Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island

Take one slightly tilted table, throw in some metal balls, a few rebound pads, and a couple of magnets, and you're left with just about every pinball game ever made. However, in Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island, we've got somewhat of a variation on this overused theme. The game is based on a mysterious island, full of wondrous creatures and ancient tribes. However, they're all about to be wiped out by some disaster, because the island's Guardian Statue has lost her enchanted eyes. In short, some marble bint has gone and had her eyes pecked out, so you have to travel halfway across the globe to a mosquito infested island, which is made up of nine giant pinball tables, in order to save a bunch of dinosaurs and some illiterate cannibals. Sounds like fun.

And strangely enough, it's pretty entertaining. Each table is based on a different section of the island, providing plenty of diversity both visually and in terms of gameplay. Adventure Pinball also makes good use of its 3D engine, interspersing the high-speed gameplay with visually pleasing cut scenes. Shame about the monkey impression sound effects though, which sound more like a constipated geriatric trying to take a dump than a banana-munching primate. As you'd expect from any pinball game, there are loads of bonuses to be discovered and masses of sub-tables to ping your iron balls into. However, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't activate any multiball bonuses, leading us to believe that there aren't any. Then again, it would probably be impossible to play with more than one ball at a time, what with all of the sub-tables.

Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island is one of the most original pinball games we've ever seen. While it's hardly born of genius (in fact it's more likely to have been born of hallucinogenic drugs going by the storyline), it's different enough to warrant your interest.