Pinball Palooza: Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators (Saturn)
There are quite a few pinball games that try to reproduce real pinball tables in digital form, and there are others that stick somewhat close to realistic designs but allow themselves to fudge reality a little in the table designs made just for video game play. Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators certainly feels more like it’s taking a set of four real tables and adapting them into a small digital collection, but I can find no evidence that any of its four tables exist in real space, which is a shame, because many of them would be just as thrilling to play in a physical form as they are in this title.
After kicking off with some live action footage that oozes with the style of 1990s sword and sorcery films and metal music, the player can pick from a set of four pinball tables to play: Gladiators, Knight of the Roses, Dragon Showdown, and Warlock. Each one follows their own unique theme and is built a bit differently while still containing the expected pinball staples like bumpers, ramps, and opportunities for things like multiball and incredibly high jackpots, and while you’re shooting for the high score in each one, you’ll notice a few small commonalities. When it’s time to launch one of the three balls you get per play session onto the field, a small roulette with three random options will appear. Whenever you choose to launch your ball, you’ll also be picking whatever option this fairly slow roulette was on. Some of these are as simple as a big point injection, but there are some like an extended timer on the ball saver between your central flippers, a Longer Timers mode that will extend the length of any timed challenges on the board, and perhaps the most useful of them all, an option to immediately initiate one of the Rounds. Rounds let you earn huge point bonuses if you’re able to hit the right areas or perform certain actions enough times under a time limit, some even having extra pinballs thrown into play to give them a more unique feel.
Every table also has one final Round you can reach so long as you’ve played every other Round first in that session, so getting one regular Round started for free is hard to turn down even though the other starting bonuses are in general pretty nice to have. The third ball of play (save when you manage to earn an Extra Ball before reaching it) will also have a fairly free multiball chance made instantly available so long as you hit the right area. This means even a novice player who doesn’t really understand how to play pinball beyond flipper flailing can still taste the exciting chaos of having a load of metal balls tossed into play, and even the scores are usually going to hand over high point values that only start feeling small once you’ve realized just how high you can reach if you begin to learn how best to play the board. The pinball physics are definitely a good fit for the tables as well, the plausible designs backed up by realistic ball movement and flipper behavior. The Dragon Showdown board does have a few places a ball can get stuck, but its design certainly feels like that’s a plausible outcome and you can always press the shoulder buttons to try and nudge it out of its bind.
There is an issue unique to the video game presentation of these fairly realistic tables though. While the board usually does a good job of presenting its pertinent parts to the player with its tilted perspective that shows the entire table, pop-up messages notifying you about the Round you’re playing, bonuses, and areas you can aim for to earn bonuses will flash over the top of the table. I have yet to see this obfuscate the ball during a moment that will lead to you losing it down the drain, but it can certainly get close to that, and if you were aiming for something special, having a text box pop up over it can make adjusting your tactics or nudging the table harder to pull off properly.
Gladiators is the table the game is named for, none other really wearing the theme save for the Credits table you have to enter a code to see. Gladiators though is a fairly good pick for the highlight table, as it is a wonderfully constructed play field that shows off the game’s strengths quite well. Bumpers and lanes in the top left that are easy to get your ball too, an arena you can shot your ball into to build up a multiball before that third ball freebie, and ramps and holes that are easy to shoot for but require some skill to hit reliably. The accessibility of each area while also still having some skill required to reliably hit them is incredibly important if you’re going to be trying to complete Rounds for high scores. Timers for Rounds are often pretty tight, meaning you will have to be precise in how you launch your ball when trying to complete them, but it’s still quite possible to get a big surge of points once you’ve got a feel for when to hit your ball and which flipper is best for getting it to a certain area. The ability to activate a Round and then participate in the goals with a decent regularity is what keeps repeat plays of Gladiators engaging, and the difficulty level is just so that getting that big bonus Round at the end is still fairly challenging to pull off because the table is well tuned to feed you successes without being too generous. You will need to train up to have a chance of getting an incredibly high score, but it’s a satisfying process because it rewards your efforts frequently with devaluing your progress in doing so.
