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This is a very Japanese game, somehow, despite its Arthurian back story and American voices. The pinball action takes place over three tables, each with its own theme, in one you are near Stonehenge for example, another features a castle, and each has its own sound effects and tasks to complete. As far as pinball games go Golden Logres has to be one of the more unusual takes on the genre: as far as I can gather from the intro screens and pictures, you are completing tasks to find the Holy Grail. This is borne out by the frequent splash screens during the game, with talk of Taliesin and Sir Bedivere. According to the web site, "The purpose of the game is to revive the 11 Knights of the Round Table and reconstruct the Kingdom of Logres by achieving ten missions running through three Tables with the Knights." The tables themselves take only one third of the screen and are seen from an almost top-down perspective. Hand drawn figures adorn the tables, and the graphics are good, if small due to the layout of the screen. The rest of the screen is used to give instructions and scoring, of which there is a great deal. The balls are well animated, and seem suitably solid; the action is a little sluggish, although as the demo version I have been playing is limited to 60 seconds it is hard to judge this accurately. The sound effects are most original, with flipper action signalled by what is either a sword or an arrow rushing through the air, and the ball's arrival at the plunger accompanied by a horse whinnying. The game can be run in 256 or 16-bit colour, in 2 sizes, and has hardware support, though I found the software version ran faster for me. This has been a difficult review to write, because I really like this game - but I have no idea why! The idea of it intrigued me, the game itself is rather corny� and yet somehow I want to keep on playing, despite the heavy ball action, despite the small table, despite the general oddity of the whole thing. All in all Golden Logres is one of those games that you will either love or hate. Its certainly worth a look, even if just to marvel at how far you can take a pinball theme.
Requirements : 486DX2/66 or Pentium, 16Mb RAM (32Mb recommended), soundcard, Win95 Download the demo (21.2Mb from LittleWing)
Golden Logres is not currently available in stores but an Internet edition is available for 4000 Yen (about �17 or $30) direct from the developers in Japan. |
