Pinball Builder: A Construction Kit for Windows

The Good
Well, I guess it's nice to see a new pinball editor since EA's construction kit way back in '84. It's fairly simple to place objects on the table. Finally, they were nice enough to include some tables for you in case you decide to never touch the editor again.

The Bad
After Frontline Design/Digital Illusions crafted the lovely Pinball Dreams/Fantasies series on Amiga (ported later to PC), their publisher, 21st Century, had to make a hell of a followup if they were to release a construction kit. Let us count the ways they garbled it up:

1) You MUST be running in 800x600x256 mode under Windows. PB doesn't even do this for you.

2) Your table design must be selected from 8 premade tables; they call it 32 because each has 4 different flipper/outlane combos, which doesn't add much (I get to speak my mind here better than the game description :).

3) You can only add a few different targets, which MUST go in pre-established regions. You cannot add or move lanes and ramps.

4) You cannot change the dot-matrix-display messages - the Teddy sample table still has Alien table messages in it.

5) I realize MOD support for Windows in 1996 was weak, but having it on Amiga and DOS for 4 years then only allowing MIDI in the Builder is just mean.

The Bottom Line
And when it's all finished, your table is, at best, half as good as any in Pinball Dreams. You would probably have more fun hacking the graphics of one of the REAL 21st Century pinball tables.

AFAIK, the original developers had little to nothing to do with this release.