New Years

Since it is a new year and I have once again put up the Worlds Best Pinball Vote (WBP99) I thought I would send out a clubmail informing so. This clubmail was shorter than the ones I usually send out, it was supposed to summarize the last year more than anything else. This is the editorial featured in that clubmail (with some additions), and end of year editorial summarizing the past year and since it also looks a little on the new year it fits just fine here. Can you by the way belive it, this site has been around for 3 years now... Things do change, in the beginning there was just a page about me and a page with links to pinbal demos. Then there was the tower and pinball reviews and then things just grew! :)

The biggest thing, at least in my opinion, that happened during 1998 was that 21st Century dropped dead. Well at least partly, their US division still lives on and are planning on developing their own pinball's (they used to only distribute whatever the original part of 21st made). A couple of programmers have been contracted and are supposedly working at this very moment on a 3D version of the very neat 2D scroller SlamTilt. In the beginning of December Peter Mason (for 21st Century) said: "In reality it is not a conversion from SlamTilt, it uses roughly the same table layouts but is otherwise all new. We expect to release the first two table product in the first quarter of 1999 followed by the other two tables some time later in the year."

This is also a really big news for 1998 (at least for Europe and PC users), the release of Pro Pinball: Big Race U.S.A. At the time of writing there is by the way No CLEAR dates for the release of the us pc version and mac version (the mac version hasn't yet been released anywhere). So to all you ppl living in the US or not currently owning a copy of BRUSA I'd just like to point out it is really great! :-)

You can though order BRUSA (PC) from www.outpost.com and www.cdaccess.com. The Store part of the page will have more information on ordering brusa (pc) within a near future.

The BRUSA ladder and hiscore page are both available at the propinball.com domain (don't check the ladder though, I was up at a one digit position, then I had some silly loss strike and uhm, nevermind ended up somewhere).

I don't really know much about this new year. The Cunning Development team is busy with fixing the mac release of brusa and such. As for their plans this year... keep an eye on the news page. ;)

There is still a couple of pinball's that were awaited already last year but have not yet been released (besides brusa). LittleWing made Golden Logres English Version available to buy trough their webpage (don't know if it is also available in stores now, it will hopefully become so soon otherwise). Angel Egg, the english version, has not yet been released at all for what I know, something for LittleWing fans to await I think.

KaZe, the developers of some quite popular playstation pinball titles, was quite certain when I talked to them that their PC conversion of Last Gladiator would hit the pc during 1998, well that didn't happen. Hopefully it gets out this year instead?

Then microsoft made it's more gracious entry to the pinball world (the only thing they had released before this one was a educational title for children that included a pinball called "heart pinball", quite laughable thing, see Files page for demo of it). It was Microsoft Pinball Arcade, a sort of historical pinball if you so wish, including simulations of real pinball tables. A vote for what people would like to see in MPA2 or just simulated sometime in a near future by some company was also held last year. The five real pinball's that topped that list was: Funhouse, Fireball, Black Knight, High Speed and Twilight Zone. High Speed has actually been simulated already, though that was for nintendo.