Pinball Fantasies Review
by Big Bad Wolf

Jaguar Cartridge, Pinball Fantasies, $53 at Electronics Boutique in the La Jolla UTC mall San Diego county, California

Before reading the rest of this review, it's important to know that I don't like pinball games. Nevertheless, I bought this game because I thought it would be fun, and I needed a new game before Defender 2000 came out.

Graphics:
Amazing! Crystal clear, with no fuzziness whatsoever. The animations were very good, the physics were very nice with everything happening just as I expected it, no funny stuff here folks.

Sound:
Real stereo sound! The sound effects were what you would expect out of a pinball game, and the in-game and out-game music ranged from OK to excellent.

Gameplay:
I could tell that this was an accurate pinball simulation in that I kept losing, over and over and over and over again just like with the standup pinball machines. However, after an hour of playing, I started scoring a few more points, started keeping the ball out of the hole longer, making more bonus points, making more point multipliers. When you're not pumping in quarters for an hour and losing constantly it gets to be a LOT of fun when you get better at it! I particularly liked the Speed Devils board and the Bones'n'Ghouls (someone correct me if I got this one wrong) board because of the atmosphere, for lack of anything else to call it.

Overall:
Everything about this game was great! Graphics, most of the sound, and gameplay. Thank goodness there's a 3 day weekend coming up so that I can spend some quality pinball time. :) If you like pinball, you won't regret purchasing this one. Even if you don't like pinball like yours truly, it was still a FUN game, and I'm still going to spend some quality time with it, in between solving Battlemorph and mastering the other characters in Primal Rage of course.

-- Keith C. Estanol / [email protected]