Here are the links that have been posted in the comments section. I thought it would be a good idea to add them to the forum thread as it’s easier to keep track here. Thank you to Elaneous for the link to Pinball Nirvana and to AxCut for the two digital illusions pinballs (Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies)

I actually bought Pinball Dreams in the mid 90’s and still have the postcard I got with the boxed set and the floppy discs, The box is still around as well, but is being used to store some of the many coloured pencils the kids have. I’ve not been able to get the game to work since changing over to XP (actually hasn’t worked since win 98) but that's because I've never bothered to search out any programs such as DosBox, so it was a pleasant surprise to see it offered as abandonware, though unfortunately I only got the intro screens to work then it went to black screen. The same happened with Pinball Fantasies. Still it may work on some systems. I’ve yet to try them on my single core computer.

Pinball Fantasies:

http://www.abandonia.com/en/downloadgame/424

Pinball Dreams:

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/41

Pinball Nirvana a forum for pinball enthusiasts where you'll find loads of custom made boards.

http://www.pinballnirvana.com/

I downloaded the following three boards expecting to be able to play them. 'The Sopranos v1.2', 'Drop a Card' and 'The Caravan' then discovered you need the actual pinball game to play the board. Which after a quick search I concluded you needed to register with the site to get.

I’ll certainly look into the site, but not just yet as I’m behind in a lot of projects. I’ve also got to check whether tomorrows game has been posted so that I can start on tomorrows review. After than I’m going to either re-enter Oblivion a game I’ve not played for over six months or try out Two Worlds which I bought a couple of weeks ago (because it had $40 knocked off the retail price and it looked interesting) but haven't had the time to check out yet. (Has anyone played this game???) I've been playing WWII and modern day FPS game such as Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and 2 as well as Battlefield 2 and Conflict Op's Denied and loads more for far to long and usually feel empty handed if I don't have a rifle of sorts on the screen lol.

There’s loads of online pinball games for example the following called Waterpark is quite playable (provided you have a large monitor). I think you require shockwave to play it:

http://www.candystand.com/uk/play.do?id=17841

And at Game Garage there’s five decent looking online tables to play (and where you'll find other quality online games to play), in particular Gran Slam and Illuminati. The following link will take you to the selection page.

http://www.gamegarage.co.uk/pinball-games/

Copmom, yes, I mentioned it over on the Comedy Comments Theatre but couldn't remember where it came from (apparently bundled with WinXP) and thus couldn't post a link. Forgot the whole name, too... Win3D Space Cadet Pinball. Further googling shows it might be buried somewhere on all WinOS CD since 95, but I sure never unearthed it on my Win95 CD. IMHO, it's the best one.

http://www.rdrop.com/~half/General/GameTips/space.cadet.html
http://www.gamewinners.com/Cheats/index.php/3D_Pinball:_Space_Cadet

Isn't there another one called 3D Pinball for windows? It's on my machine, no clue on where I got it.

There is no spyware - and the ads will only be displayed if you let the game connect to the internet while you are playing and you live in certain countries (it is listed when installing).

The country is determined by your IP address - obviously so the advertisements can be relevant to your geographic location. I haven't seen any ads yet.

Of course if viewing an advert causes that much distress - you could just check what it is connecting to and block it on your firewall or hosts file - or just block the game from connecting to the internet altogether - problem solved.

In my opinion it is all a bit of a shower in a teacup (definitely not even worth calling a "storm").

Thanks Bobby.

Hey I hope all your outstanding work has been sorted. I must admit my outstanding projects are all piling up due to this fantastic project. By the time I've evaluated a game, done a review and checked my Emails and done a little surfing the rest of the time is spent either with my family or sleeping (that includes just staring into the blue wide yonder dreaming of better things), lol

Sorry for my absence. I was a little preoccupied with other stuff.

I’m not really fond of pinball games that much. They are fun every now and then, but overall, I just don’t love ‘em.

Extraction & Activation: This activates pretty well with no problems. The extraction isn’t that bad, either.

Gameplay: You can choose the resolution size. Basically your average pinball game. The controls are all keyboard-based. The three types of gameplay are Normal, Online, & Easy.

Normal: The average game of pinball with your average difficulty.

Online: I would assume you play online against other players, but I’m not too sure. I decided not to try this part of the game due to some of the comments above about privacy & stuff.

Easy: The average game of pinball with an easier difficulty.

Scoring System: Hitting stuff will result in points, just like any other pinball game. After you get a game over, you can choose to upload your score to the internet or not. I decided not to do this either, due to the same reason I stated above.

Notes: At first I tried the game because when I downloaded it, there were no comments. So I played it for a while and enjoyed it [this reminds how badly I play pinball]. I noticed some lag, but not enough to make the game really slow.

Spyware & Adware: I didn’t notice any at all. After I played for a while, as I said above, I checked back on the website and found comments on spyware & adware. I am currently waiting for more comments, especially WR’s [he hasn’t posted when I wrote this].

Conclusion: I can’t give an exact score as of now, due to the possibility of spyware & adware, but if there wasn’t any comments about this, I would give it a thumbs up. But as of now, I’m not too sure. Until this “spyware & adware” thing can clear up, I cannot give an exact score on this.

