Every Monday on a new Twitch stream called, (Not) Blue Monday (https://www.twitch.tv/playgamesmoredotcom) – kicking off each week with games from the past. It might be games released yesterday or dozens of years ago. Might be an arcade game, PC, mobile, tablet, console or not even a videogame (yeah, I haven’t done that yet, but it’s coming). Last Monday for episode 5, I played over six hours of a classic Amiga virtual pinball game called Pinball Fantasies. In particular, one of the four included machines in that collection: PartyLand.
“Pinball Fantasies is a 1992 pinball video game originally developed by Digital Illusions and published by 21st Century Entertainment in Europe for the Amia home computers. It is the sequel to Pinball Dreams, which was released earlier in the same year on multiple platforms. In the game, players can choose between any of the four available playfields, both of which have their own thematic and main objectives in order to obtain the highest score possible.” – Pinball Fantasies – Wikipedia
Pinball Fantasies: Partytime is available to play through the cloud gaming service, Antstream here: https://live.antstream.com/game-details/603ca31e-89b7-4114-ac54-196d557c9487/info?id=603ca31e-89b7-4114-ac54-196d557c9487&focusElement=playButton
It takes 30 gems to play each game and if you already have an Antstream account and login from time to time, you’ll amass plenty of gems to play. You can buy a subscription to Antstream, too, but after they lost the Warner Bros. / Midway licensing, it’s a less compelling offer to do that.
Of course, if you have an Amiga computer, you can also play Pinball Fantasies. It was ported to other systems like the Atari Jaguar, SNES, Playstation 1 and more, with varying differences. Personally, I’m fond of the Amiga version. That sound chip, oh my!
Have you played Pinball Fantasies before? If it’s been awhile, give it another try. No, it’s not better virtual pinball than the current VPX, FP and Zen stuff, but it’s from a different time and place. Sometimes it’s good to go back to these places and experience them. What do you think?