21st Century Pinball

Spidersoft had gotten the feel for the Pinball Dreams engine once they had ported it to DOS, and later got the go-ahead from 21st Century to make their own follow-up while DICE were busy with Pinball Fantasies. The result was Pinball Dreams II, a competent pinball game in its own right, but often unfairly looked down upon by the die-hard fans due to its sequel-in-name-only status (and because the fan base was waiting for a successor to Fantasies and not just more of the same). Pinball Dreams II contains four brand new tables from Spidersoft, including Safari, Revenge of the Robot Warriors, Stall Turn, and Neptune.

Neptune

A water-themed table, making heavy use of purples and turquoise colors, which gives the table a pretty unique style. The table is a little dark, but has plenty of things for your ball to hit, ensuring that no matter how bad a shot you are, odds are you're going to get points regardless of where the ball actually goes. You even get a small handful of points for letting the ball go down the side drains... but then, just about all of these tables do that.

Safari

The safari table is, of course, themed after an African safari, with pale orange savannahs and zebra-striped borders. Plenty of tracks to ride on, and a bonus multiplier that's pretty easy to trigger a few times in succession. The music does a great job of sending you to Africa, with tribal drums and wildlife sounds. This one's probably my favorite of the bunch, but only because the other three kind of look dumb by comparison.

Revenge of the Robot Warriors

An apocalyptic science fiction table with some robot warriors. The goal here is to run, hide, and eventually blow up said robots. The table doesn't really score very well, and has no skill shots to speak of. The grey and brown color scheme of this table doesn't really work out too well, though there is a nice bonus in the form of the lovely young lady painted at the bottom.

Stall Turn

This table is themed after World War I biplanes, right down to the helmeted gentleman appearing in the center of the table. Lots of sky blues and wooden browns make for a good set of colors, but I found the table overall to be rather lacking in fun bonuses or anything of the sort. This table was evidently designed around competitive play, as there is a bonus that will add the highest scoring player's score to your own.

Pinball Dreams II was only released on the PC. Since it runs on the same engine as the PC version of Pinball Dreams, the video mode still squishes the visuals a bit, and also is a little difficult to run on modern computers due to timing issues (though DOSBox helps, obviously - make sure you play around with the cycles settings, because this game depends heavily on having the right speed CPU to play at the proper speed). The game also seems to add a few annoyances over the basic game formula, like the occasionally dodgy ball physics - I'm told this is due to the original ball physics programmer leaving in the middle of production - and the fact that the end-of-ball bonus countdown takes way too long. Overall, though, despite the tables not really being stellar (and most sound effects lazily reused from Dreams 1), it's still a fairly fun game. Just don't expect anything really great out of it. The music, on the other hand, definitely lives up to Dreams, especially the introduction theme (which received a couple of minor updates in later releases; the Pinball Dreams Deluxe release offers a remixed version with a more prominent lead part).

Later down the line, both of the Dreams games were combined into the same program and released as Pinball Dreams Deluxe (released in some territories as Pinball Arcade), though it still did not leave the PC. The Pinball Dreams Deluxe pack mashed both games into the same menu (the list of tables now scrolls up and down), added a settings menu where you can change the number of balls, table angle, and screen mode (in case you don't like playing in the bizarre 320x350 screen mode), and also - the most interesting addition - a History section, with details, photos, and flyer posters for some of the more famous real-world pinball tables like Bride of Pinbot and Terminator 2. It also adds some frivolous rendered intros to all the tables, and a slight remix of Pinball Dreams II's intro theme.

Pinball Illusions was DICE's last title for 21st Century before moving on to greener pastures, and was also the first of only three 21st Century pinball games to require the AGA chipset, as the game was designed from the ground up for AGA's 256 colors (by comparison, Dreams and Fantasies were limited by the older Amiga's limit of 64 colors on screen). Illusions contains only three tables, compared to the previous games' selection of four tables each, which was not a popular choice among enthusiasts who were expecting four. On the flipside, though, all kinds of new features have been added that make the three tables just as good as their earlier works. There is now support for multiball, something the previous two games didn't have. Illusions is also the first of the games to have a high-res mode, although on the Amiga, this means running in an interlaced screen mode that probably looks better on a real monitor but looks choppy and blurry on an emulator. The AGA support means the tables all look really, really awesome, with a nice shiny ball, flippers that have more depth, smoothness and realism to them; and blinkers that actually appear to cast light on their surroundings. Simple touches, yes, but they go a long way toward improving the experience overall.

Law 'n Justice

Science fiction and police action have always gone well together. Just ask any fan of RoboCop or Judge Dredd. This table pays tribute to the sci-fi cop movie, placing you in the role of a police enforcer for Future City's finest. Lock up both criminals and balls in this one to achieve Multiball. Plenty of rewarding jackpots, too, but only if you know how to light them first. The side drains on this table are ludicrously easy to hit by accident, and there is no stopper peg between the flippers, so it's actually quite difficult to keep the ball in play for longer than a minute or two. The upper-level ramps are very difficult to hit... the flippers in this table seem to act strangely.

