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I would like to be able to say how well Balls of Steel enhances the genre, with its Duke Nukem 3D tie-in, its several tables (in the registered version) � but I can't. Simple reason is that Balls of Steel is pretty poor. It doesn't feel like pinball, and to be frank the freeware Roll 'em Up comes closer to the real thing than this one. On top of that the ball is unconvincing in both appearance and dynamics, moving at uneven speeds off the flippers and when it bounces off the bumpers. What was worse about the demo version I played was the amount of messing about with my monitor the game insisted on doing, with dire warnings that its testing program might damage the monitor or cause the computer to hang, encouraging me to turn the screen off until the rather unnerving beeps had finished. The absolute worst thing of all, that made me wipe the demo from my hard drive as soon as I could was the game itself, with its scrolling screen: to avoid having to see a small screen, Balls of Steel displays a close-up of the table and compensates by having the screen scroll up and down following the progress of the ball. This was not mesmerising in the slightest, in fact it made me feel seasick, more due to the speed of scrolling I think� in the full game you have the option of viewing a smaller table without the constant nauseating movement, but nothing about the game tempted me to part with cash to see if that would make the difference. Pick one of the other games reviewed here but avoid this one like the plague!
Requirements : P90, 16Mb RAM, soundcard, Win95, DirectX 5.0 Download the demo (13.2Mb from Gamespot) |
