A sure sign of a misspent youth is a good pinball player, in which case I think our resident teenage delinquent/old man Dazza had a childhood similar to that of Oliver Twist. Whereas I personally was a good, God-fearing child who never went anywhere near such things as the pinball machine - I was an Afterburner and Galaxians man myself. Biff wasn't born, as he is a genetic experiment gone tragically wrong.

Alas there is no escaping the simulation bandwagon, and one must put up with such things. All right, I admit it, it's very good. In fact as far as simulations go this is one of the most realistic I've seen. I'm more used to seeing rubbish football manager games and flight sims with the minimum specification being a MENSA member.

On starting the game you have the choice of four tables. They all act like the real thing, and none is easier than the others. Your playing screen is the view you would normally have of a real table. You can't see all of it at once as you could in the older console-type pinball games, but this means you get a closer, clearer view of the part you are concerned with.

The table scrolls with the ball when you knock it up the table with the flippers. You might think that this would be a bit confusing to watch, but the scrolling is silk smooth.

Graphically the game is fantastic and all the illustrations on the bed of the machine are colourful. The ball's movement is perfectly smooth, even though on some of the tables it gets flung around at a hell of a rate.

I played first on table two. The theme here is rally driving, and an unusual feature is extra flipper which involves a hell of a lot of skill to use it effectively. When using the other flipper it was almost as though you were playing independently of the lower table - you could get massive scores at the top.

Themes of the other tables are a game show, horror setting and theme park, all with their little quirks. A lot of the time you not only control the flippers but also small games of skill further up the table, like moving the light which the ball will run over - very simple but very effective.

I think the only thing lacking is a multiball sequence with two or more balls on the screen, but it's understandable they didn't do this as multiball scrolling would be a nightmare.

To polish off their product 21st Century have added cracking theme tunes, even a creepy one for the horror table. Also they've got a direct sample of the flipper noises, so as you can imagine it's pretty convincing. The music itself at first sounds pretty dodgy but they are very cleverly written and irritatingly catchy tunes.

If you have Pinball Dreams there might not be much point buying Pinball Fantasies, but if you were madly in love with it then this is probably well worth a look because of the extra features it offers.

Earlier this year, 21st Century Entertainment proved that the age-old game of pinball can be faithfully reproduced on the Amiga by releasing the incredibly popular Pinball Dreams. On the face of it the game seems to be quite simple, but when you consider all the physical components programmed in it to make it realistic, such as gravity and momentum, it takes on a whole new complexity.

Not concerned with extending the game to introduce features which couldn't be possible in the real world. 21st Century concentrated on producing a game that was as close to coin-op pinball as possible - and as anyone who has played Pinball Dreams will tell you, it couldn't be much more realistic.

There were a few niggly points that spoiled the lastability of the game, such as the limited number of flippers and lack of special sequences (such as multi ball).

Play on your fantasies
Enter the sequel: Pinball Fantasies. Opening the box gives you a clue that something must be different here - the game comes on three disks instead of the original two. On loading, it takes on the polished look of its predecessor and it's only when you start playing a table that you realise just how different the game is. Although there are still only four tables to choose from, each is incredibly large and features three flippers instead of two.

Dead good scrolls
As with Dreams, the tables scroll vertically depending on the position of the ball - a feature your eyes will probably take a while to get used to. Loads of imagination has gone into designing the game, with each of the four tables based on a single theme: Partyland, featuring ducks, snacks, cyclones and skyrides; Speed Devils, with pit stops, speed bonuses, off-road and speed ramps; Billion Dollar Gameshow, including expensive prizes, super jackpots and cash bonuses; and Stones 'n' Bones, featuring bats, devils, mummies, ghosts and the Grim Reaper.

The graphics are excellent: there are large, colourful backdrops which scroll smoothly up and down, and a plethora of features crammed into each table. The sound manages to recreate exactly the repetitive tunes that are found on traditional pinball tables, but thankfully they can be turned off if required. The spot effects are excellent, with some nice sampled sounds adding to the atmosphere of the game.

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes pinball addictive, both with this version and the ever popular ball-bearing-based arcade game. Maybe it's just that utterly infuriating feeling when the ball drops down between the flippers, and you curse and swear that it won't happen the next time; or then again it could be just the bells, pops, whistles and flashing lights that draw you in time and time again. Whatever it is, the pull just gets stronger each time you play.

