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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?

Technorati Tags: pinball, games, fantasy, Swords of Fury, Williams

This being the first of the famous “Pinball table of the week” posts, I thought it important to carefully choose a pinball table that captures everything that I love about pinball, and everything that makes pinball a unique, valid and complimentary companion to other kinds of gaming.

So I got on Wikipedia and typed in a few pinball tables I enjoy. Big, classic tables. They didn’t come up. I went to the Williams page, and none of the pinball tables mentioned in the article had an associated link, whereas all the video games Williams produced did. Wikipedia has failed me? Impossible. As a test, I typed in some of my favorite classic arcade video games. Every single one I typed in had an associated article.

Before we get on to discussing pinball game of the week, then, let me put a plea out to pinbally people: Please start writing articles about these great pinball games for Wikipedia? Not just for those of use who enjoy them to read up on them, but also for new fans and the simply idly curious to learn about them. Of course, there are many other pinball-related resources out there, but these tables deserve to be recognized in broad sites like Wikipedia just like arcade games do.

Now, before I move on to Sorcerer itself, I think I need to point something out, that kinda sucks: I don’t have the actual real physical manufactured table to play. Nor have I ever done so. Nor is it likely that any of my tables of the week will. Yes, it’s depressing, but all of my pinball pleasure comes from Visual Pinball / VPinMame, which is supported by an amazing community of these insane geniuses who craft 3D replicas of these things, complete with lots of reference photos pasted as textures over the model, and then port the solid state stuff in using vPinMame. The brains of the machine thinks it’s running a real physical table, but it’s running a simulation of that real table. Since I discovered Visual Pinball nearly two years ago, I’ve been hooked.

Table of the week: Sorcerer

The Eighties was a great decade for pinball, with tons of great tables released. The Seventies had seen a great deal of technological innovation, at the end of which something really special began to occur: tables began to talk. The advent of speech brought a whole new level of immersion to the experience, and never is that more evident than with 1985’s Sorcerer.

Ported to Visual Pinball with tremendous artistry by superhero PacDude, replete with flashing lights and tons of eye candy, Sorcerer instantly propelled itself into my all-time favorite list, and judging from the ratings score at the Internet Pinball Database, others think so too.

The player does a sort of battle against a taunting, supercilious Sorcerer, and playwise the game features all the staples of pinball at the time, including an eye-catching elevated bridge running across the top of the playfield from a ramp on the left to a holding area on the right where balls get racked up to trigger the completely frantic multiball.

The bulk of play, and of scoring, lies in attempting to hit a number of targets arrayed through the middle of the board to spell — you guessed it — S-O-R-C-E-R-E-R. There’s also a little nook with a triple drop-targets and an associated extra flipper — get all three drop targets before the timer runs out (about five seconds I think) and bonuses start to light up on the inlanes.

The table is actually quite straightforward, in terms of design and features. It’s also one of the hardest pinball games to play, at least for me. The ball will very, very often skip out down the outlanes while I sit and watch, powerless to intervene. Such is pinball. I’m pretty much the worst player in the world at pinball, but I would rank the difficulty of this one pretty high.

What really makes this table special is the pair of amazing, intimidating eyes just above and behind the playfield, which flash and light in response to the action going on, and the awesome voice which goes with it. The Sorcerer basically taunts you and mocks you the entire time, in this deep, booming voice, replete with zappy, thunderous sound effects. The whole package deal is tremendously memorable, and I often play the damned thing just to hear the zippy sound effects (also, this table, like other Williams tables of the era, uses sound effects that any fan of Eighties arcade games will recognize, like Joust).

How can anything be bad which, when your game ends with a particularly pitiful score, taunts you with “You are done, mortal!”