Introduction and Installation

Fastlane Pinball was developed by Framework Studios in 2006 and is distributed by Merscom LLC.

I thought I recognized this as it has been the only pinball game ever given away. It was actually given away over on the giveaway project while the game giveaway team took their summer break. It received a positive 70% of 352 votes. From the 130 comments which you can see by following the link below it would seem that many were disappointed in the game due mainly to is unresponsiveness; even on faster machines community members were experiencing slow flipper movement though some said it was fine (eg Labrat with his quad core cpu and high end graphics card – 8800) Also some found the large size which for this download is 64.5Mb (when installed it is just over 75Mb)

Previous comments

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/fastlane-pinball/#comments

In particular check Fubars comment #27 which mentions links to adware. I did get requests to open up my browser which I blocked. (see images via the links below); Thereafter the game appeared to work okay with no lag (though my main computer has been set up for gaming - Dual core 3.2GHz cpu with an NVidia 8800GTS 640Mb video card and 4 Gb of RAM)

The Game

I’ve just copied my original comments from the first time this was given away with some minor corrections and uploaded a few more screen captures:

This is another good game from Merscom. This is the first pinball game (to my knowledge) that has been given away on the giveaway project. Checking Games site such as Alawar (who have already generously given away several good titles) and Reflexive who haven’t yet, I was unable to find one pinball game; so there must be a market out there for some developers :) (Hint) Oh yeah just remembered you can get ‘3D Thrill Ride and ‘Devils Island’ from Real Arcade. And I’m sure there are others if you dig deep enough. They just don’t seem very common these days.
The game installs and plays fine on the slowest of my systems (1.4GHz, 500Mb RAM mid range graphics card. Although as with a lot of Merscom games there’s no shortcut installed on the desk top, so make sure you see where the game is being installed:

The default is C:\Program Files\Fastlane

I really like pinball games, and have purchased boxed sets from games shops, eg such as Adventure Pinball Forgotten Island and Pro Pinball Fantastic Journey, both of which are superb examples (though by todaysstandards the graphics are looking a little pixillated. There are more, but all of them appear to be available on disc only, which is a surprise as this game alone could define the arcade era because (IMO before computers this was the only out of home activity you would find in arcades apart from slots of course.

Images: All on one page:

http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/Fastlane%20Pinball/

Images: As a Slideshow:

http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/Fastlane%20Pinball/?albumview=slideshow

There are at least 10 sound bites of between 30 to a minute in length, all of which are electronic. They are all MP3 so you should easily be able to change the music if you wish; however remember to rename the music to what you are changing it to. I think some of the tracks are played in layers, so I’d experiment, otherwise you may get a cacophony of ‘Mash’ that will hurt your ears, lol

The game is standard pinball, so anyone who likes pinball will like this. The menus are all keyboard controlled as is the game play (which you would expect for a pinball machine. There’s no mouse or game pad support whatsoever.

I must say that the graphics aren’t the best I’ve seen but for less than $10 you cannot complain. The boxed titles above actually only cost me around $10, so if I was to buy another pinball I’d definitely check out the bargain bins of Wal Mart or other shops that specifically sell computer games as I think you will find much better ones that are themed and have far superior graphics. For a give away though this is definitely worth having. (It’s inspired me to reload one of the ones I mentioned above for some afternoon relaxation - despite me buying the latest Ricochet game Infinity (Breakout fans you’ve got to download the demo if you haven’t already – it takes the Ricochet series one step closer to Nirvana :) )

About 34Mb of the game size comes from the intro AVI file and several smaller ones within the game. Personally I don’t think they were necessary (although the intro one was interesting to see) as they are only secondary to the game. The present size will probably preclude those on dial up from downloading it. :(

There is the oppertunity to play this online, though I think it's a Local area network and not the www. Which means you'll be able to set up your home network so that the family can play against each other without having to fight over one computer. I've not bothered to check this part out though as no one else in the family is remotely interested in pnball games :(

Thank you Merscom and the Giveaway team for giving us another playable game.

Conclusion

I originally gave this a 5 out of 10, but after playing it for the past hour with no problems I’ve enjoyed playing it so would revise my original score to 7 out of 10. Of course I am playing it on a reasonably fast machine with an expensive graphics card attached. Still it also worked previously on what was my slowest computer (no longer exists). I tested it on what is now my slowest which has a 2.4GHz single core cpu, a Nvidia 7500 128Mb video card and 1.5Gb of memory and it also worked like a dream

Other Relevant Information

You can get a free pinball game from the following address (thanks to yoyo)

http://www.futurepinball.com/

Someone else calling themselves not yoyo posted a link to a forum where you should be able to find more free pinball games. I would have checked this out if I’d have had time, but this review needs to get posted soon. :lol:

It seems that this game also suffers from a need to have an Indeo video codec installed on your computer. You will be informed by a pop up window if you require the codec, Don’t follow the link provided as this leads you to a web site that’s selling the codec for nearly $15 whereas JanW posted a link last summer to a site where you can get the codec free. Just unzip and install the file and re-run the game.

Indeo Video Codec:

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Indeo_Codec.htm