We're in the 90s now and I still haven't reached a game with multiple tables yet.įinally a game with multiple tables! There's four of them here in fact: Ignition, Beat Box, Nightmare and the one you're looking at here, Steel Wheel. It seems that there are at least 6 bonus stages, but you there's only one main table. Those ball launchers are still there by the way, it's just this time the ball gets fired out of their eyes. In this case there's a row of dragon heads that need smacking.Īnd in this case it's a little more. They're all pretty much the same layout, with a launcher on either side of the playfield that fires the ball back out if it falls in, but they contain different enemies that need defeating.
![best pro pinball ms dos game best pro pinball ms dos game](http://www.allvideo.org/pictures/caliburn/crystal_caliburn_screenshot1.jpg)
I never really figured out what exactly I was meant to be doing on this one, besides smashing bits of scenery, but I did discover that there are many teleporters around that take you to bonus stages.
BEST PRO PINBALL MS DOS GAME PLUS
Plus instead of traditional pinball targets like ramps and switches, it's covered in little enemies. Though it also looks surprisingly tile-based, like a typical console game. They used all their extra colours to make it properly metal. We've jumped to the next console generation here and you can tell just by looking at it. Man, devs should just pick a name and stick to it, it would make things so much simpler for me. Next is TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine game Devil's Crush/Devil's Crash, aka. GAME 5 of 23: DEVIL'S CRUSH / DRAGON'S FURY Developer: I've got to be honest, I wasn't really having much fun playing this, but I was bloody impressed. It's a bit hard to make sense of what you're looking at maybe, the graphics are kind of busy, but then that's a feature of the original table as well. You can always see the flippers and scoreboard even when the camera's up at the top of the table. The game has proper smooth scrolling by the way and features a trick I don't remember ever seeing in a pinball game before: split screen. Plus it has one feature I definitely didn't expect to see on the NES: multiball! It's a shame I didn't grab a shot with the balls further apart as I could've showed off the scaling as well, as the ball shrinks as it gets further away to match the perspective of the table. I haven't played the real Pin-Bot so I can't say how accurate it is, but it seems to have all the same targets, ramps and rails, and the lights are flashing in the way you'd expect. Before Rare put 3D graphics on the SNES with Donkey Kong Country they were pulling off things like this. In seven years the Famicom/NES went from basic shapes to replicating an actual real pinball table (Williams' Pin-Bot).
![best pro pinball ms dos game best pro pinball ms dos game](https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/49085-pro-pinball-big-race-usa-playstation-front-cover.jpg)
The next game is Pin-Bot, which is somehow running on the exact same system as Pinball up there. It does have flippers though, so there's that. There's no rails or bumpers, only whirlwinds, and it seems like you've got to get those orange shapes. Well, maybe 'halfway' is exaggerating a bit.
![best pro pinball ms dos game best pro pinball ms dos game](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e1/cf/c8/e1cfc853b4342f88bb4fdc572f9b9293.jpg)
To be fair, I wouldn't have thought an Atari 2600 was up to even the most primitive ball physics, so to get something that halfway resembles pinball running on it isn't bad. In fact I accidentally bounced it back down the shooter lane onto the plunger a couple of times. Right away I spotted a problem with the game: it all takes place on one screen so I can't stitch screenshots together to make a giant image! Also there's no music! You might think that playing with a square ball on a table with no diagonals might be an issue as well, but you don't have to worry about that as the thing bounces all over the place constantly.
![best pro pinball ms dos game best pro pinball ms dos game](https://ramokromok.com/rr_frontend/directoryimages/originals/16/zb/w2/screenshot-of-pinball-dreams-amiga-zbw2845592.png)
To be honest it's not even the earliest Video Pinball game, as Atari introduced dedicated Video Pinball consoles in 1977 and an arcade game with a printed backlit screen in 1978, but I can't take screenshots of them so I'm going with this instead. I figured I might as well start at the beginning and Video Pinball on the Atari 2600 is the earliest pinball game I can find.