Pro Pinball: Big Race USA

The Good
Pro Pinball USA: The third of the Pro Pinball series of games, continuing on the line of quality set before with the web/time-shock releases.

From reading the introduction in the manual, you'll discover the passion the developers had for this product, absolutely everything they penned in the introduction notes comes to fruition once you fire up the game and get swamped it's insane amount of options and mountain of a playfield, make no mistake, no stone was left unturned.

While many (self including) will consider time-shock the more of the purists table, big race advances on it's predecessor in many ways. The introduction of the most realistic physics set you'll ever encounter in the genre, the air balls jumping ramps and slamming the glass, and of course more refined graphics.

It wasn't just the technical Innovations that make big race a standout product, in my opinion there was definitely a move towards appealing to the more commercial market, the amount of modes, games, challenges, rivals anything released either on a real table or on the screen.

Singling out the physics, you've ever played a tournament standard table, you'll see just how nailed on cunning developments were. That ball spins over the diamond plate in the bottom of the playfield like no other, and guess what... you can adjust it, adjusting even the wear of the machine!! When no stone was mentioned, they went that deep, everything from adjusting the level of the playfield, to being able to adjust the difficulty of virtually every individual feature. This added to the standard fair of being able to adjust and audit the table as you would a real table in the options menu.

The Bad
It's HARD.

Loose shots will kill you, and even as a semi/decent player going back 25 years, I struggle with it.

Problems start with the top left flipper, it's hard to see, it's hard to judge on anything else but intuition, this can often lead to a center drain when mistimed.

The center, one big hole that can be plugged with the airbag, but id imagine that there was some discussion to put a center pin in there, there are shots that drop from the police loop and taxi shot that'll fly down the table without option, nudges won't help.

Extra balls, while the first one drops fairly easy, and there are a manner of ways to gain them through the video mode, cash rewarded items, and random gives from the taxi shot, the lack of a progressive system over the implemented successive hit system is a killer. Nobody is realistically going to hit 10 loops in a row with that side flipper.

That's it for the bad, while you can make life easier by adjusting the difficulty, there's a few playfield design issues in my opinion that make it an unfair challenge at times.

The Bottom Line
Perfection of the genre, cunning developments outdid themselves with big race, they created the perfect template for pinball on the screen. It advanced in technical measure over it's previous incarnations, and wasn't improved upon with it's successor.

If your the kind of person that embraces pinball with a passion, you can't fail to see the qualities of this game.

It was given the time and love from the publishers and developers, something that'll not happen in this day and age.