GamesRelay

Name: Pinball Fantasies

Pinball Fantasies is a game name you might recognise, it goes back to the good old days of the Commodore Amiga and was originally developed by Digital Illusions C.E. who are now more commonly known as D.I.C.E. You may know them now more for developing games such as Mirrors Edge and the Battlefield games. Upon booting the game it will tell you it was developed by The Silents, who for those in the know were part of the Amiga Demo Scene and made the transition to commercial games towards the end of the popular life span of the machine. The original Amiga version had the abbreviated 'TSL' as the name entered on the high score table, this has also been paid homage to with the scoreboard on the PSP version with TSL topping the list and several other abbreviations to represent the names of the original development team. Fantasies is actually the middle game of a trilogy released on the Amiga; The first one being Pinball Dreams with a sequel to Fantasies being Pinball Illusions. The game has since been ported over to a variety of consoles in various incarnations (some versions borrowed tables from the other games) since it first saw the light of day back in 1992 including the Atari Jaguar, the Super Nintendo, Game Boy and even the iPhone version has recently been released by the same people responsible for this PSP Mini game; Cowboy Rodeo.

The first thing that's striking about the game is the size of the it, a mere 5.5mb worth of download, peanuts in the grand scheme of things, and it does leave you wondering how much of a game there could actually be. Thankfully any worries are soon cut short, the game remains intact with its full compliment of the original four tables to choose from; Party Land, Speed Devils, Billion Dollar Gameshow and Stones 'n Bones all make it into the game and look pretty much as they always did.

The tables are all represented in a 2D fashion in a cartoon like manner, no attempt to make them more real has been made, even the shading on the ball is pretty much none existent. The graphics are good and work well, but they seem to suffer from some kind of motion blur effect from time to time, an effect which can be slightly off putting, however it isn't enough to spoil any enjoyment of the game. The mix of the tables is well done, some are easier than others but that's always the same way with Pinball, it wouldn't be any fun if they were all the same.

The controls of the game are simple and intuitive, the shoulder buttons operate the pinball flippers as you would expect, however one feature which is of particular interest is instead of playing it like a normal PSP you can play it length ways, making the X and Triangle button become the method to flick the padals, thus playing vertically instead of the screen being horizontal. Although, while this applies to the original PSP's and the newly released PSP Go which is the driving force behind these Mini games, as you can imagine, trying to play like that on the PSP Go would be rather uncomfortable.

Likewise the sound isn't going to be winning any awards on the sound track front, but, it's more than adequate for this game, there are some fun catchy tunes in there and the sounds of the table are realistic enough so they keep you engaged with the game, problems with the sounds could be down to the nature of the game trying to remain true to it's origins but since it has been released on a digital platform one could of hoped for it to be remastered.

Overall this is fun little purchase, especially if you remember gaming on your Amiga and want a bit of honest nostalgia, the game is well presented throughout and for the asking price you won't get a much better Pinball game than this.