- Pinball Dreams
It’s the early nineties, and a demoscene group called The Silents has a pinball game up their sleeve. They’ve shopped it around to a few publishers, Bitmap Brothers among them, but the general consensus is that pinball games don’t sell enough to make it worth publishing their game.
A fledgling company called 21st Century Entertainment, Inc., then known for publishing Amiga action titles like Rubicon and Deliverance, steps in and publishes the pinball title. That little pinball game was none other than Pinball Dreams, which not only sold millions worldwide, but also ended up being packed in with many Commodore Amiga computers and ported to many other platforms.
The demoscene group, now formed into a company called Digital Illusions CE (to later become more famous for their Battlefield series for Electronic Arts), put 21st Century on the map. After they finished their last pinball title, 21st passed the pinball duties off to another company, Spidersoft. More and more pinballs were released, many memorable tables were brought forth, and a great lifetime was had before 21st Century finally went kaput around 1999 – a whole two years before their namesake.
21st had four companies working for them throughout their existence. DICE, as mentioned above, worked on three major titles that are widely considered the best ones released. Spidersoft was brought in later to aid in porting the DICE games and was also eventually given the task of making original titles after DICE moved on. Unique Development was picked up for the purposes of remaking Obsession Pinball, and Liquid Dezign – comprised mainly of ex-DICE and UDS staff – was responsible for SlamTilt. In addition to this, 21st Century had an American publishing arm, confusingly named 21st Century Entertainment, Ltd. (as opposed to Inc.) – reputedly, neither branch was aware of what the other was doing. The US branch did no development of its own and existed solely to publish pinball games, and beyond that, would exclusively handle US publishing for games developed by the European branch. They continued existing at least a year after the European branch died.
DICE’s first pinball title began when their lead artist started drawing pinball tables in Deluxe Paint on his Amiga. The idea was, a better pinball simulator could be made by making the table several screens tall and simply scrolling up and down the table, as opposed to earlier Amiga pinball games which simply showed the entire table at once, or NES Pinball which would cut between screens without even scrolling. None of the original tables ever saw the light of day, but the concept lived on, and four tables came from DICE to form Pinball Dreams. The Silents didn’t originally intend for Pinball Dreams to be a commercial title, but once 21st Century came into the picture, things quickly changed.
Pinball Dreams plays from an overhead perspective, with the table view scrolling to follow the ball. The perspective may not be realistic (like, say, KAZe’s Super Pinball series for SNES), but this way, DICE was able to put more processing into the ball physics. A wise decision: the ball physics in Pinball Dreams are stellar, to say the least – most tricks employed by real pinball experts will actually work here, including holding the ball with the flippers, juggling, and ricocheting off the side bumpers to make those tricky shots. Each table is lovingly crafted, well painted, and has plenty of features and opportunities to make skillful scores.
Ignition
A space-themed table that features a skill shot, bonus hold, and easy opportunities to increase your score multiplier. Fuel your ship and try to make it to Mars… and beyond! The music in this one is appropriately sci-fi-heroic, and the table’s red color scheme really works well here. I actually find this one the hardest to get a good score on, because while it’s easy to boost your multiplier and get bonus holds, actually getting the points to make them worth it involves some tricky upper-table shots (spell FUEL on the left and then hit the upper-left ramp) and spelling IGNITION with the center drop targets. The skill shot on this table, though, is probably the second-easiest (next to Steel Wheel) if you’re handy with the nudge button. That’s an easy 2x, right from the start of the ball.
Steel Wheel
The easiest table of the bunch, Steel Wheel is themed after the Old West. Points are very easy to pick up in this one, especially if you get the skill shots and all the add-on cars for your train (which result in all kinds of bonuses for you down the line). Great banjo music and a nice brown and grey color scheme round this table out. Hitting the ramps repeatedly will eventually start giving you massive points, especially if you hit them several times in quick succession. The skill shot is probably the easiest in the game, since there are only three possible lanes for the ball to roll into at first, and there’s enough surface for the ball to roll on that if you’re going down the wrong lane, a simple nudge will send it into a different one. Of course, excessive nudging does lead to a tilt, but Pinball Dreams is surprisingly lenient about that…
Interestingly, the layout and gameplay of Steel Wheel was more or less based on Williams’ Bad Cats table from 1989. For the MS-DOS port, the facing direction of one of the ramps was swapped to make this connection a bit less noticeable – this change didn’t stick for the other ports.
Beat Box
Probably my least favorite of the bunch. Beat Box is themed after the rap/hip-hop music industry, with a primary-colors scheme that makes it stand out. Gameplay, in my opinion, is rather weak, and the multi-level structure at the top tends to make it confusing where your ball is actually going. The music is nice, I suppose, but I just can’t get used to this table, on account of not knowing how to get a good score on it. The game doesn’t really make it that easy to figure out, considering half of the ramps are unlabeled and only make sound effects as you roll through them under normal circumstances (as opposed to displaying prompts on the scoreboard). Some of the ramps don’t even give you points at all, unless you’ve set up the combo for them first. To put things bluntly, you have to be pretty good at pinball in the first place if you want to do well on this table.
Nightmare
The hardest table here, appropriately enough. Nightmare takes place in a graveyard, and has a steeper slanted table than the other three, which means your ball is going to be much harder to launch up and easier to lose. On the flip side, though, skilled players can earn far more points on this table than the other three, due to its many opportunities for jackpots by hitting the ramps a lot. Nearly every ramp hit on this table will increase the jackpot. I love the music for this table. Strangely, the menu picture calls this table Nightmare, but only the word Graveyard appears on the table itself. This was fixed, however, for GameTek’s handheld adaptations.
