Robo Pinball is an excellent, original concept, Shockwave 3D pinball game from Germany. It combines old-school pinball action with 3D graphics and elements of a first-person shooter, all wrapped up into one. The game is a beautiful implementation of Director 3D with realistic physics and all sorts of secrets to discover. Some events trigger the camera to zoom in for a close up of the action, and triggering Shooter Mode takes you right down onto the pinball table itself in a first person view. Outstanding!

The game's graphic design and production is top notch, and it was all conceived, modeled and programmed by Max Tafelmayer, with sound design and 2D artwork by Thomas Kress. Max used the Havok Xtra for reatime physics simulation as well as other cool technologies such as adaptive timestepping for consistent speed across platforms, scripted model movement, smooth motion paths based on Catmull-Rom and Bezier splines, and all with a file size no bigger than 600Kb. Visit his site cerberos.de for more details about the game.

But all this cool stuff doesn't come without a price. No, Max isn't charging to play the game, but your system better be up to the task. Minimum hardware requirements: 300 MHz (PC or Mac), at least some sort of OpenGL or DirectX accelerated graphics card with 8 MB. He recommends a 600+ MHz CPU with at least 16MB graphics card. I encountered a little flakiness after playing for a while, but re-starting Shockwave did the trick. No guarantees you will have similar luck with it, but at Version 1.0 it's looking pretty sweet! Very nice. Click.