Published by Steve Litchfield at 18:59 UTC, December 27th 2011
Summary:
I remember the day well. Aged seven or eight, I was at an ageing relative's house and he brought out 'something he thought I might like'. It turned out to be a wooden 'pin bagatelle' and I loved it, spending the rest of the day on the thing. Just some wood, some pins and a ball, but it kept me happy. And fired me off in the direction of pinball, one of my specialities at university, ten years later. And now we have bagatelle on our Symbian smartphones, courtesy of Fortuna.
We're not talking high sophistication gaming, of course - this is just a metal ball being fired round a static arrangement of pins driven into a wooden board, but there is still some skill in judging how hard to fire the ball up the curved entry ramp.
As anyone who's played the real game will realise, the angle of the board itself is rather crucial to how the ball will behave under gravity, given a certain firing speed. This is the first thing Fortuna asks you to set, with a choice of 9 different angles (equating to slow and graceful ball curves right up to savage falls to the bottom). Not only does this mean that you can set the game to 'feel' like the Bagatelle that you had as a kid, it also means that you get slightly extended gameplay, in that, once you've mastered the game at your original angle, you can change it and have fun re-learning the best input speeds, etc.
Although the layout may not match your wooden original, it's authentically presented and believable, helped by some subtle short sound effects when the ball hits a pin or settles into a hole. The arcs under gravity are accurate and the physics behind the game looks to be pretty good.
Aside from the static nature of the game board (perhaps the developer could offer a few alternatives, now that the core game code is done?), my only real gripe with Fortuna is the way the ball is launched. Rather than model pulling back on the launching 'stick', the ball's initial momentum is set by tapping an appropriate point up the input channel. This has the advantage that you can set the speed fairly accurately, but you don't get any feel for striking the ball - which is arguably half the fun in this traditional, physical game.
That's about it - there's a high score table and nothing else - but I still reckon this title is worth £1 in the Store. Who knows, if the developer gets enough sales to Bagatelle fans, we could even see other tables/boards and even wood texture/colour schemes?
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 27 Dec 2011
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