| Mnementh said: game #35 Hint 1: In this game you travel into space. With a train? To have your music tourney? On a graveyard? Hint 2: Make millions! Hint 3: The company who made this game back then is now famous for one of the most successful shooters and the development of the engine used by the publisher who bought them. Hint 4: Although the publisher who bought them destroyed many game companies it bought, the one that made that game thrives. Hint 5: This Pinball game was the first in a series of the dev and the first game of this dev ever. Hint 6: I prefer the dreams over the illusions or fantasies. |
Sadly this game stayed unguessed too. Some Swedes from the Demo-scene founded in 1992 a game company. They made a bunch of more or less successful games. In 2002 they released an ego-shooter named Battlefield. Since then they developed a lot of Battlefield-games. Since 2005 EA owns the majority of the company. But back in the beginning, the first game they released in 1992 was a Pinball game named Pinball Dreams.
The game was successful and became sequels, named Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Illusions. In Pinball Fanatasies I like the tables OK and one (Stones and Bones) very much. In Pinball Illusions I think the tables are mediocre. But in Pinball Dreams I like all four tables, so Dreams is my favorite game out of the series.
On the table Ignition you travel into space, Steel Wheel gives you a train in Western times. In Beat Box you are a musician making tours and releasing music albums. My absolute favorite though is Nightmare, which has a "scary" theme.
All four offer pretty good made music and sound effects (especially considering that back then sound-cards weren't that sophisticated). The graphic was great, but also very fast. The team used their experience from the demoscene to optimize everything out of the VGA-cards of the time: palette rotation, usage of full video buffer and so on.
The game was classic 2D, but for a long time the later coming 3D-pinball games didn't do for me what Pinball Dreams achieved - until Zen Pinball which also made the TOP 50 a few days ago.
If you want the fun: GOG has the game still available - in a pack with Pinball Fantasies and Illusions (Pinball Gold Pack). If you own the old game, you can run it with Dosbox.
Wikipedia, MobyGames, OGDB, IGDB
