Yes! Yes!! This is the one I've been waiting for! After loads and loads of desperately mediocre pinball games, the second game in Empires great Pro Pinball series is finally with us. It promises a slew of improvements on the already classic original, but the burning question is, can it deliver?

First, let’s take care of the plot. Yes, the plot. Yes, I know. Just bear with me on this,ok! The plot tells of a superbeing that has inadvertently created a ‘shock-wave’ of anti-time that now threatens your time and soon, the dawn of history itself. It is up to you to create a counter-shock wave by bringing together the already shattered fragments of time - which are crystalline by the way - and slapping said crystals into this being's crude time machine. Well, I suppose it’s better than a boring old page of instructions at any rate.

Delving into the contents of the game box, Pro Pinball fanatics of old will notice the game at last has a decent manual. I can distinctly remember the crappy little leaflet which came with the original game as reviewed by Mlaskey. It was chock-full of spelling errors, syntax errors and the like. However, this time the game comes with two glossy manuals. The first, a full-colour table manual written as if the Timeshock! table was the real thing, by Cad Delworth, who you may remember as the man who created that cool "Pro Pinball: The Web" help file (It seems someone was impressed with his work, and rightly so!). The other is your usual basic instruction and installation manual. My eagle eyes have spotted no typos... yet.

Upon installation, you launch the game and are presented with a wide array of options, letting you configure everything from the table viewpoint to the colour depth. As with the original game, Timeshock allows you to play in various resolutions, from 640x480 in 256 colours to 1600x1800 in 16.7 million colours, for any posh sods who’ve got a machine that`s stupidly over-spec'd. You can also examine the table in intricate detail, zooming in on every part's fully rendered glory. As if that wasn’t enough, the table comes complete with all the configuration options you might expect from a real pinball table, allowing you to tweak the tables settings to suit your requirements exactly. However, it’s only with the factory defaults that you can submit your high scores to the big World High Scores table, which certainly gives you something to work for.

The table itself is bursting with features. As well as your common or garden variety flipper bashing, Timeshock! has a glut of special modes, surprises and features up its sleeve. Such as a Challenge mode, whereby any multi-ball bonuses that you may have clocked-up but not used are passed onto the next player. There’s a video mode, reminiscent of Stun Runner, when you take over the dot matrix display and rush down a tunnel, collecting million point bonuses and avoiding the mines. You might find yourself scaling Mount Rushmore, mining the channel tunnel, belting seven shades out of a robot warrior or even cooling down a volcano, all animated in the dot matrix display at the top of the screen. The quality of the animation is excellent, make no mistake, and there seems to be dozens of different animation’s. You can even nudge the table to the left and the right instead of just up and down. This allows great control of the ball which is a major plus over lesser pinball sims (i.e. any pinball game other than the Pro Pinball titles).

The entire table is displayed on the screen all at once - it doesn’t scroll at all, meaning you won’t get distracted (or seasick) with the screen bouncing up and down all the time. The aforementioned variety of table views means you can select a view to suit your tastes, but the lowest angled view is probably the best option. This view gives you a view up the table where it actually feels like the ball is rolling around on the table surface, rather than flying around in the air as seems to be the case with 2D scrolling tables.

All this and I haven’t raved about the graphics yet! I know, I know, graphics do not make the game! However, the graphics in Timeshock! surpass even those in The Web. Someone has been working overtime at a Silicon Graphics ninja workstation creating a table that looks stunningly realistic. Now I was only playing the game on a 14" monitor (stop laughing at the back) but even on this monitor the level of detail is astounding. At higher resolutions on bigger monitors you will almost be able to see your face on the ball. I was able to run the game at 800x600 in 65k colours and the game performed exceptionally well, although it slowed down quite drastically during the multi-ball sessions, but I believe the upcoming patch should optimise the code a bit. Still, the game is doing well to run as fast as it does at that resolution, especially when it also has to deal with CD quality sound and the best ball physics I’ve ever experienced (insert your own smutty innuendo here).

The music is great too, (I’m fast running out of superlatives here) and is once again written by Jake Burns and Bruce Foxton (ex-Stiff Little Fingers and The Jam). A mixture of rock, dance and jazzy tracks, I’ve found myself playing it in the background when I do other things. Cracking stuff and there’s no less than 32 audio tracks on the CD.

To sum up, it’s quite clear the makers are total pinball fanatics, judging by the sheer detail of every aspect of the product. It’s this detail which gives this product the edge over every other pinball sim going (including The Web) and the huge number of features packed into the single table gives the game more longevity than any other pinball sim going. My only moans are the slowdown and the length of time the table takes to load if you can’t free up over a hundred megs of disk space. Still, these are only niggles rather than hard complaints. This is the best pinball sim available on any format and will stay that way until either the Pro Pinball team unveil the next game in the series, or one of the other pinball sim developers open their eyes and try to beat them at their own game.

Pro Pinball Timeshock! by Empire Interactive

Specs	O/S	Processor	RAM	Graphics	CD-Rom	Soundcard	MMX	Direct3D
Required	DOS 5.0 or Win95	P60+	8Mb+	SVGA	X4 speed	All major cards	No	No
Tested On	Win95	P133	32Mb	2Mb Mystique	x8	SB AWE 32	N/A	N/A

Tim Wright for Game Over!