space Cadet, came on one of the bonus discs and I spent hours on it. If you ever had a computer with Windows '95, I can guess with great certainty that you've played Full Tilt! Pinball by Maxis.
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