Babewatch

These days, the American dream is starting to lean more towards being a total beefcake and having all kinds of chicks within easy access. This table is no exception. Build your body, race in your car, or gamble your way to becoming the envy of every hot chick in town. Plenty of different ways to boost your multiplier here, some multi-level action, and of course, multiball mode is present as well.

Extreme Sports

This table is all about taking massive risks. You can trigger free-fall events, and rather than the bonus counting down as you fail to hit the right ramp, in this one, the bonus actually continues to count up as the timer counts down. Hitting the right ramp at the very last second warrants a HUGE bonus! So needless to say, if you want a good score, you better be as daring as possible. Iron Man mode gives you a four-ball multiball, and you can score all sorts of combos by hitting any of the ramps in quick succession with each other while touching nothing else on the table.

The Vikings

This table was only present in the PC CD-ROM versions (and the 32-bit remake, True Pinball), because DICE hadn't finished it. FrontLine, who ported Illusions to the PC, did the honors of finishing it up for the CD-ROM release, though the fanbase tends to believe that The Vikings is Illusions' weakest table. Vikings has lots of upper level action, with the upper rollovers resulting in some easy bonus multipliers due to the bumpers' tendency to knock the ball back up to the rollovers. Collectible items such as axes, helmets, and pizza(?!) result in big end-of-ball bonuses. Pseudo-vocal music is included for this table, as well... interesting to note, since we're dealing with MOD music and not digital CD music.

Illusions was supposed to be DICE's coup de grace as far as pinball was concerned. This was their final release for 21st, but unfortunately there are a few issues with it that keep it from being quite as classic. While the tables are very well designed, fun, and nice to look at, there are some graphical glitches regarding multiball (especially on Babewatch) and the high-res mode can tend to mess things up as well (it might just be WinUAE at fault, but high-res in Law 'n Justice doesn't draw the flippers correctly). Also, it may just be me, but the flippers don't seem to act as realistically as the previous two games: the ball would go speeding off in entirely the wrong direction half the time, making precise upper level shots more difficult than they should have been. The game is still fun even in spite of all the bugs, but they can tend to put a hamper on any serious playtime, and ultimately I end up preferring Pinball Fantasies over this.

Pinball Illusions, interestingly, got two major ports, each with pretty big additions. The PC port followed the Amiga version by a year, in both floppy and CD-ROM versions, and with full support for SVGA monitors for resolutions up to 800x600. The floppy version was virtually the same as the Amiga's, but the CD-ROM version included a fourth table called The Vikings, which the development team didn't feel was really up to the standards they had set with the other three tables and thus had removed from the original version. The re-addition of The Vikings courtesy of FrontLine brings the table total back up to four. The CD version also had Redbook audio tracks on the disc, replacing most the MOD music for some of the bonus modes, and changing about half of the music for the Babewatch table. The PC CD-ROM version is rather tricky to get working properly - DOSBox runs it well enough, but high-res modes are not supported properly, and it tends to play both the original module music and the CD Audio soundtrack at the same time, resulting in a horrible cacophony.

Amusing little hunk of trivia: the introduction for the Amiga version of Illusions initially calls the game "Super Pinball Fantasies Turbo EX II M-Ball Edition" but quickly corrects itself into Pinball Illusions. This doesn't seem to appear in any other version of the game. The PC port overwrites this with a few extra logos for the team responsible for porting the game.

Following Pinball Illusions, DICE momentarily detoured into console gaming. The first game they created for PlayStation and Saturn was an upgraded port of Pinball Illusions, entitled True Pinball and published by Ocean. True Pinball includes all four Pinball Illusions tables (including The Vikings), with 3D modes in both low and high resolution modes. The high resolution mode interlaces the screen for a more crisp display, but this makes it not display properly on emulators (or on component/HDMI video, if you're playing it on a PlayStation 2 or 3). High res video does make the table a bit easier to see, but in some tables it's still pretty hard to see some table elements like the multiplier lanes near the top of Babewatch, due to them being obscured by bumpers. If you don't like the 3D tables, the game also includes the option to go back to 2D mode, but all this does is display the rendered table from a top-down view instead of the original pixeled graphics. I personally think the rendered 2D looks pretty decent, but I still prefer the Amiga/PC versions for 2D, because the way the tables were modeled makes things harder to see than the classic 2D versions, since things like bumpers still get in the way of some essential table elements.

There are some other minor details changed about the game. The main menu is entirely different now, so it no longer features the thumping techno from the Amiga/PC versions. Some of the in-game music is different, especially the main themes from Babewatch and Extreme Sports, and it tends to be too quiet compared to the table sound effects. There are some extra voice effects added, mainly from a Mortal Kombat-style deep-voiced announcer, which doesn't entirely fit, but is markedly better than Pinball Fantasies Deluxe's announcer, who probably wasn't even trying to sound excited. And finally, the game does not even bother saving high scores or configuration settings (even in the Saturn version), so you'll have to reset them every time you play.

As for which of the two True Pinball ports is better, the PlayStation version is the one to go with. Not for content, but more for the controller. The Saturn controller just wasn't meant for this kind of game. But if given the choice, the PC DOS version is the best, because few of True Pinball's changes were for the better.