really! i hate this game! horrible gameplay. horrible controls (yes i know you can change them but a keyboard just doesn't feel right for a pinball game) horrible horrible horrible! the only good thing about this game are the graphics (which look amazing) but graphics alone don't sell a game for me.

So uh... what's horrible about it? The controls are about the best you're going to get on a keyboard, and you don't comment on anything else. Do you just hate virtual pinball in general? Because if so, that's not really the fault of this game, and if there's other virtual pinball you like, how does it control better than this?

@ sethsez
i LOVE virtual pinball. in fact one of my favorite games of all time is epic pinball for the PC.
i've seen my errors after posting that after playing epic pinball again and seeing that the controls are almost identical. honestly my biggest gripe is that theres only one table.

Well, the reason there's only one table per game is because that's really all that would fit on the disc. I mean, look at the size of the install... it's almost the full size of a CD.

The reason a single table takes up so much space is because they simulated the hell out of that thing. It's got a bunch of smoothly-animated, extremely high-resolution assets (uncompressed 1600x1200 2D art with tons of frames of animation isn't cheap, space-wise), and the physics are absolutely incredible. It also lets you adjust damn near everything you could possibly adjust on a real table.

Epic Pinball is a lot of fun, I agree. But in exchange for the number of tables you're losing visual fidelity, table complexity, range of options, and physics quality.

Considering when it was released and how good of a simulation it is in pretty much every respect, people at the time were willing to forgive the lack of tables.

The "only one table" gripe is mostly caused by sierra putting out completely garbage pinball games with many tables.

Timeshock when it came out was as close to real pinball as it was possible.

Having only one table isn't a legitimate complaint when you're talking about the quality of the sim compared to the other trash pcpins out there.

look guys i see my errors and i just played the game again and i found out it was a pretty good game

hey man i think he just thinks it's horrible 'cuz he keeps draining the ball ;-)..
This aint your mama's pinball where ya can eat a sanywitch and talk on the phone while playin'..
That ball moves Faaast......................

Timeshock! IS the best pinball game ever released! But: The game is harder than other games (e.g. Big Race USA).

Yeah... faster than on any real pinball machine I've ever played. Which is why for all Pro Pinball games, the first thing I do is to lower the slope. It's ridiculous how steep it is by default.

But aside from that, the games are just perfect. It boggles my mind how many shitty "arcade" (or shall I say "not arcade"?) pinball games were released after that. In fact, I don't think I've ever played another pinball game that looked and felt as great as Pro Pinball. Still.
Which is also why this was my first GOG purchase ;)

Agreed, Pro Pinball has been #1 for beyond a decade after its release. It's embarrassing how bad the physics are in every other game.

And this situation with Timeshock being choppy and not being able to select all the highest settings, and being choppy no matter how low I set it, whereas the other two Pro Pinballs on here do not use DOSBOX and run AWESOMELY with all settings maxed, is really upsetting me.

However, I just picked up Pinball Arcade for Mac, which has perfect digital reproductions in full 3D of Medieval Madness, Arabian Nights, Theater of Magic, Bride of Pinbot, Funhouse, Black Hole, Cirqus Voltaire, Ripley's Believe or Not, with Twilight Zone and Star Trek: TNG to come. The physics are right on as well, but I don't think it has the ball spin which was very visible in the Pro Pinball games. Still these are perfect reproductions of the real machines and playing them truly feels like the real deal. In fact they even run the dot matrix screens with the original ripped ROMs from the machines. pinballarcade.com and watch the video there to see how deep their development process is and how the scan every piece of every machine and all that.

It's that large because it uses redbook CD audio. Remove that, and it becomes quite a bit smaller.

(It so happens that in Encore Software's "Pinball Madness 2" collection, that's exactly what they did; they used the extra space for something called "Pinball Builder".)