By Gaz has a lot to answer for.
Over the past couple of years he's always expressed his enjoyment of pinball tables. Now, when I had my Amiga, I had all 3 of the Digital Illusions' Pinball games, Dreams, Fantasies & Illusions and was hooked on them. When I moved to the PC I discovered that they felt nowhere near as good as the Amiga versions. Then I found Epic Pinball and downloaded that, which was quite awesome; however, that must have been about 8 years ago now and I have upgraded at least half a dozen times since then and have no idea where it went. They also did a follow up called Extreme Pinball, which I've never seen. MicroLeague released a commercial version of Epic Pinball, Silverball, which I've also never seen. The other notable release is Kiss Pinball from Gathering of Developers.
Anyway, Gaz has mentioned Visual Pinball a couple of times in the past, and whilst browsing today I came across it's homepage and downloaded it and a couple of tables. It's awesome; it's not a 3D Fragfest, it hasn't got specialist 3D lighting effects, doesn't use T&L; nothing fancy at all. Just a straight up pinball game that's fun to play. Maybe, some developers could learn a thing or two, gameplay, gamelay, gameplay...
Oh, by the way, if you have an inclination for good games, have a look at Warblade, based upon rather an obvious original source. The author, Edgar M Vigdal, wrote a very similar game on the Amiga, which everybody I know locally that had an Amiga was addicted to. And another PC conversion/update of a classsic Amiga game that we all loved is Pocket Tanks, wrtten by Michael P Welch and based on his Amiga shareware hit Scorched Tanks, which is still available for download from here. This in turn was based loosely on the old PC game Scorched Earth by Wendell Hicken.
