![]() ![]() | |||||||||||||||||||
|
- The pinball
Basically this pinball is lousy but it has unusual touches in the tables. Not that those make the pinballs overall any better, just they are there. The music is mostly pretty ordinary and not especially exciting, the space warp table has some fun tracks with b-conversions of the star wars theme and a very few other science fiction series. Sounds lousy but is kind a fun to hear - once. The ball physics and table themes are both bad, the physics are simply impossible to ever get the hang of, the themes and layout (including graphics) are simple and made hard only by the fact the feeling makes it nearly impossible to hit anything. The pinball comes with a nice manual (the german version even has a manual in hard case). There is two table views - 3d / slightly tilted 2d - , both as bad, the 3d view is way to tilted to give you an ease of play, the other view gives you an overall view of the table but playing feels wrong.
All the tables feel very empty (and so they are too), no superpinballs for sure. The ball bounces a lot like it thinks is realistic and thus disagree with me. Instead of a real pixelated dmd there is some avi movie or something playing constantly, pretty boring movies too.
Watch out so you don't run out of gas, no it is no joke, if you play to long without refilling gas at the pitstop (a sink hole or something I belive) the game will appear as tilted and you'll lose your ball. The theme is simple, you start at last position and advance in rank and you fill up gas, advancing awards multiballs and maybe an extraball. Advancing is accomplish by over and over hitting some drop targets or uh whatever. You try to score. Dull and boring in the whole. The layout is simple with 3 bumpers in the middle that honks when the ball hits them (annoying like hell), a loop stretches around the table and surrounds the middle section with the bumpers. two ramps feed the ball to the flipper. A sinkhole - the pitstop is next to a ramp. You can activate the sometimes functionable ball saver by lighting six rollovers in the sidelanes. The table feels somewhat unfinished. - Space Warp Science fiction somewhat. Star Wars and Star Trek somewhere in it. Parody on itself. Theme - advance in warp to warp 16 which is a 5 ball multiball. Advance by hitting 6 droptargets and then enter a ramp (symbol for going in orbit around a planet and landing on it). Well their you find some crystal that makes the spacevehicle (to qoute what enterprise was referred to as in tos: the cage) go faster. Kind a found that out in the readme, didn't realize the ramp was a going in orbit and that I did a EES when I landed on the planet, the EES is a scan for the crystal thing. That is about it. No need yawning about the table layout. I think I covered it all except for those 5 bumpers and a probably useful sinkhole. - The Source
2-pair flipper pinballs isn't something you commonly find in pinball simulations or real pinballs at all today. Instead of one flipper on each side of the drain at the bottom of the table there are 2, making the flipper the double its length. This certainly would be useful since you then can set up your aim differently. But now when the ball and flippers being as poor as they are you can't really take advantage of that. Anyway this table is sort of enjoying, but simple as the others. You try to hit 6 drop targets and hope something will happen. I never really managed to hit those six targets, can't belive that is so impossible!!
Aiming really is hard, hitting a target even harder. The ball so easily drains, and there is so many bugs in the game, tilting might sometimes result in the next ball being tilted, sometimes you get the feeling one ball was skipped so you feel like you only played 1,3 (not sure there though ;)).
Rather simple, sometimes it is almost ok but 90 percent of the time you are frustrated by the fact you don't hit a single target no matter what you do. Then you get lucky and the ball hits a target, not by your skill but by the pure luck you flipped the ball at the right moment without thinking. Simple enough, the physics are not good. Still adequate for this pinballs overall which isn't really any good. Can't really say what better ball physics would have added to these tables which feature poor graphics, poor layout, simple themes and high repeatability level... I'm pretty sure you would have wondered why the physics were so good, but as it is now you aren't really surprised.
Things that would have helped this pinball (anything - everything would help it) would have been a ball that doesn't accelerate quite as much and one that was easier to aim with, so you at least had the slightest feel that it is you who are in control. You don't really feel like that now. The layout and theme do go together, but that is because they are both as simple, so you will never really get caught up by the table. The Source was something of the strangest so far, attract mode music is people talking in a cafe and while you play you hear encouraging voices saying - "Wow" "Play the pinball!" "Your good" - when the ball drains... That is a mistake for sure. The samples are just played randomly and you get annoyed (but that doesn't really affect the grade, but it does imo reveal something of how serious this pinball is). Strangely enough this was the only table I played for longer than a while, no idea why, just wanted to hit those six drop targets which proved to be nearly impossible. Frustrating (if you look at the screenshot you will see that it should be easy to hit those). In the whole this isn't really a pinball to rush out and buy, it isn't really worth recommending it at all. Today there is so many good pinballs out there and ones of so much higher standards. nah.
system requirements
Platform: PC
Also available for: - Screenshots: ![]() |