Pro Pinball - Timeshock!

You thought nobody could make a better pinball game than Pro Pinball - The Web. You were wrong. The game in question? Pro Pinball - Timeshock!. (Try saying that in your best Orson Welles voice for added effect. Really drag out that 'Tiii-iii-me' bit, too).

Empire's last pinball game, Pro Pinball - The Web, was considered to be about the most realistic pinball game you could get without actually going into the boozer at the end of the pier. All it really needed to capture that authentic pub pinball atmosphere completely was a novelty rubber vomit pool to place under your feet, a photograph of a pint of beer to stick on your monitor and partially obscure your view of the proceedings, and an aerosol can of fag spray.

But the obessives who made it think they can go one better and make a game unprecedented in the annals of the holy calling of pinball. This is partly because they're pinball obsessives, and obsessives are like that, and partly because they've had about eight million letters from similarly obsessed pinball nutcases with suggestions for improvements. Unfortunately, being pinball freaks, their concerns have been chiefly with the gameplay itself, and little or nothing to do with making everything a bit more like a simulated pub, but that's single minded developers for you.

Punch-Ups Ahoy

The new game will have a 'plot' that's a little more obvious than the last game's - something to do with an exploding time crystal causing you to warp about to different points in time - and have elements which will be a lot more integrated. Central to the table's design will be a big revolving crystal, which you will be able to turn with the flippers and enter from a number of different angles to enter different time zones. If that sounds like we're getting dangerously close to fantasy pinball concepts and away from the traditional pinball values that made The Web so cool, fear not - we're still firmly in the realm of proper tables.

There are bucket-loads of new features including Tournament and Special Challenge modes, along with a Novice mode for the particularly ham-fisted, where you'll be given a specified amount of time to play regardless of how many times you lose the balls, thus enabling you to improve without worrying about losing the balls before you've got going. They're also considering allowing carry-overs in multi-player games, whereby if you set up an extra ball and fail to collect it, the next player can do so, no doubt provoking nasty remarks and all-out bouts of fisticuffs.

Voyeuristic Fun

Among other new features will be an option to play other people over a network or the Internet. There's also talk of an upgrade option to spectate while others play (for those with voyeristic tendencies and/or empty lives). Once you get a certain level of expertise, you'll be able to access an 'operator's menu' which will enable you to customise most elements of the game. (Although your high scores won't count for much if you make things too easy).

Sound and Vision

In the bells and whistles department (in fact, it's more like the bells, whistles, car alarms and klaxons department) the dot-matrix display will run at twice the frame rate of its predecessor and they'll be Dolby Surround Sound and more tunes. There are improved mechanical sound effects - where The Web only really makes a noise when the ball hits stuff, Timeshock! will have rattling-on-metal noise on the railed sections, sliding-on-glass noises on the main floor of the table, and time-gentleman-please and toilet-flushing noises from the simulated pub in the background. (Look, there isn't a simulated pub, alright? Ed.)

Graphically it should be even more impressive than its predecessor, thanks to the new rendering - there are visible ball-lock mechanisms, animated diverters, switches, jets and slings, super-bright lights, illumination effects that can plunge the table into darkness, and text on the lights in the game. And not only will the table be reflected in the ball, but the ball will also be reflected in the table - which will finally give you a reasonable excuse to play pinball in shades. For those of you who like to examine a table in detail, there's a 'super-zoom mode', enabling the player to examine any part of the table in extreme close-up, removing the final excuse for putting the ball somewhere it shouldn't go.

A Bit of a Looker

Timeshock! will provide more ways to view round things bouncing about the screen than the average slow-motion segment in Baywatch. As well as the usual variety of angles and arrangements with which to view the table and dot-matrix display, the detail setting will be pushing back the frontiers of graphics card requirements in much the same way that Captain James T. Kirk once pushed back the frontiers of crap acting.

The maximum setting at which you can play the new game comes in at a cool 1600x1200, in 16 million colours (or true colour). At this resolution, the 'dots' for the dot-matrix display will be proper little circles for each dot, rather than a single pixel, giving unprecedented detail. You'll probably be able to count the nasal hairs in the reflections of the scumbags crowding around the machine to watch your outstanding flipper skills.

To run the game in this mode, of course, we're talking about serious amounts of memory in the graphics card - how does 8Mb sound? That's right it sounds like rather a lot. Those with piddling little 4Mb cards will be able to view the proceedings at 1600x1200 in 64K colours, or switch down to a measly 1280*1024 if they want true colour. Don't worry if you only have a 2Mb card - you'll still get 1600x1200 if you don't mind 256 colours, 64K colours in 1024x768 or 800x600 in true colour; and if you only have a 1Mb card (you gosh-darned Luddite) you'll be able to get 256 colours 1024x768, 64K at 800x600, or if you want, true colour at 640x480. Except all your friends will laugh at you.

Tales of Obession and Madness - 1

One of the things that made the first game so good was the fact that the more time you spent on it, the more routes to success on the high-score table revealed themselves to you. As you got better, you'd go from a couple of hundred million points, through half a billion, up to a billion or so. If you took it really seriously, and invested serious amounts of your life in playing it, you might even reach the dizzying heights of a couple of hundred billion.

Anyone who wants to assert their flippery prowess can check out the high scores on Empire's web page (www.empire.co.uk/propinball) and see just how much better they'll have to get. The all-time high score at the moment (and probably for some time to come) has been notched up by Jonas Martinsson*, a finalist in the (real-life) Swedish pinball championships. The score? A mere 1.237 trillion. The scoreboard in the game doesn't even go up this high, so he had to wait until they'd checked the code at Empire before he knew what the score was. And in case you're thinking of having a quick bash at the record, you might like to set aside some time first, as it took him six hours of continuous play to get it. Clearly, the man is mad.

The Swedish maestro knows more about the game than the developers do. So much so, in fact, that he has his own advanced players hints and tips web page (there's a link to his page from Empire's) and is one of the play-testers of the new game - as are several others who've got extremely high scores. If you think yourself a bit of a whizz, let them know, and you may even get to play-test the new version yourself.

Tales of Obsession and Madness - 2

The animated dot-matrix displays that appear at the top of the screen, illustrating elements of the plot as your flippery skills reveal it on the table below, have all been developed, at great expense and over some considerable time, on a Silicon Graphics workstation. These high-quality, if teensy-weensy, clips have been painstakingly converted into four-colour dot-matrix displays for the game. Clearly, these people are also mad.

* Correct at time of going to press. Check the High Scores page for the latest information.