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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

I'm always surprised at the nostalgia for Space Cadet Pinball.

Perhaps it was just chance that I grew up playing what seemed like a much better pinball game ( Hyper-3D Pinball, aka Tilt!* ), but I was always underwhelmed by Space Cadet Pinball on windows.

In reality they're both pretty similar, I just happened to play a lot of one before the other, but the full screen DOS experience was much richer than what felt like a much more flat and less 3D windows experience.

You can see some Hyper-3D Pinball / Tilt! gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ufwSkB0XQ

* Not to be confused with "Full Tilt!", from which space cadet pinball comes from.

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Pinball Dreams first on a friend's Amiga and then my PC for me, later Pro Pinball. Space Cadet was hopeless garbage in comparison. Space Cadet had a boring table, much worse graphics and sound, and terrible ball physics.

I still applaud the Linux version for its hack value :)

After watching a video, it seems like I misremembered the ball physics, but the rest seems more or less correct. The sound effects sound really cheap, the music... exists, and in the lower center of the table, there is... uh, a star-shaped gradient thing? That is usually where the most elaborate graphics of the table are! Like a cool spaceship or the space cadet or evil aliens or whatever.

I loved playing Epic Pinball and especially the music. Exactly the kind of sound I enjoy. I collected mod files on floppies as a kid.

Other pinball games are bland and boring to me.

Yeah the Pro Pinball series cstarted arriving around the same time as Windows 95. I guess people liked the Windows game because it was just a few clicks away.

Some of us only had pinball. My parents didn’t buy games, so I got what was included.

I was a fan of "3D Ultra Pinball". You have to keep smacking that glider!

This was referenced at the bottom of the linked article.

And yeah, I'm a big fan, too. I still have the CDs for it, and it still runs in Windows 11!

It's really no surprise: it's a game that was pre-installed on hundreds of millions of computers. That's it. For people of a certain age it's very very likely they have played it, at least a bit.

Honestly my favorite pinball game of all time is not at all realistic: Devil Crush (I think it was called Devil Crash in the USA). It has been released on both the pcengine and the megadrive. For some reason I tend to prefer the pcengine more despite the graphics quality being a bit below, probably because of the more "dirty" sounding soundtrack. This is my main occupation when I am flying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-7iC8z6q8s&t=7

Define better.

It had a "plot". You "upgraded weapons"

...also it was what you played when you had no internet

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