Psycho Pinball (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
125A playthrough of Codemasters' 1995 pinball game for PCs running MS-DOS, Psycho Pinball.
This video is of a round (normal difficulty, default settings) played on the multi-table Psycho board. Before giving totally up the ghost, I gain access to and play on each of the regular single-table boards.
I have been meaning to post a video of this game for years now - I have no idea why it has taken me so long, but I'm excited for this one. Psycho Pinball is hands down my favorite pinball video game. Well, Devil Crush on the TurboGrafx-16 is right there with it, I admit.
I couldn't begin to count the number of hours my sister and I sat passing the keyboard back and forth when we stumbled across a demo of it on a PC Gamer CD.
(That's the British PC Gamer, mind you. Quite different than the American magazine of the same name. It was a fantastic read usually, but I admit I still harbor a lot of resentment for their review of Phantasmagoria. They gave it a 4%. Four. Ahem... moving along...)
The demo included only the Trick or Treat table, but there were no time limits or weird demo restrictions on that one table, so we did out best to wear out the shift keys on the industrial-grade Zeos mechanical keyboard. That thing was diesel - I remember leaving gouge marks from the sliding of the keyboard legs as we played this! Anyone else remember how satisfyingly loud those old keyboards were? And how satisfying that was when playing a game?!
Every time we'd go to any computer shop, we'd always look to see if they had a copy of Psycho Pinball. They never did. Finally, about six months later (we still regularly were playing the demo), my dad needed some blank Zip disks so we popped over to Curry's, and lo and behold! We grabbed it and shoved it in our parents' faces, reminding them of the hours we'd played the game, and reminding mom of the 2 minutes we convinced her to play it for when she seemingly enjoyed it - you know, all the reliable standby appeals to sway parents. My dad balked a bit at the £44.99 price tag for a pinball game, but he relented, and my sister and I literally cheered in the middle of Curry's. What an awkward sight that must've been for anyone walking by. Needless to say, we got a lot of play out of that fluorescent yellow CD.
It was unlike any game I'd seen before it. Everything was so loud, bright, and colorful, and had a quality to it that you didn't generally see in console games yet. It felt like an arcade game. Funnily enough, Psycho Pinball was originally a Mega Drive game and the PC version was remake, but the PC game was SOOOOO much better. I got the Mega Drive game a few years after getting this one, and while it was cool, it was missing a lot of the impressive glitz and character that the PC version nailed. And it had those silly minigames in it that I really hated.
The PC version's high-resolution tables (well, 640x480 if you had a fast PC, otherwise you got 320x240) had at times excruciatingly vibrant colors and tons of things animating all the time.
There were plenty of things to unlock, and each of the tables had their own distinct personality. You have The Abyss, which always made me think of The Little Mermaid; Trick or Treat, a halloween themed table (with a sweet Maniac Mansion shoutout on the LED screen!); Wild West, complete with gunshots, hangmen, and a big wanted poster; and Psycho, a circus-themed table that features doors to other tables. They each all feature their own "dot-matrix" displays as well, with each table having several mini-movies for bonuses, hazards, bonus games, and what-not. The attention to detail throughout the entire package is insane.
The tables are all a blast to play, and the music - oh man, the music is what really makes this game. It's all done with digital MOD files, so no midi or FM music at all, and it's some of the best music I've ever heard in a game. Every tune is perfectly suited to the tables and games, the sample quality is pretty good (for 1995), and every one of them is memorable. I know that sounds like a lot of hyperbole, but I would pick this soundtrack over the Pinball Fantasies' soundtrack, 100% of the time.
Does the intro remind anyone else of Saved by the Bell?
And by the by,
I don't show *all* of the minigames and bonuses, but I think I do a good job of showing a lot of them. It is fairly difficult to show everything on every board while playing the Psycho game mode. I in no way claim to be an expert on this game - I don't even know if I'd call myself good at it, so there's my good faith warning if you want a video that shows 100% of all of the game's nooks and crannies.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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