Pro Pinball Timeshock

Great Physics and complex gameplay! Highly recomended

I love the game. I already own it on CD and it still looks fan-fucking-tastic. Amazing physics and deep table. One of the best flippers out there, be it real or just in software. Unfortunately however, GOG is still only making the DOS version available that comes with DOSBox (contradictory to GOG's statement in toshiro's review). Downside here is worse sound quality, lower resolution graphics (1024x768 instead of 1600x1200) and also fewer overall colors. I am returning the game, as I'd much rather stick to my old scratched CD (needed for music ingame), instead of a more convenient, yet audio-visually disappointing. Overall, I can highly recommend this game, just not this GOG release!

Dosbox version problems: No instructions on how to configure game controllers (press ctrl-F1 in game) Low frame rate Lower resolution Windows version problems: No music Need to set compatibility mode to windows 98

The Pros: -The graphics are amazing. It's all 2d, but the quality is breathtaking. It looks much better than the recent Wii release of Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams collection... and Timeshock is 11 years older! -The physics feel right. The ball never does anything weird that doesn't make sense. The nudges are powerful and work well. -The table is very complex, with all the requisite features: video mode, multiple varieties of multi-ball, drop targets, ramps, spinners, and meta-goals to work for. -The little touches heighten the sense of realism. You can access an operator menu that includes totally unnecessary features like test-firing all the solenoids. It's a computer, there are no real solenoids... but it's so cool that they put that in there. The operator manual is written as if it were a real machine. Cons: -The audio isn't quite right. The electronic sounds are a little too pure - I prefer my pinball sound effects to be a little more gritty, like they're coming out of a crappy pinball machine speaker. The mechanical sound effects are also lacking--they're too weak. The knocker that fires when you get a replay in particular sounds like a pale shadow of its real-life counterpart. I need a better sense that I'm playing a massive machine with real parts slamming into each other. -The table, even though it has all those features noted above, lacks something in playability. A lot of the key shots just seem too difficult for my taste. The ramps could be a little wider, and the upper ramp shot could be a little easier to set up. In contrast, video mode is way too easy to rack up a lot of points in. In both of my games that were high-score-table-worthy (only in the 2- and 300 millions), I got about half my points from video mode. I'm here to play pinball, not some crappy dot matrix video game! The video mode shouldn't last so long or pay out so much. Conclusion: All in all, Pro Pinball: Timeshock is a great game that's certainly worth your money. The Timeshock table itself doesn't measure up to some of my favorite real-life tables, but it's decent enough and has a lot of replayability. I'll be very excited to play the next in the series when it comes to GOG in the future.

I played this a lot back in the day and really liked it so I bought the GOG version to play it again on a more modern PC. There are two versions supplied (DOSBox and Windows) and both had shortcuts placed on my desktop so there's no hidden bonus or secret Windows version - it's here in all its glory. My rig is a basic Windows 10 Pro, GTX 970, i7 6700K just for gaming so I wasn't expecting the jittering and juddering I got in the DOSBox version. That performance issue made it difficult and frustrating to time hitting the ball and, thus, aim accurately. So, onto the Windows version then. Unfortunately, I had to remove the winmm.dll to get the game to start which stops the contextual in-game music working. That turns the game atmosphere into a eerie ghost-like version. I didn't think losing game music would ever impact a game as much as losing it in this one does. I did find a 'fixed' winmm.dll for another game but this had problems with triggering tracks correctly. My rating only reflects my experience on Windows 10. If it runs fine for you then I would easily rate the game as, still, one of the finest Pinball games on PC - 5 stars.