Interestingly, because of DICE’s origins in the demoscene, many crack groups and pirates swore a pact to not crack or release Pinball Dreams through their respective services, out of respect for the developers. While the pact didn’t last long (it was eventually released by Fairlight, though with the message “A GAME WORTH PLAYING IS A GAME WORTH BUYING!” on their cracktro screen), it’s things like this that show that there is honor even among software pirates. To an extent, anyway. The boys at DICE probably weren’t too happy, considering that they previously collaborated with Fairlight for an Assembly demo.
Pinball Dreams got a few good ports, with versions for DOS, the Super Nintendo, Game Boy, and Game Gear. The DOS version is reasonably accurate to the Amiga original, even including the original MOD-based music tracks, as well as an alternative MIDI soundtrack for use with Roland MT-32. Sadly, as awesome as the idea is of Gustaffsen’s music being remixed for what was at the time considered the best music device around, the MIDI conversions of the songs just don’t quite have the same feel as their MOD versions, with wrong notes, misplaced instruments, and no regard for overall volume, causing horrible clipping unless you turn down the MT-32 itself. This port was actually released in three different versions – the original stand-alone release (and more common) only included the low-res 320×200 mode and required you to select your sound card every time the game was started, but was still a good conversion of the Amiga original. The second version was nearly identical except for the fact that it has a slightly different sound setup menu, lacking the Roland support but still offering Adlib as an option, and also the addition of the high-res 320×350 screen mode, which looks smushed on most screens unless the monitor is adjusted. This second port was bundled with Pinball Dreams 2 on a single CD-ROM and included a new options menu that lets you specify the number of balls per game (3, 5, or 7) and the tilt angle of the table (affects how fast the ball falls and how easy it is to make shots with the flippers). The ports both had a few other oddities in the ball physics such as occasionally getting the ball stuck on the side bumpers and triggering them rapidly. The PC ports were handled by Spidersoft, who would go on to make pinball games of their own.
The original MS-DOS port was later hacked apart by Expert Software, who were at that point becoming infamous for selling jewelcased CD-ROMs containing demo or shareware versions of commercial games. Pinball 2000 is one such product, as it is literally less than half of Pinball Dreams, as the Ignition and Nightmare tables were renamed to Rocket and Graveyard respectively, the Beat Box and Steel Wheel tables entirely cut out, and several elements of the remaining tables removed or simplified. Various notable omissions include the lack of extra ball features, some ramps being missing, and many bonus modes having been removed due to their triggering ramps no longer existing. It’s really not worth the time or money.
The SNES port was handled by GameTek, evidently based on Spidersoft’s DOS version. This port is quite surprising as hardly anything had to be cut (outside of the usual Nintendo censorship); even the music remains almost 100% intact (though a few samples were changed, and the intro tune is trimmed a bit). Some colors are changed for tables like Steel Wheel, and a few sounds were changed, but aside from that it’s actually a very good port. About the only change Nintendo made to the game was on the Nightmare table, as there are some crosses in the table artwork that had their arms removed. As a strange note, the SNES port was published in Japan by Coconuts Japan and GX Media under the name Pinball Pinball. The game remains unchanged aside from the weird new name – 100% of the text remains in English. (I suppose LCD-segment displays don’t handle kana very well.) There are a few minor bits in the table artwork that don’t look quite as good due to conversion issues, but it still looks and plays pretty well.
There was also a Game Boy port from GameTek and Spidersoft, which is extremely bizarre. The Beat Box table was entirely cut (aside from its attract mode music, which is now used in the main menu), the Nightmare table was renamed to Graveyard (which is more consistent with what it says on the table), and given the Game Boy’s lack of color and detail, much of the graphics had to be cut down and removed. The music especially suffers, with it not only having been essentially ripped to shreds to even work in the Game Boy, but tracks even seem to be switched around – a purist like me can’t stand it when the attract song is played while your playing the table. The worst part is the ball physics: since the Game Boy doesn’t really have a lot of processing power, the ball’s movements have been vastly simplified, and it’s very hard to get the flippers to nudge the ball lightly as opposed to catapulting it everywhere. That makes it kind of hard to pull off some of the trickier shots, or advanced tricks like juggling the ball between the flippers. This port is best avoided. There are far better Game Boy pinball titles out there.
Finally, Pinball Dreams received a Game Gear port, apparently based on the Game Boy port, and again handled by GameTek. This is essentially the Game Boy version with some color added to it, a few graphical touch-ups here and there, and slightly better music (though still oddly arranged). Beat Box is still missing. The weirdest change made to the game is that the point scale has been drastically reduced. What would have given you one million points in the original version will only get you 10,000 in the Game Gear port. Perhaps they ran out of screen space to contain the large scores? It puzzles me why they’d do that. It certainly takes the impact out of those massive jackpots, I must say.
The fans have not forgotten Pinball Dreams, however. A fan-made port to the GP32 exists, and C64 demoscene group Xenon is working on a Commodore 64 conversion of the game as well. It’s not yet complete, as only Ignition and Nightmare are implemented and scoring doesn’t work yet either, but it’s impressive to see the game pulled off so well on a weaker system like this, and the ball physics are almost 100% intact as well (not to mention it’s really kick-ass to hear Nightmare’s song on the SID chip). Then, around 2002, UbiSoft and developer Binary9 acquired the rights to remake the Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies tables for Game Boy Advance. That effort will be detailed later in the article.
Amiga
Commodore 64
DOS
DOS (Expert Pinball 2000)
Game Boy
Game Gear
GBA
SNES
