Judge Dredd Pinball has a few limitations when compared to the gold standard of old pinball games - eg. Pinball Fantasies. The major problem is the inclusion of only one table to play on. The other is the semi-serious nature of the game itself - it strives to be realistic (fair enough) and does achieve this reasonably well. However in my opinion the more successful games have a sense of fun that is lacking here.
Not knocking the inclusion of some Judge Dredd type features, there are occasional voice over sounding like Dredd should, and a motorcycle shop and other Dredd elements have been added as well.
The game plays in VGA or SVGA and looks quite good doing it. The fixed perspective screen isn't all it could be though - not uncommon with early DOS pinball machines - simply due to the shape of a monitor being opposite to the shape of a pinball table when viewed from a players perspective. Once again however, a scrollable table from a full top down perspective may have helped to provide a sense of movement and 'stuff happening'. For what it is, it is implemented well enough.
Controls are via keyboard arrow keys and are not readily mappable to the users preference. However this is not a major issue as they are at least intuitive and react sufficiently well to the virtual game world that this is only
an irritation.
The usual powerups including multiball are included and can be quite fun. Testing showed that the younger players (under 5) got frustrated with the reasonably high level of difficulty, although clearly the game type and controls are suitable for the age bracket.
The game CD version does not require any particular effort to get running on a Windows (XP in this case) platform, and as you'd expect there are certainly no performance issues - minimum requirement is for VGA, 4 megs of RAM and a 486 or faster CPU.
