Balls of Steel




Balls of Steel features five tables with edge and attitude. No lame circus, zoo, or cutesy themes here! We're talking blood and gore, with animated creatures getting splattered by your ball and laser cannons dishing out hardcore destruction.

Balls of Steel is realistic, first and foremost, with real physics behind the ball movement and table obstacles. This game behaves like you'd expect it to. On top of that, there are many special effects and table animations. Finally, we've added event triggered music, and each table has characters that speak during the gameplay, to you and to each other. This really adds life to the game compared to other pinball games you've played.

Balls of Steel has two methods of gameplay. Either via a scrolling screen, where you cannot see the entire table at once, or via a smaller static screen where the entire table is on screen at once.

There are 5 tables that comprise the entire Balls of Steel package (with a sixth available separately).  You can click here to learn about the various tables that comprise Balls of Steel.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

  • Pentium 100Mhz (133 recommended)
  • Microsoft Windows 95 (or 98) with DirectX v3.0 (or higher)
  • 16Mb of memory
  • 1Mb VESA compatible SVGA display card
  • DirectX compatible sound card
  • 2X CD-ROM drive
  • 70Mb hard drive space

Originally released December 12, 1997



Image Gallery

 

You can click on any of these thumbnails for a larger image.

   Please note that the large images are quite large - they're about 500k each, and could take some time to download on a modem.

 

 

Downloads

 

Shareware Episode

The filename is bossw13.exe, and the size of the file is 13,370,368 bytes. It is a self extracting archive. Please note that this game will not run on DOS or Windows 3.1.

Patches

  1. bos13sp.exe v1.3 shareware patch (1.58Mb)
  2. bos13rp.exe v1.3 registered patch (3.58Mb)

Please note that the patches available here will patch either v1.0, v1.1, or v1.2 of Balls of Steel, but you must apply the shareware patch to the shareware game, or the registered patch to the registered game.  The registered patch will not work on shareware or vice versa.

USER PATCH AVAILABLE:  Wildfire has ceased updating Balls of Steel.  However, there is a user patch available which fixes several of the problems that the last official version (1.3) had developed.  You can download this patch now, but it requires you already have the official 1.3 patch applied before use.  Please keep in mind this is not an official patch from Apogee/Pinball Wizards or Wildfire.  This is a third party user patch.  Having said that, the patch does appear to work correctly - we cannot guarantee what will happen on your machine, though.   Click here to see a list of fixes for this user patch.  Click here to download the patch.

 

What people are saying

 

GameWeek, the leading non-consumer game industry publication, just arrived and has a glowing review of Balls of Steel. Here are a few of the quotes:

"Balls of Steel is easily one of the most entertaining and attractively rendered pinball games ever developed for the home computer."

"Satirically inspired by the "Balls of Steel" pinball game depicted in Duke Nukem 3D, Balls of Steel is a champion in its own right, combining photo-realistic graphics and state-of-the-art special effects with smooth, utterly absorbing gameplay."

"Balls of Steel is a winner...one of the most addictive pinball games ever concocted, providing countless hours of engrossing gameplay at a reasonable price."

Here are some of the other reviews:

 

Registered Download Information


Format: Registered Download - File size: 64.5Mb

Estimated Download Times:
28.8 Modem - 4 Hours, 12 Minutes, 44 Seconds
56k Modem - 2 Hours, 32 Minutes, 3 Seconds
128K ISDN - 1 Hour, 1 Minutes, 5 Seconds
T1 - 5 Minutes, 31 Seconds