Gladiators is probably the most committed to its theme, having the arena area and having each Round explicitly tied quite well to the Roman blood sport. All the other tables also recontextualize their rounds to match their theme, and Knight of the Roses takes the player to medieval fantasy, Rounds now portrayed as things like entering the dragon’s den or rescuing a princess even though you’re just shooting for things like the lock holes and ramps still. Knight of the Roses is another good solid table, but it does seem a little like it’s just shuffling around the elements you played on Gladiators without any unique pieces like the Arena to sell its new theme. Still, its ramps, drop holes, and areas to aim for all have a good balance of being reliable to hit without being too easy that they lose their appeal. Unlike Gladiators it has one central lane that is incredibly easy to shoot into and that can start to feel old because of how easy it is to launch your ball down it when aiming for other things or nothing in particular, but the only real flaw of this arrangement are the triple bumpers which sometimes can throw the ball perfectly towards the space between your flippers below. Usually, the tables draining your ball feels fair enough as you can see how a bad bounce or poor use of the flippers lead to that outcome, but the bumpers here are out of your control and coincidentally at the end of that easily entered lane as well. It doesn’t happen with a huge degree of regularity, especially when you can spot it coming an nudge the table properly, so Knight of the Roses can be conquered without having to fear foregone ball loss too often.
Still, the quality of Knight of the Roses comes through, which isn’t quite true for Dragon Showdown. The table themed around Japanese samurai and myth breaks away from the shuffling of familiar elements, but this seems to be to its detriment. Most tables only have the one pair of flippers at the bottom, but Dragon Showdown throws in an single extra paddle you control near the top, and to encourage its use, it’s practically required to get into the drop holes that activate Rounds. Since Round are where much of the fun comes from, having to work your ball over to even have a chance of starting one makes Dragon Showdown feel slower and like you’re doing far less, which is also true because the bumpers are in an odd spot where they require perfect entry to even touch them. Dragon Showdown’s upper area is also loaded with ugly yellow ramps that your ball can get stuck in, the player sometimes trying not to activate a Tilt alarm with desperate nudging as they watch a Round timer tick down while their pinball takes a break. The ramps require a good amount of power to clear on top of being pretty dull since they’re the only thing that can be reached reliably. Even the drop targets, a relatively minor part of the other boards, are made awkward to hit here. All these subpar designs is why I lead by saying many of the tables would be enjoyable in real life, because Dragon Showdown is the lone exception.
That does mean our last table, Warlock, is still pretty close in quality to the other two. The bumper trouble of Knight of the Roses isn’t here, and while Warlock uses a dubiously effective translucency filter to have your ball sometimes appear behind plastic ramps, it’s still far more entertaining than Dragon Showdown. Going for a true sword and sorcery theme with Rounds that allude to things like magic and werewolves, this bright blue board is a little tougher to hit the Round-starting drop holes and the like, but in a way that feels like a natural step up in difficulty rather than a complete shift into another direction. The bumpers are accessible, the ramps are important but not overly so, and there are lanes and targets to shoot for that require you to hit your ball right without being as strict as Dragon Showdown. It’s a fitting capstone if you play the tables in their intended order because it is less lenient without being grueling, and its magical aesthetic makes it one of the more striking tables visually.
THE VERDICT: Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators is a collection of three pretty enjoyable tables and one dud. Dragon Showdown’s aimless ramp design and withholding interesting targets makes it a clear dip in quality, but Gladiators, Knight of the Roses, and Warlock all have engaging designs that let you frequently engage in exciting things like high scoring Round challenges and minor multiballs. Some of their elements are clearly just being shuffled around and the text display issues are a small bother, but the three well-designed tables included are a joy and worth coming back to since they are designed to give small victories to less experienced players but reward committed ones for honing their skill.
And so, I give Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators for Sega Saturn…
A GOOD rating. Three fun tables make Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators a blast to play, and it’s certainly one of the better collections of vanilla pinball I’ve played since it has reliable realistic physics and some strong designs that dole out points liberally while still making earning high scores really require mastery of the boards. Rounds are well communicated and easy enough to initiate without losing their edge, so you can keep shooting for improvement just by trying to complete more Rounds in your next play session. However, those text boxes can be a bother when they’re hiding what you want to see, and despite all three tables being good on their own, moving the elements around probably wasn’t the best way to achieve variety. They turned out enjoyable all the same, but it’s not surprising Dragon Showdown broke the mold and tried to offer a table that feels distinctly different. It just failed in the execution and feels like it runs counter to the general game plan of Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators.
Removing Dragon Showdown would spare some people some disappointment, but it is not like it is holding the game back from providing enjoyable pinball experiences. Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators constructs its other tables well and feels like it is rooted in realistic physics, and its understanding of rewarding play carries repeat playthroughs quite well, so it still turns out to be an easy recommendation to pinball fans who own a Saturn.