If your art editor Marcus hadn't made a concerted effort to yank himself away from his monitor after several days of solid playing, this issue may never have been finished on time. Almost everyone in the office was bitten by the bug at one time or another, causing a situation that hasn't been since the release of Anco's productivity-destroying footie blast Kick Off 2 (Never mind Speedball 2. Ed.)

So could this flippery fantasy be improved on? Of course it could, but for now Pinball Fantasies is certainly the best pinball simulator available for the Amiga, and one of the most maddeningly addictive games we've come across of late. Well done 21st Century Entertainment - roll on the sequel to the sequel because we want more!

I think we all pretty much know the score with Pinball Dreams by now, don't we? (If you don't, pop over to the Readers' All-Time Top 100 on page 79). It came from nowhere, but almost instantly became one of the most popular Amiga games of the year, as flipper-fun-starved silver ball fanatics lapped up its fast, smooth, and above all realistic arcade pintable feel (almost all the previous attempts at Amiga pinball had lacked either realistic ball structures or lifelike ball movement, or even both).

This sequel, then, had been eagerly awaited since it was announced, which can be a little dangerous - the element of surprise that served Pinball Dreams so well had disappeared, and authors Digital Illusions found themselves having to match up to some pretty hefty expectations. How did they cope? Read on and find out.

HOW THEY COPED
Well, they basically wrote Pinball Dreams all over again. Pinball Fantasies' biggest flaw - and its biggest strength - is that it disrupts very little of the winning formula of the earlier game.

It's a bit faster-moving (the tables seem to be tilted more steeply), the flippers (of which you get more - three of the four tables now have three flippers each) are all, deeper, more realistic than before, and there are a few slightly more complex features (split rail channels, kickbacks, score-locked barriers and a few more), but the game engine itself feels almost identical (no multiball, for example).

With that in mind, then, let's forget about the game engine. In the four boxes around these pages, you'll find a little mini-review of each of the game's tables as a pinball game in its own right. Go and read those, then come back and join me for the last paragraph. Well, go on, then...

THE LAST PARAGRAPH
So there you have it. One brilliant table, two good ones, and one slightly ropey one. Whichever way you look at it, that's four pinball tables in your home for £30 and - whoa! THIRTY quid? Surely with half the game already written, there's no feasible excuse for this being priced at a fiver above the tag on Dreams?

They certainly didn't spend a load of extra cash on the sound - several little jingles and snippets on the Stones 'N' Bones table, for example, have been lifted straight from the Nightmare table in Pinball Dreams., and the effects on all the tables are the same as in the previous game. This is my biggest (and it's not really very big) gripe with Pinball Fantasies - the sound effects are pretty tinny and weedy, and don't really convey the physical thump and clatter of the real thng very well at all.

But I guess you can't have it all. This is still a brilliant game, so save yourself up 30 quid, grimace a bit as you hand it over to the shopkeeper and grumble a bit about market forces and profit margins, but buy Pinball Fantasies anyway.

Once upon a time, in the depths of the magic forest, where jolly goblins passed the day discussing insider trading and fleecing holidaying elves with slick tourist traps, there lived a game called Pinball Dreams. It was a happy game, and would spend its time spinning electronic simulations of metal balls across electronic simulations of pinball tables.

One day a merry pixie happened across it and fell instantly in love with its fabulous playability and tore it bodily from the magic forest and showed it to the world and proclaimed it to be of fabulous playability. This merry pixie's name was Stuart. "Roll up, roll up," Stuart would command sternly in his nevertheless twinkling pixie voice. "Come and see Pinball Dreams, the wonder of the age. Fabulous playability, it is pinball on the Amiga, guaranteed to retard the ageing process or something." And many people came to listen, and bought surprisingly-reasonably-priced copies of the game from authorised dealers, and found that they were indeed of fabulous playability. And Stuart saw it was good.

A little later upon the same time, Stuart was again skipping through the magic forest on his way to cut himself in on the goblin tourist grade or something. Anyway, as he was passing a road accident involving a lot of socially backward people from St Ives, he heard the unmistakable sound of someone scoring a five million point bonus by traversing a loop anti-clockwise with a small steel ball. Pushing aside some leaves he carried for just such an occasion, Stuart was amazed to see Pinball Fantasies, an incredibly fabulous pinball game with four magnificent tables and more playability than a goblin shell-and-pea game, and nowhere near as deadly to your health should you actually win.

Capturing the frisky game in a quickly fashioned mantrap, he rushed to town to tell the people and further the cause of really very good games indeed.

