Pinball Magic

Sending a ball to the top of the table and letting it fall back down — everyone knows that from arcade halls. Pinball Magic from 1990 takes the oldest entertainment of all and pours it into a computer, which can barely handle it.

It's a flipper simulation for MS-DOS that gives you a table with thematic decoration, bumpers, ramps and various targets. The goal is classic: keep the ball in play, achieve high scores and progress further. There's no story, no animations between rounds, just the game itself. The table slowly increases in difficulty and the number of points needed to progress grows. Nothing complicated, but the principle does its job.

The controls are simple — left and right flippers are controlled with two keys, you launch the ball from the top target and then catch it. The physics does what you'd expect from it. The flipper responds appropriately, the ball behaves according to your stubbornness and timing. There's nothing like real pinball — it's not thrown into it at all, without that magical moment when you know that hit will be the last one and it has to count. The graphics are simple, the sound minimal. The music didn't change for three decades of minutes I played. The game feels like a gym, not an experience.

Pinball Magic was one of the first attempts to get pinball into a computer in this form. Today there are far better emulators of real machines available. This one takes its simplicity — there's nothing that fails, but also nothing that grabs you by the hair.

Those who want to feel how computer enthusiasts in the nineties solved arcade classics on modest hardware will find an answer here. It's not surprisingly bad, just quite boring. Flippers on screen seem better in your mind than when you have them right in front of you without that direct feedback, without solid weight in your hand.