This is the first in a new series where I play some very rare and now forgotten PC game demos.
First up, we have a demo of Judge Dredd Pinball by Pinball-Games, Ltd., a game which I still knew from the Action Games CD-Rom Pack that I bought with my mum from Aldi back in around 1999, which had this game alonside other notable games I liked like Safecracker, Speedboat Attack, Gubble II, POD and Have a N.I.C.E. Day included. Can't recall how much it costed when we bought it at the time though. And before you ask, NO, this has absolutely NOTHING to do with the 1995 Sylvester Stallone vehicle, but rather of the original 2000 AD comic that the flick was based off of in the first place. Still, the name is heavily associated with and even synonomous with Stallone himself. (Eh, and Rob Schneider, him too.....)
Still, who doesn't remember all the very memorable yet infamous lines from the film such as "I AM THE LAW!", "I NEVER BROKE THE LAW! I AM THE LAW!" and everyone's personal favorite: "YOU BETRAYED THE LAW! LAW!!!!!!".
I also forgot to mention, yes, there is also a Judge Dredd Pinball machine in real-life made by Bally in 1993, two years before the movie hit theatres, yet this game has absolutely nothing to do with the Bally-produced pinball machine either. It is entirely original in nature.
The demo is time-limited as seen on the top right of the screen, and the game will immediately quit after 5 minutes of play, with the time limit frequently pausing when the game is paused or its Game Over and resumes when its unpaused or a new game has started after it's Game Over. There is no tilting in the demo and you can only play up to two balls, not three, before its game over and you have to restart until the aforementioned timer runs out and it's Game Over permanently.
Interestingly enough, according to the opening and closing splash screens, it was the first ever game put out by the now-defunct Pinball-Games, Ltd. under the Pinball Arcade line of budget games each retailed for less than £19.99 (roughly DM 59.99 at my local currency at the time, today about €29.99). Only four games were ever made for this line-up, which included this game, and Roswell Pinball, Pinball Soccer '98 and Avengers Pinball, with a fifth one called Zorro Pinball as advertised on an advertising board seen in the opening FMV of Pinball Soccer '98 being unreleased, and the company that made the games must have folded after just one year since then, with the four games they made eventually being re-released by other companies as part of low-profile budget compilations. The same company that made these games also made a pinball game for a classic Point-n-Click series called Simon the Sorcerer.
The demo came from a May 98 disc from a Czech gaming magazine called Level, available on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/czlevel40cd
(And OMG, the disc also includes the PC demo of the Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne or Ranma 1/2 of the PlayStation! Known as "CROC"! Oh dear......)
The entire demo is played via DOSBox-Pure running Windows 98. Perhaps you might consider this one to be a test, which sorta-kinda is. The full game does run pretty well on the core.
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