On the way he bumped into Jonathan. "Hello Jonathan," said Stuart, breathlessly. "Look at this incredibly fabulous pinball game." "Pinball?" asked Jonathan, his brow wrinkling in an endearing fashion. "I have never played a pinball game. Is it any good?" "Don't be stupid," admonished Stuart, lightly punching him in the face. "It is stupendous. You just cannot get better than this. The tables are classics, the action never lets up, the satisfyingly huge bonuses are tricky but attainable, you can play for fun or strategically, you can have eight players taking part, and it is staggeringly addictive. And it looks good. And sounds better."

Jonathan put his arm around Stuart's shoulders in a friendly and yet somehow sinisterly conspiratorial manner. "Concisely put," he nodded, "and a fine summary considering the enormous amount previously written about the game which means that repeating it would be pointless and irrelevant," he grinned. "I happen to have the A1200 version here, and it is exactly as you described, except it obviously looks better than the standard versions. And you can install it on a hard drive, although, inexplicably, this means you lose the groovy table-selection screen and music. Do you think we could come to some arrangement by which I can use your well-crafted paragraph and thus avoid writing a regurgative review myself? Oh, hang on, I've already done it. Thanks anyway. Bye."

And, clapping the bewildered Stuart on the shoulder and adroitly stealing his watch, Jonathan went on his way, whistling in a particularly smug and irritating style.

Opinions are divided in the Amiga Format office. Richard Jones, a bit of a wizard with the silver ball and possibly the only man on earth who has the power to control gravity at wil, believes that pinball is a game without any element of chance. That is easy for him to say. Personally, I believe that chance plays more thana small part in the shiny ball game. Come to think about it, many is the time the ball eludes Richard's preternatural control and slithers down the drain between his violently jerking flippers. If this is not chance, he must have chosen to ditch himself... strange tactic!

The pinball table is a closed system, all the variables are under the direct control of the laws of physics, therefore there can be no chance. Once we introduce chaos theory, and butterflies in Japan start affecting our game, the debate becomes even more heated. Then there is always the position of the moon which also needs to be taken into account...

The net effect of this conversation is that we play less pinball and drink less beer... the opportunity cost of philosophy, eh? One thing is for sure, if any game on earth is fundamentally analogue, it has to be pinball - world-class tennis is almost completely digital these days. So you could never successfully convert this mixture of genius, beer spawn and gravitational anomaly to the antiseptic environment of the computer - could you?

What a stupid bloody question. Digital Illusions did it almost a year ago with Pinball Dreams. They improved on it with Pinball Fantasies, and for a while we spent more time in the office after work than we did in the pub. Eventually we came to our senses and started playing real pinball, but for a while there we nearly earned our anoraks.

NOW IT IS OUT for CD32. Can it possibly improve on what is already one of the greatest games ever to grace the Amiga? Of course - there is 256 colour graphics for a start, with the already gorgeous tables now rendered even more gorgeous. On first impressions the gameplay seems to have been ruined by CD-isation. The screen is massive (well, our fabulous new Nicam stereo telly is, when compared to our old 1084S monitor) which is merely weird.

But the scrolling is much faster, and the motion of the ball smoother. For some reason (possibly the 50 frames per second animation) the act of scrolling from the bottom of the table to the top, and back again, at high speed is nowhere near as nausea inciting as it used to be. Digital Illusions have been freed of making allowances for the limitations of 16-bit technology. The ball trajectory algorithms are now all computed by the speedy 32-bit 68020... and it shows.

These enhancements are disconcerting at first. All the shots seem easier to make than on the Amiga 600 version and visions of truly huge scores start flashing before our eyes. A few more games dismiss these illusions and after a few days 'hard playing (hey! Thre is no other way to play pinball!) these dreams are diminished, and it becomes obvious that Pinball Fantasies CD32 is actually more challenging than the computer version. How much of this can be ascribed to the joypad control method is a moot point, and of no interest to anyone.

THERE ARE ONLY two blots on this shining star of a game. Firstly, there is the excessive price. £32.95 is simply too much. What happened to lower prices on CD products? And secondly, and closely related, there is no reason why all four of the Pinball Dreams tables could not have been put on this disc as a bonus. There is no chance Pinball Dreams will ever stand alone as a CD32 product in the wake of Fantasies. For this tightness on the part of the publishers, this 95 per cent game gets downgraded a full 10 per cent.