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It was bound to happen sooner or later, and Microdeal have released an ST pinball game sooner. Pinball Factory, the game, puts you in charge of engineering in the factory. Your sole responsibility is the completion and play testing of the boards produced in the workshop.

As an employee of the PF you have various 'state of the art' tools at your disposal including Edit Game menu, Edit board Edit Logo-Alter Rules, Test Game and Exit.

This is the central core of the program and has two main functions. Firstly, it allows you to customise graphics of the table using a rudimentary graphics package. Then it's time to build up your game using the 'Bumpers' sub-menu.

While using the drawing program, you can flag fourteen of the sixteen available colours as either visible or invisible. Invisible colours are treated as part of the graphic design of the table and do not interfere with the movement of the ball. Anything drawn in a visible colour can be thought of as a kind of 'designer' bumper than can be any shape or size.

Features include brushes (there are ten different ones), Line, Rays, Frame, Box, Circle, Disk, Clear, Undo, Detail (for the engineer who likes things pixel-perfect), Fill and Pattern which is used with the Disk, Box and Fill commands. You can also select any 16 from 512 colours using the RGB selector.

Using similar graphic tools to those on the Edit Board (with added airbrush, text and shadow functions) you can design a logo for your table. Logos are purely superficial and have no bearing on the game itself, being positioned to the right of the table, away from all the action.

Here you can get one up on Newton by tweaking gravity to see what it would be like playing pinball on the Moon - or even Jupiter. You can also change the elasticity of the ball making it bounce faster off bumpers, etc.

The number and speed of your balls can also be set together with the "free ball" score threshold which depends on how generous you're feeling. Next you can set the strength and value of the various bumpers you have used in your design.

Pinball Factory will go down well with all pinball freaks.