Advanced Pinball Simulator

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Skinto deluxe? Then rifle thought this month's cheapies with Marcus berkmann - you might find a bargain!

Code Masters
£1.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

This latest Code Masters title (accompanied as ever by pix of those ghastly Darling laddies) is an assault on the ever popular pinball market (Nah? Really? Ed), and it's not at all bad.

The main problem on the Speccy - well, on my cranky old 48K-er at least - is the hopeless sound, and pinball does need its sound effects to work properly. But despite this, APS is not as awful as most Code Masters games, perhaps 'cos it's written by the Oliver Twins, who also gave us the ill-fated Sport Aid project, The Race Against Time. If they have not captured the feel of a pinball table particularly accurately, that's partly because they haven't tried to. Instead this is a computer game based, to a greater or lesser extent, on pinball, and as that it works well. Just be careful not to tilt the computer (Eh? Ed).

Yegads, what's this? Pinball?! This is as good an example as you can get to show how odd the pairing of gun and games can sometimes be. What on Earth possessed the designer of this game to make it a 'shoot-at-the-flippers-'em-up'? It almost seems deliberately perverse!

What happens is you shoot at the plunger to eject the ball into the machine. Then you shoot at the flippers to punt the ball back into play if it looks like it's going to make a break for it. Just like a normal game of pinball really (well, sort of). Works okay though, and although a bit strange at first, the program does play a mean pinball!

Label: Code Masters
Author: The Oliver Twins
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

Advanced Pinball Sim is just that. A sim of a pinball machine Where does the advanced bit come in? This one has a plot. Something about some village being taken over by a mad wizard or something. Nothing worrying about As a pinball game it's pretty simplistic. There are a few bumpers here and there, the obligatory paddles and the odd target or to be knocked out. Needless to say, it's all frightfully easy and amazingly boring. The whole thing that makes pinball exciting is the flashing lights and the tension as your metal sphere goes careering all over the shop, not seeing a little white circle bounce all over the screen doing absolutely no damage to your neves at all.

There is a little bit of speech at the beginning, that mutters something about pinball. but it's so bad. that I can barely make it out.

There you have it. Probably the worst Oily effort to date You can tell how they tackled the problem of complex gravitational fields, and even the complexities of inertia itself. "We won't have any", they said. "Let's let the ball go anywhere at random."

Authors: The Oliver Twins

A previous CodeMasters hit gets the light gun treatment with fast flippers, gates, barriers, bonus lanes, extra balls, a ball trap and loads more pinball features, and it's all controlled by the light gun firing at left and right flipper icons on the side of the table.