In a nutshell...

It’s video game pinball, Jim, but not as we know it.

What’s it good for?

Wearing your thumbs down to sore nubs and causing you to use bad language/tear out your hair in frustration.

Judgement time...

Pinball computer games have been around for almost as long as computer games themselves, and by and large they’re pretty much the same: hit ball with flippers; rack up a giant high score; eventually “die” when you lose three balls. But new N-Gage release Mile High Pinball takes a refreshingly different tack: rather than have you striving to stack points on a single pinball table, it stitches dozens of them together!

Basically, each “level” in the game is a pinball screen, and you progress by knocking the ball out of the top of the screen, whereupon it pops up at the bottom of the next screen - and so essentially the idea is to climb up a huge “mile high” pinball table, all the while totting up an enormous amount of points. Lose the ball between two paddles and you don’t get a life chalked off - you simply drop back to the last tier, and need to knock the ball back up again.

While this makes for nice lengthy sessions, it often make the game swear-inducingly frustrating when a run of unlucky bounces sees your hapless sphere fall three or four screens in quick succession. We just hope the neighbours weren’t home when we were bellowing four-letter expletives at our N95…

Power-ups add a dash of extra spice to proceedings, giving you bumper point multipliers, causing the ball to move more slowly or clone itself instantly into multiple balls, and on-screen enemies (which have to be ball-bashed into submission) mean there’s often something other than bumpers to aim at.

Graphics are colourful and sharply detailed and, while the music becomes repetitive at times, sound effects aren’t too harsh on the old lugholes.

There’s an option for some multiplayer match-ups over N-Gage Arena, and you can upload your single player scores to see how you match up against other ‘ballers.

Despite the occasionally frustrating gameplay, we reckon this is one of the better “cheap” games currently available via N-Gage (it’s £6 rather than £8): it’s a snap to pick up and play, endlessly challenging and the simple controls mean it’s not too taxing on the digits.