Pure Pinball	Iridon Software
Reviewed: 2003-06-19

- The pinball

Pure Pinball offers 12 table views for each table and a wide range of resolutions. Among the table views there's about 2 or 3 that are useable allthrough playing. You hit a function key to switch view and the change is immediate, everything is rendered in real time (in contrast to pretty much all other pinballs with a 3d table view), the foremost advantage of the real time rendering is probably the ability to switch views, for me however it just meant I had to go out and buy myself a new graphics card, my voodoo3 was getting old ;). Bought a Asus GeForce FX 5200.

My computer is a piii-450 with 512000kb ram, I couldn't really play with all the neat effects turned on nor at the highest resolutions so I guess I miss out a little there because the designers have had an eye for visual detail at certain places, you can with a machine that's not mine, switch on effects for glass cover and glass cover reflection, metallic reflections, ball reflection and additionally have some background scenery showing if you want. Also if you can run the simulation in one of the higher resolutions, well it looks great! I still somehow like the looks of the pro pinballs much more though, feels more solid and realistic. If you buy the pinball or play the demo, zoom in on the silverball using one of the f10-f12 views, way cool!, really scared me at first ;).

To continue with the topic of table views you either choose to have one of two "fixed" views of the table where you see the whole table or you opt for a 3d scrolling view in the spirit of Tilt!/Hyper 3D Pinball (I can still remember me praying when reviewing it for me to never have to see another pinball with that view implemented, oh well..).

There's one or two 3d scrolling views that I thought were acceptable, all of which more or less make you feel like you are leaning over the middle of the table or something (but then again, were are you standing when playing a 2d scrolling sim? no better, no worse, I still prefer a fixed 3d view anytime). The other views zoom in very much on the ball, cool for the moment (like catching the ball on the flipper, tilting the view so you have your head down on the playfield, and flipping) but you can't really play with those views on.

Rather neat is the fact that when the ball is on the back end of the table the view is tilted up so the back end is more visible, feels a little like you are moving up and down as one tends to do when playing a real pinball (me at least), could make you seasick too I guess.

The fixed views aren't that great, you can choose to have the dmd (on the actual backbox) visible or not, which gives a little more view of the table, but the tables stretch so far back that the back stuff gets hard to view. The dmd by the way can only be shown in one of the corners, not in the top-middle, annoying.

So the views, while many, in my opinion aren't that great. I've been using a 3d scrolling view (the default view, f4) that doesn't feel too extreme and have gotten "used" to it. At multiball the view is hovewer switched to the entire table.

The music and sound effects are ok I guess. There's a single table theme played most of the time which isn't restarted when you loose a ball, it just continues, positive there's no annoying end of ball sound, negative is there's no annoying end of ball sound. At modes music switch.


- The Tables

World War

Interesting design at first sight, but I thought that feeling lessend as I played. There's lots of things in the middle that hide things in the back from sight, not terribly much but depending on the view it can be annoying. The first thing you probably notice on the table is a big god damn Tank! :-) The tank is placed near the top of the table on a raised section of the table. Again there's plenty of ramps, loops and drop targets to hit. There's a ramp leading into the tank which shoots the ball out the Tank's turret (a habitrail). By hitting some drop targets (rather obscurely placed I thought) you can rotate the turret to connect it with with a ramp that feeds the ball to a multiball lock.

There's a number of modes to start and complete, I found it very annoying that the three drop targets needed to light start mode were placed quite openly but were impossible to hit with a direct short from the flippers (at least I never managed). I read the manual later and noticed there were two other ways to start these modes, but does that really weigh it up?

Runway Train

I've spend most time on this table I believe. The table as the title revelas features a railroad theme ("old western"). An additional table design element is a sublevel table (a'la haunted house). This table like the others features a set of modes that can be started but don't advance you towards any wiz mode. It also features a multiball mode and some additional mode extras that aren't precisely easy to figure out (why isn't more mode info etc. displayed on the dmd?).

The table design is quite nice with "everything" visible in the fixed view (nothing to look "over") but I still played using the 3d scrolling (f4) view, this since some of the targets on the table were sort of obscured (and I wanted to try to see what was on the table so I could try to figure out what was happening) by some ramps going over them. Some targets are hard to hit (if possible) due to the powerful flippers.

Excessive Speed

The theme is obviously cars and there's plenty of space for car chasing with a multitude of ramps.

It is perhaps the most interesting table, even though I couldn't play it much due to the ball dissappearing everytime after I had played a multiball (no ball search kicked in or anything, soo dissapointing, this was a review copy so I hope it is fixed in the release version). Though what I could play gave me the same sort of mixed feeling as the other two tables, sure there's modes (and here it seemed you could advance in them towards something) and things but the ball handling gets in the way of the joy of exploring and somehow lessens they joy of playing the table.

Overall...

I'm not sure, usually I like playing a table and just hitting things to figure out what to do, but playing these tables I was mostly bored... If it was the physics that were getting in the way or obscure rules or little info on the dmd, I'm not sure, that's my experience though.


- The Feeling

The ball is rather fast moving and the flippers unfortuantely too rapid/powerfull for my taste. The flipper's strength is probably needed in the flippers for these long ramp-filled tables. The flippers are cruedly masterable but I hate flippers that are that strong, one of the reasons I never really played pinball illusions that much. It gets hard to set up shots for ramps or things (is it at all possible to hit the start mode drop targets on the world war table with a direct shot from a flipper?). Tapping quickly/lightly on the flipper keys doesn't give any real impression of a light flip.

Overall the feeling in the flippers are ok but crude at times and lacking in finess at other times (if you could stand Tilt! this is excellent in comparision), it's nowhere near pro pinball excellent.

The controls I must point out are not reconfigurable (for what I could tell in my review copy) and the left/right tilt keys are the alt keys!! I hate that, I want z/. on my keyboard. Though the left/right nudge is so weak and tilting way to easy so it doesn't matter perhaps.


- The Whole:

In all a good attempt but it fails first and foremost with the physics. The table themes and table design needs more thought to work with the views and the views while many could perhaps have been better tested out to find a set of more usable views (though I did get used to one, but nowhere near happy with it). Additionally none of the table themes really caught my interest as something interesting (or new) nor cleverly done (the tank turret is quite nice though I guess). You should ofcourse try the demo though and see if you like it. The visuals are nice, there's some cool features on the tables but in the long run the physics and table themes will probably not hold up.

Platform: PC

Also available for: -

a 3d view of the tables, non-scrolling

Runaway Train

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