Pinball Fantasies (Amiga)

GOOD RETRO GAME WEEK, day 6.

The acclaimed sequel to Pinball Dreams. To be honest I think Dreams had way more dramatic title screen music though.

The game has four tables, and I might as well play them in order. Starting with Partyland.

This table has way too much clown on it in my opinion. Even the music sounds more like clown music than theme park music.

Look how bright and colourful and packed full of stuff it is though. It's covered in cryptic flashing lights and buttons and I have very little idea what any of it means. But that's okay, as long as I can keep the ball from going down the big hole at the bottom I'm sure I'll do just fine.

Here's a screenshot of the exact moment I failed to fire the ball into either of these paths to get a skill shot bonus. I could have made additional millions by continually looping the ball around through that bottom path, but I've screwed it all up now.

Somehow the sound effect for this is even more annoying than the annoying clown music which to be honest isn't actually annoying me at all but whatever.

To help save my sanity I'm going to have to hit those duck targets so that I don't have to hear this sound again.

Even though the game is just scrolling up and down a still picture, the little animations on the scoreboard whenever I manage to achieve anything help bring it to life and keep it visually interesting. It doesn't really do much to help my screenshots look more interesting though.

In this case I managed to switch the arcade on, and land the ball inside.

There's a very slim chance that after I mess up with my third and final ball, the game will award me an extra ball to keep going. And it just happened, just then! And then I just let my rare and precious bonus ball slip between my flippers after barely earning a single point with it... totally wasted.

I had two PARTY letters lit too. That's like twice as many as I normally manage.

I've found the 'hidden entrance'! Which seems a lot like their way to get the ball back in play if I ever manage to get the ball stuck at the top of the loop, like I just did.

I really hate these gutters at the side of the table. Once the ball drops down them I'm screwed, and there's absolutely nothing at all I can do stop the ball going down the drain. Here's a screenshot with faked motion blur, to help emphasise how screwed I am

Well actually I could get out of it by pressing the space bar to hit the table, bouncing the ball upwards a little, then drop the flipper to slam the ball back down at the pin, where it'd ricochet up into play. But I suck at that.

Table two, Speed Devils. I'm finding this to be a little boring compared to Partyland, though maybe I just miss the constant clown music.

I can loop the ball around with the flipper like in the other table, but I don't gain much by doing it. Lighting up PIT lets me add a multiplier to my bonus added on after I lose the ball, and it's pretty simple to do because I can change which letter is currently lit by pressing the flipper key.

Awesome, I've got a GEAR letter! What that means I have no idea, but I'm bored of this table now anyway.

Table 3, Stones n' Bones, doesn't have the third flipper, but it does have a 'hit the flashing letter' skill shot, which is always nice. I missed having it on Speed Devils.

It may look like I'm about to fall down the outlane to my doom, but actually I'm falling into The Vault to collect 5 MILLION. I hope.

The last table, Million Dollar Gameshow. Apparently I can actually win a trip! Which is good to know because I've won next to nothing so far. I guess I have to start activating things before I can build up my score on this table.

Awesome! That's more like it. 500,000 points for each and every target I hit until the timer runs out.

Typical. I've somehow managed to get stuck doing loops of the 'loop mil' ramp, which gets me a million every time but takes ages. This is completely unbelievable, I've just wasted my Money Mania timer doing like 4 loops in a row.

Well okay I probably would have made less from the targets knowing me. And I'm all out of balls on this table now too.


Is Pinball Fantasies as good as I remember? Yeah, it's still as addictive as ever. Am I as good as I remember? No I did terrible at the game! I barely made 10 million on Partyland after playing for hours. On the plus side, I've still got that clown music playing in my head. I think it's burned in there for good now.