Godday,

In the last editorial I asked you readers to send in some material to start up some kind of pinball debate which could run in the forthcoming editorials. So let's start off directly with a one debate concerning pinball designs.

Debate: Table Design

I love the physic and graphic engines presented in the latest Pro Pinballs, but for table design, give me the pre-digital boards of the 50's-70's! I love the old lighting systems, and the roll over numbers, and all those mechanical sounds of bells and things. I do not care for background music, especially since they all seem to have gone to CD which doesn't allow the instant theme switching that the classics (Pinball Fantasies and such) could do. I would love to see a merging of Gottlieb or Bally or someone with the folks from Pro Pinball to do up a LARGE (more than Microsoft Arcade) collection of vintage pins. I love that Microsoft Pinball, except for the horrible frame rate and the "windowsy" high score list. It is nice that you don't need to put the CD in for that one. I would also love to see a new pinball construction kit, and was considering writing one that would allow you to lay it out in 2D, then it would use Direct-3D to show it from any perspective you want, and then when you smack the machine from the side, it could actually move in perspective. But, I don't know how to do the physics for the game!

I used to play Pinball Construction Kit all the time on my Atari 800, and wish that Bill Budge would do something new on the PC end!

So, in closing, I don't care for ramps and the metal pipes that drop your ball right back onto your flipper, give me the challenge of catching the ball myself, and just gimme good table art, classic design (drop targets, bumpers, and lots of lights with text on them), and good old mechanical noises! If you want to include actual pinballs from the past, that's a definite plus! After all, I don't have time to travel the country trying to find working vintage pinballs to play, and all you can mainly find in arcades today in Minnesota, are the games where you just hit a button to launch the ball into play and use your flippers to do the skill shot, don't people remember where Pinball comes from? Back before it had flippers?

- Scott Haag

Let's return to the normal editorial writings. Since the last editorial was written I've received a copy of the full version of Simon the Sorcerer (StS) Pinball. The pinball was interestingly enough developed by Adventuresoft together with a third party company that asked to be anonymous. The third party provided Adventuresoft with the engine that they based the pinball on. If I were to make a wild guess (that I suppose might be wrong) I would guess that the third party company was in some way Pin-Ball Games Ltd. (who have released such mediocre pinballs as Soccer '98 and Judge Dredd Pinball). My guess is based on StS's remarkable similarities in both ball and flipper physics to products released by PBG. Wonder why they wanted to be anonymous, don't they want their name mentioned in association with their engine? I suppose there might be some other reason for it all, I just wanted to write about it since it makes up for good editorial writing which I don't have a lot of! :)

Sierra has recently been a victim of the word - which has been made so famous by Dilbert - downsizing. Dynamix, which is a part in Sierras company structure, has suffered from lots of layoffs. As a results projects have been canceled and pushed further into the future, one project canceled was 3D Ultra Pinball NFL which apparently was slated for a release mid-years. The 3dup series will still continue and new titles in the series will be released, apparently 3 new titles are planned for this year, how they now will be able to produce three different titles this year with all the layoffs and such I don't get. Though I suppose it's likely they'll manage to do so before the end of the millennium... then again that's about as big a chance as they'll developed three new titles before the end of the year. I'm rambling. :)

I mentioned Dilbert above which reminds me of a recent Dilbert strip where Catbert sings "The Pinball Wizard" (The Who). I would probably be visited by some dilberty lawyers (no, I don't know what exactly a dilberty lawyer is but he will definitively steal a lot of money from me) if I were to put that image up on my page so I'll just link to it instead. Check out the Catbert - The Pinball Wizard strip at the dilbert zone.

Fox's Sci-Fi Pinball has not been released yet but should get out before the end of the month if one is to belive the rumors.

It seems that BRUSA is out in the states now and that the mac version has been released. I'm not sure exactly what the situation is like, if there is someone reading who lives in the us and has seen brusa pc available retail, send me a mail, the same if anyone worldwide has seen the mac version available retail (in stores)!

Let's round off with... uh, I forgot what I had planned to round of with so let's just round of with this (the previous sentence that is, not this... argh).

Now we...