pinball of the week 02
Time for the second of my world-famous pinball games of the week posts, read by a force of like three people.
Swords of Fury (1988) Williams Electronics
Williams Electronics always was a market leader in pinball, and indeed in video games, but the late Eighties seem a particularly prolific period for the producer, a period in which they produced a flurry of some of their most famous, beloved tables. Right in the eye of this quality storm stood one of my personal favorites, Swords of Fury.
The first thing that strikes you about the table is the magnificently artful, detailed graphics, depicting a series of crumbling stone staircases descending down, down, ever down. Runes etched in stone line the borders of the playfield, and the hilt of an opulent sword pushes its way past the flippers. It’s all very traditional heroic fantasy fare, but it’s the execution of the art which makes the table so unique to look at, like if Winsor McCay has been commissioned to draw DAW science-fiction book covers in the Seventies. It just might be the finest art ever produced for a pinball playfield. I’d argue it.
Play begins by launching the ball into a 5-bank drop target area with a mini-flipper at the upper left of the playfield. Each drop target represents some slathering foe against whom you are pitted in battle, all of whom die in the most satisfyingly noisy way as you knock the targets down (there are more screams of agony and despair in this game than when the roller-coaster derails at the state fair). There’s also a tight loop called Ogres Alley in the upper middle of the playfield which is activated by looping one direction and then scored by looping the other direction.
Unusually, Swords of Fury doesn’t actually have that most generic of all playfield elements: the bumper. There is, however, the second-most generic element, the spelling game element. A vairety of targets around the field beckon you to spell A-V-E-N-G-E-R for booby prizes and ever-increasing fame and fortune.
There’s also a hair-raising tiny little loop on the lower-left through which you rack up your bonus multiplier, a loop which savagely tosses the ball right back at the flippers, if you’re lucky, and down the hatch, if you aren’t.
It’s all great fun, well-balanced, challenging. But it’s the evocativeness of the game which makes it such a winner, the sense of involvement in the setting and the story, a story which, by the way, seems well-developed and complex and epic, pregnant with backstory — none of it ever revealed to the player so far as I know, yet resting behind all the plays and graphics, lending depth, frustratingly nebulous.
Oh, and the music. A noteworthy score plays along to your game, movie-quality stuff that sounds like it was written by Hans Zimmer’s cousin perhaps, building in steam as you initiate various modes, and really launching into high-gear during multiball. It’s layered over with almost constant shouting, taunting, screaming, and the great booming voice of Lionman (whoever he is) … and the voice of a woman who could so easily have been Ferris Bueller’s sister (you’d get it if you played it).
A true classic, a work of art, and the best bloodcurdling screams in any pinball game. Do you even need more of a reason to play?
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