When I went to Arcade Club for the RLLMUK anniversary meet last year, I spent a little time on pinball machines, completely failing to get the ball anywhere I wanted – and when I did, I was never quite sure if I was meant to get there anyway. Pinball machines can be very confusing in terms of which routes you should be hitting and how to gain the jackpot. The overload of flashing lights and sounds doesn’t help.
Maybe that’s why I’ve generally preferred videogame pinball. It is often much easier to see where the targets are, the tables can often tell more of a story, and everything’s a little calmer. The extremes of this come to Sonic Spinball, which is hardly a traditional pinball game at all, and Super Mario Ball, where the game is almost adventure-like. A lot rests on the physics of the ball, and whether it’s realistic. Sonic Pinball Party was pretty good apart from the fact the ball felt too light and floaty. Pinball on the CD-i, which was probably the game I played most on that machine, was far too fast and skittery. Pokémon Pinball was a little slow. In recent years, I’ve played a bit of Zen Pinball, which is well known for its accurate ball physics but is a bit too faithful to real pinball tables for my tastes.
I remember sitting in Kevin’s house one afternoon, back in around 1993, and him showing us Pinball Dreams on the Amiga. We took turns in playing on the four different tables, and I remember being really impressed with how realistic it felt, while also being a bit frustrated with the fact that sometimes you couldn’t see far enough up the table to know where you should be aiming. Background graphics indicating the pathways were OK to a point, but I made some shots which narrowly missed the openings. Still, it was excellent and I came away very impressed. I played Pinball Dreams on WinUAE a few years ago and those memories came flooding back: this was probably the best videogame version of pinball, with clearly laid out tables, great ball physics, and a great competitive element to it. At the time I had a Mega Drive and a CPC on which to play games, and neither had a pinball game that could match it.
That’s quite a preamble but by now you may have joined the dots. Pinball Dreams, CPC, couldn’t I just have bought the port which you’ve no doubt seen in the cover image? Well, no. Pinball Dreams for the CPC is an official conversion which was released in 2019 – initially intended for a commercial release, but after that fell through it was freely distributed. With such a late release, the team behind the game has been able to make use of all manner of clever tricks to get the game running, and it’s an astounding success.
All four of the tables from the Amiga original are included, with the game requiring 128k and a disk drive to run. There are obvious graphical compromises – the CPC can manage at most 16 from a selection of 27 colours, and the tables are significantly more zoomed out (I understand to allow for a more limited scrolling requirement). Yet the physics and controls are spot on, feeling accurate and realistic throughout. There has been only one occasion where the physics model went a little wonky, with the ball balancing on top of one of the bumpers.
My favourite table is probably Beat Box, with Nightmare a close second. Both of these have some clever routing of ball paths around the table, and Beat Box in particular has a good variety of targets. There is actually a real benefit to the tables being zoomed out, as alluded to above – you can get a much better feeling for where to aim for.
I am still pretty hopeless at the game, mind. I managed to get fourth place on the high score table for Steel Wheel once. More practice is needed.