Leger vs. Pinball Fantasies (Amiga)

People hardly had the chance of getting to grips with all the fuzz around Pinball Dreams before Digital Illusions put forth a sequel.

A genuinely classical follow up in that it took pretty much everything from the previous game and pushed it through a progressive filter and worked through the details arriving on the other side until it could be considered more of everything.

The same people behind the computers, the ground was already laid, and thus focus could be on evolving what was already there into some kind of perfection.

Partyland came to be the posterboy of Pinball Fantasies.

With yet another flipper placed on the upper part of the table, now higher than any table found in Dreams, a new dot matrix-panel showing both points and tiny animations in ways the old panel could not manage and an extremely unique audiovisual and aesthetical expressen (amongst it all a laughter of a clown positioned in the midst of the table) the bar was set so high that it felt ridicilous.

Partyland is everything but an easy table to deal with and it takes time to get it to deliver a satisfactory amount of points. Though, thanks to things happening pretty much all of the time the feeling is always present of a huge deliverance.

A deliverance which, finally, I got to experience after I do not know how many rounds of scoring not much at all.

Or at least no more than 20 millions.

But... suddenly it happened and the Mega Laugh mode took turns with the Happy Hour one over and over again, encounters with targets and ramps turned into something like 150 million truly dramatic points and goose bumps all over my body.

The table is truly well balanced and it shows a great evolution of what already had gotten close to perfection in Dreams and its tables Beat Box and Nightmare. Also it feels like a great example of when more actually is more and more lights to lit, more easily activated multipliers and bonuses aswell as a generally more complex attitude makes a huge difference on the experience.

Just as impressive is the Stones'n Bones-table, which in most ways are the Fantasies equivalent of Dreams' Nightmare.

Once again there is a huge focus on ramps and drop targets, much things to active and three ball traps which in two cases acts as final destinations for intense score hunts.

I am having a hard time deciding if Nightmare or Stones'n Bones is the table I prefer, but considering the circumnstances it is a truly pleasurable issue to deal with.

What is left is the racing oriented Speed Devils table and the Billion Dollar Gameshow.

Speed Devils is anything but an easy table to deal with. It severly lacks a natural flow with most of its ramps hard to reach and it is way too easy to get stuck up in the rightmost corner trying to get the most out of its non eventful Pit-Stop area; A lone flipper makes it easy to stay there and by looping over and over again active the PIT lamps which in turn makes the ramp close by being an activator of the next multiplier level.

But that is all there is to do there, all but using its ball trap when so see fit.

Concerning scoring nothing really makes things explode like it eventually will do when playing Partyland. Instead a slow and time consuming buildup is at hand, and to be frank the lack of happenings makes the table rather dull.

You do have the Off-Road mode, but it does not really make the score take off, not even when getting stuck between some bumpers. The Jackpot is quite naff in favour of the Super Jackpot and there is a constant strive for Miles to active the Jump ramp which gives 10 millions. Not even the Turbo mode gives that much time to go after the 5 million reward each of the hard to reach ramps will offer.

While not a bad table it is both time consuming and hard to reach the fun of and it will take time learning how to reach the desired destinations.

What about the Billion Dollar Gameshow?

Well, it continues in the boring trend of Speed Devils but adds some truly complex chains of events focusing on just a few happenings. The result feels like one long struggle to reach the two ramps on the upper part of the table after having activated them by going through a loop activated by going through an easy to reach ramp.

Huh?

Conceptually Billion Dollar Gameshow delivers by having a giant Wheel of Fortune in the middle of the table; First you active a prize and then you try to win it.

It screams of the game shows of the ninties with a stereotypical gray haired man dressed in a suit as a host and its even getting the cringe worthy music right in a way that makes things seem abysmally luxurious.

The problem is that it feels just as hard to live up to this dream as it is hard to do anything of worth on the table.

The fact is that I even activated the Digital Illusions code to make the ball stay on the table forever and after some hour or so of training I truly started to resent the design; Time consuming, hard and with extremely little in the form of fun Billion Dollar Gameshow manages to be the first table in the series which I would call genuinely bad.

Instead of the journey Dreams offer, an experimental one from beginning to end where the wrongs gets right along the way while never truly standing in the way of the experience, the one in Fantasties feels way more extreme.

Two fantastic tables which continues exactly where Dreams left off, one quite unbalanced table which takes a bit too long to deliver any outcome of worth and one table which completely misses its mark and is no fun at all to play.

Unlike the later AGA version this earlier one of fewer colours manages to feel a bit more relevant thanks to the wonderful and almost Amiga defining introduction which the AGA version lacks.

The intro is iconic, with its heavenly music from Olof Gustafsson aswell as the logos and the graphical menu where the tables are presented. The AGA version even misses out on the the high-score tables.

Also worth mentionning is that the original graphics by Markus Nyström looks more natural with fewer colours, in ways that makes the AGA graphics seem like an afterthought (while never ugly, they do seem a bit forced in ways the grahics of the later Illusions never do since they were designed with more colours in mind).

While not as well balanced as Dreams, Fantasies still manages to feel relevant thanks to Partyland and Stones'n Bones. And while I do hesitate to push up the score a notch I just have to do that very thing thanks to the truly magnificent presentation of this original version of the game.

I mean, it is not really that hard to just ignore the two lesser tables and spend time on the fantastic two instead.