Pinball Dreams

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pinball Dreams is a Commodore Amiga game from 1992 developed by Digital Illusions CE.

Title screen (Amiga)

It spawned several sequels, Pinball Fantasies, Pinball Dreams 2, Pinball Illusions, Pinball Mania and Pinball World. Dreams, Fantasies and Illusions are the best known, each having come from the same developer stable: Digital Illusions CE.

The ball moved according to reasonably realistic physics, and the game was restricted to using table elements which would also be possible to build in reality.

Table selection (Amiga)

1 Tables
2 Community
3 Conversions
4 External links

[edit] Tables

Its four tables each had a theme, as do most real life pinball machines. Although Nightmare was nominally the most difficult, it usually gave out the highest scores of all due to bonuses such as double score. The version of Pinball Dreams bundled with the Amiga 1200 had a bug which rendered most of Beat Box's advanced features non-functional.

Ignition table (Amiga)

Ignition, themed around a rocket launch, planets, and space exploration.
- The Expert Software Pinball 2000 port of the game renamed this table Rocket.

Steel Wheel table (Amiga)

Steel Wheel, themed around steam trains and the Old West.

Beat Box table (Amiga)

Beat Box, themed around the music industry, charts, bands and tours.

Nightmare table (Amiga)

Nightmare, themed around a graveyard, ghosts, demons, nightmares and generally evil things.
- Unlike the other tables in the game, the name of the table in the menu did not reflect the name displayed on the table itself—Graveyard. Some ports of the game (notably the GameTek port to the Game Boy) name this table "Graveyard" in the menu as well.

[edit] Community

The pinball simulation world generally considers both Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies cult games, but the trilogy to have been released in descending order of quality.^{[citation needed]}

An alternate PC only sequel, Pinball Dreams 2, was released in 1995. It was released by 21st Century Entertainment (like Pinball Dreams) but was developed by Spidersoft.

[edit] Conversions

Atari Falcon
Commodore 64: Currently in the making. A preview was released at the Breakpoint demo party in April 2006.
Game Gear
GBA: Under the title Pinball Challenge Deluxe, with tables added from Pinball Fantasies
GP32: Released many years later.
Super NES: A mostly accurate conversion, including all four tables and near-perfect sound.
PC: An inferior conversion due to the technical limitations of PCs at the time.