Pro Pinball - Big Race U.S.A	Dev: Cunning Developments Pub: Empire Interactive
Reviewed:  1998-11-01

- The pinball

Wroom!! Watch out all you little cars on the street, the big race is green lighted! The third pinball in the now so well known and classy series Pro Pinball is here! This time not with a science fiction inspired theme, but with a car theme, and an excellent one (I love saying excellent). The table is more easy to grasp than timeshock!, with that I mean the basics of the rules are a little easier to understand and you might easier get into it. I just wanted to point that out in case you thought t! was way to hard for you, brusa isn't easy by any means, but it is different from t! One thing you will notice is that BRUSA has an attitude all of its own. Just imagine you are Darth Vader and read this quote: "You're powers are weak old taxi" (that's the police car quote after he has knocked you off the road!). As usual there is lots of features, the operators menu is still there and as good and filled with things to manipulate as you could wish, different playing styles available (tournament etc). You now also have the possibility to change table slope and condition (new, maintained, weared etc), which will affect the ball movement etc. The most interesting thing about this release (apart from the table itself ofcourse) is maybe the Head-to-Head mode!


- Head-to-Head

I was very curious on how the h2h would be implemented, I imagined there being long plays during which you and the opponent continuously raced to start and finish certain modes first etc etc or something similar, well anyway....

Without going to deep into how you set up a connection with the opponent... there is a chat/lobby inside the pinball where you can set up (head to head) matches with other people. Trough the lobby you can find an opponent and set up a friendly or ladder match with him. The main attraction is the ladder which will be a part of the propinball.com brusa pages, a ladder is simply a ladder, you start at the foot of the ladder and by challenging other people above you in the ladder you climb the ladder until you reach top position, that is the basic idea at least. The brusa pages will simply list your rank on the ladder and probably some other facts. So you can log on to the chat and find an opponent and play for the ladder, you don't need to ladder, you can play normal (friendly) matches against an opponent (your score wont be recorded for the ladder, that is the only real difference). If you wish you can use directplay and ignore the empire lobby totally and play with a friend over ipx, tcp/ip, modem or serial link and play just for the fun of it. And fun it is! It is quite important with the directplay feature (which worked fine for me) since I had trouble using the lobby (I continuously ran into trouble setting up a ladder match), but I am positive a later patch will fix all the troubles with the lobby so don't worry. OK, so there is a number of ways to set up a head to head match, how are the matches set up then...

The H2H Match is divided into 3 rounds, each round building up for the next. How does it all work? After having set up a connection with your opponent you will both find yourself watching a counter tick 3,2,1 and then the ball will launch. All the time when playing you only see your table and the opponent only see his table (like any normal game), except that now what you do on your table might affect the opponents table.

In round 3 - the big race - there will be 4 locks available to lock a ball in and you will have 5 balls in play. Now to win the third round and get the big score which will probably result in you winning the match, you must lock all your four balls in these four locks and then shot a fifth lock (which will only open up when four balls are locked). Alright sounds easy, but whenever you lock a ball in one lock that lock opens up for the opponent who must then lock his ball there which results in yours opening... and imagine you having locked four balls and only need to shot the fifth, but the opponent locks a ball, thus the fifth lock closes for you and you have to lock the fourth ball again... takes skill to win! And this is under time stress, each round is timelimited, in round 1 and 2 time running out results in a draw, in round 3 the person who have most balls locked when time runs out gets more points (I'm not going in to details of score counting).

That was only round 3, the winner of round 2 will have one lock open at the start of round 3. The winner of round 1 will start on the road in round 2, and since you must increase your speed (which can only be done on the road) in round 2 and reach the finish line first it is a benefit to start there. All the time you in round 2 are on the road the opponent can lock a ball and throw you off the road.

It all adds up to you in all rounds playing to advance or be first in the race while the opponent tries to do all he can to make things hard for you and put himself in first place. Note though that at the end of round 3 the winner is the person with the most score, so you can in theory win the match without winning a round, but that would be terribly difficult. You have unlimited balls, there is timestress, there is points to be earned, positions to win - love it! The H2H is implemented lovely!


- The Table | Big Race U.S.A (BRUSA)

It not only just looks nice, it is nice (ain't that a cliche). In overall I like the layout and it works great with the theme. There is some things I had trouble getting used to, the top left flipper being hard to notice in the beginning (obscured partly by a wire or something), but you will eventually see it and not think of it anymore (not forget it is there that is). The so called U-Turn (which is exactly a U-Turn, placed somewhere at the top-left) is pretty important for starting modes but can be dangerous when it launches back the ball, though I find the balls usually can be caught without any danger being involved, still that is mostly. :) The table layout is also dangerous on some other parts, but there is nothing that causes constant sdtm's or similar that lame pinball simulations might suffer from.

Anyway, the theme without revealing all the fun details is based upon you travelling from New York to San Francisco (across the U.S!). Well there you must win the Big Race which is a kind of wiz-mode I suppose. You must also kill police cars (caricidium? maybe I should just say "knock of the road"), drive around passengers and duel cars in dangerous "on the road races". That said you get the idea you are aiming for something big, something Really BIG. Enough spoiled, the rest is for you to find out.

