Full Tilt! Pinball

Full Tilt! Pinball is a pinball arcade game released on PC. The production was created in cooperation between Cinematronics studio and Maxis, a company known mainly for its best-selling SimCity series.

Mechanics

In terms of gameplay, Full Tilt! Pinball is no different from the classics of the genre, popularized by Digital Illusions and its famous Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies. The game boils down to keeping the ball on the flipper table for as long as possible and performing various tasks and tricks, which consist of hitting certain elements of the table, ramps, bumpers, etc. The game is to be played on the table for as long as possible.

Players have three different tables at their disposal, differing in terms of theme and type of tasks. On the Space Cadet table we play the role of the title star cadet, and our goal is to climb the military hierarchy through nine consecutive ranks, ending with the fleet admiral. Skullduggery is a pirate table where the aim of the game is to find the treasure of the legendary Peg Lega, by collecting all fragments of a map or activating and completing a series of mini-games. The fantasy table Dragon's Keep puts us in the role of a dragon killer, who must get to the beast's hideout, kill it and release the kidnapped maiden. The daredevil is helped by weapons, armour and spells, activated by hitting specific targets.

Game modes

As in most popular pinball games, up to 4 players can participate in the game, alternately competing with each other to achieve the highest possible result.

Technical aspects

In terms of visuals, Full Tilt! Pinball is quite different from most previous productions of this genre. One of the main differences is the fact that the table occupies only half of the screen, while its second part is reserved for a digital display on which mini-games are played and information about the player's score and subsequent tasks to be performed is displayed. Unlike the aforementioned two-dimensional pinballs from Digital Illusions, Cinematronics' production is also characterized by more modern, prerendered 3D graphics.

Additional information

A curiosity associated with the game is the fact that Full Tilt! Pinball's table called Space Cadet was included by Microsoft in the Plus! set for Windows 95, and then to the next versions of the popular OS such as Windows NT 4.0, Windows Me, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Compared to the original version of the game, however, 3D Pinball for Windows worked in lower resolution and differed in the appearance of the display and small details of the game.

In 1996, Maxis released Full Tilt! Pinball 2, which is in fact a set of additional tables to the original. There are three new tables in the game: Mad Scientist, Alien Daze and Captain Hero.

Last updated on March 9, 2020