Mystery Mansion Pinball

While modern arcade machines have enjoyed years of ever-escalating technological bells and whistles, comparatively speaking the pinball table has remained mostly frozen, like a museum exhibit, in the antiquated age of joyless knobs, springs and flashing bulbs. But despite the close extinction of its real-world progenitor, virtual pinball continues to exist, and with Gameloft bringing its own contribution to the table, you can bet there's a good reason.

Not content to cram what some consider to be a fairly tedious, bulky form of entertainment into the mobile handset, Gameloft has underlined Mystery Mansion Pinball's B-movie simplicity by including just one pinball table. If you happen not to like the table, you're stuck – but that only makes it all the more impressive that this game can keep you hooked for as long as it does.

You start the game by pressing '5' to pull back the plunger and letting it go to send the ball up the side of the table and into the flashing citadel of alleys, potholes, and repulsive bollards that make up the playfield.

To keep the ball from rolling into the gutter at the bottom of the sloping table there are obviously two paddles, which you can flip by pressing '4' or '6'. These paddles enable you, with practice, to aim the ball towards points and sub-games, announced exuberantly by the ticker tape display at the top of the screen. It may take three buttons to play Mystery Mansion, but in spirit this is the one-button-play principle epitomised.

Where a pinball game succeeds or not, of course, is in the ball physics, and Gameloft has been characteristically scrupulous in producing a virtual table in which the ball really does seem to be acting as it would in real life.

The ultimate aim of the game is to make each of the letters in the word 'Mansion' light up. How you go about doing this is, as the title suggests, initially a mystery. In reality, everything that happens in Mystery Mansion has an explanation and a purpose, though. Lodge the ball in a certain hole, for instance, and a bonus multiplier will spasm into life, showering you with points if you can then steer the ball around the right lane, or thread it through the right gate.

The rules are fabulously complicated, and Mystery Mansion's instructions page is more voluminous than any we can remember. The fact that, when you're trying to follow them, the ball might not have touched a flipper for the last ten seconds and is freewheeling uncontrollably is irrelevant.

Besides, it's the ticker tape display that contains the secret of Mystery Mansion's appeal. The pinball action on the table is frantic and random, but if you get the ball lodged in the right place the screen will zoom in on this LCD display and a sub-game will begin. Amongst these are a point-of-view maze game in which you have to escape from a mine, and a DDR-style rhythm-action dance game in which you have to match scrolling symbols to key presses.

They aren't great – they go on for too long and are trivially easy to complete – but they do break up the routine of the table and provide a novel twist to a gaming form that hasn't usually been noted for its innovation.

Further boosting Mystery Mansion's appeal is the execution of its canny Hammer House of Horror theme. From the menu screen to the sub-games, a polished, kitsch score accompanies the polished, kitsch graphics. The whole production is stylish, humorous, and never looks its age.

Pinball is half skill, half luck, and however richly you're endowed with either, you'll hit 1,000,000 before you have time to blink: Mystery Mansion throws numbers at you like a frantic auctioneer. Despite the library of rules, it's an orgy of incomprehensible instructions, bewildering noises, flashing lights, and uncontrollable hyperinflation.

And that's all good fun. It may belong to an extinct species, but, like T-rex or some frilled prehistoric venom-spitter, Mystery Mansion Pinball knocks most of what's currently roaming the earth into a cocked hat.