The theme and table itself is cute itself with stars in the form of little cars (well the cars aren't looking especially cute, nor small and they don't talk nice either... basically they just want to crash you :). The table can easily be described by focusing on the two main areas of the table, the taxi and the u-turn (they are important areas at least). The U-Turn then, here you can make turns (!) and also lock the ball to start the city modes and get "on the road", obviously since your goal is to travel to San Francisco this is an important part (cars travel on the road you know). The city modes vary all the times and are seldom the same twice for a city. When playing you start in NY, you must now start (and preferably complete, though not a must) the city mode, then you can "hit the road", when on the road you must increase speed and travel a certain distance to the next city where you will repeat starting a new city mode.

All the time while traveling to SF you don't just travel, you should try to start the different duels, the different challenges and search out those secrets and bonuses that help you on your way. There is the Jay's giveaway, a little shop you can lock the ball in and "buy" a gadget (for example a compass or a planner which lets you select the next destination city or an airbag which is an ball saver etc...). The citymodes themselves are either boring or greatly enjoyable, you can collect big race boosters (they boost something in that big race I might have mentioned). But I mentioned the Taxi as an important area, the taxi is a object shaped as an taxi placed at the top right, it is important not only because you can lock balls in it and hit it with the ball (it bumps or something when you do so) but this is where you start the passenger frenzy, an up to 4 ball multiball that you can start over and over again!

I have mentioned "on the road" and "city mode", this probably confusing. The table theme has two overall big modes you play in. While in the city (city mode, not to be confused with the different modes you start in the city, a.k.a city modes, argh) you can for example start challenges and do lots of things. When you are on the road you can't do all the stuff you could do in the city, that is you can't start the same modes, instead there is some new modes you can start (duel modes, police car mode, video mode). Did I clear it up? This isn't important to really understand as you are meant to understand how this works first when you play.

There is btw no kickback or bumpers. There is though a ball saver in the form of an airbag that closes the gap between the two flippers, pretty effective.

The video mode is pretty ok, you drive a car along a road and can race to the finish line or decide to knock all other cars of the road (though watch out for the police car). The video mode is a good relaxation from the real play so the knocking off cars bit is pretty fun!

Well, I just wanted to float around and touch the different parts of the theme to give you an general idea of what the table is like. I'll conclude with the fact that all parts and objects on the table look good and realistic, when you play and the ball hits something it "feels" like a hit. The table brings with it that nice atmosphere of pinball. Challenging and lovely.


- The Feeling

The flipper physics are much to my delight, catching the ball gives you the feeling of some weight hitting the shift key... or the flippers then. You can learn to set up shots (get the "feel" for them at least) to hit certain targets, you can learn how to do nice hold passes (passing the caught ball from one flipper to the other flipper) that succeeds most of the time just you have the right feeling for how to do them. Also you often loose control of the ball totally when you are about to start something important and just have to hit that one lock, still with the right nerves you can get back control. The ball spins nicely and also reflects the table a little. Implemented in brusa is something called motion blur (demanding on the computer, so it can be turned off), the basics idea of it is to make the ball movement more realistic (if you have a dead slow computer you will see "speed stripes", but if you're computer meats the demand you will have a smoothly moving ball). Even without motion blur everything looks just fine. The risk of you not being terribly disappointed on the lack of realism on concern of ball and flipper physics is pretty much 99.6% as Ziggy would say.


- The Whole

BRUSA has a sence of humor and a level of fun when playing. It is hard and those three balls might just drain all the time for you but you keep on playing and get a little further, or you open the operators menu and select 10 balls instead of the factory default 3! :) If you found t! to hard I can't guarantee you will find brusa simple, but it is my opinion that brusa is different from t! not only in attitude but also that the table is a little simpler to grasp (get into, begin to score and advance in). Still what you should be looking for if brusa is to be a perfect match is a pinball that has lots of things to do, but things that demand a level of self control and figuring out to start, you should also want a little challenge, thinking "that is way to hard to be fun" might result in you missing something good, give it a chance, it is overwinning the hard bit that gives the immense satisfaction of having beaten something!

Anyway the basic line is you have fun playing this table, the rules are deep and there is many not so obvious features hidden all over the table for you to discover. Just saying the rules are deep might be pretty meaningless to you, when I say it now I mean that there is millions of modes connected in logic ways that in the end add up to something really really BIG, that is what makes things so fun, to find the correct way to the end, to find the places that help you get there and the places that give the really really BIG scores. If you want a realistic and fun sim, get this one. I recommend it as deeply as I recommend it's predecessors, the web and timeshock! BRUSA isn't small, BRUSA is big, it's is really really BIG (this is possibly the silliest conclusion I have ever written :).

Platform: PC
Operating System: DOS, Windows 95/98, NT 4.0 (Service Pack 3)

minimum system req:
Pentium 90MHz processor (rec: PII 266MHz)
16 MB system RAM (rec: 64 MB)
1 MB Graphics card (must be VESA 2.0 compliant for DOS version) (rec: 8 MB PCI)
10 MB of free hard disk space (rec: 400 MB)
CD-ROM drive
(rec: 16-bit sound card)

Also available for: MAC, PSX

BRUSA (big screenshot)

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