Space Cadet Pinball...in a Flatpak?!
I remember it like it was yesterday. Getting off the school bus and making a full sprint up the hill to my house. Running inside. Breezing through my homework. All so I could have just a few extra minutes on the family computer playing Space Cadet Pinball for Windows 95/98/XP.
I won't go so far as to say I grew up poor. But I'd definitely say we had just enough to get by but not much more than that. As such, my family didn't have lots of money for video games and things. So I spent quite a lot of time using the one computer we had in the house to play Space Cadet Pinball.
I found a copy a while back that someone had updated for newer versions of Windows (7/8/10) but that was years ago.
So imagine my surprise when I was looking through Flathub for a game to try and I see Space Cadet Pinball from Andrey Muzychenko. "Oh, it's got to be a copycat game. Not the real thing. Especially not for Linux", I thought to myself.
Boy was I wrong.
This version of Space Cadet Pinball is a complete reverse engineering of the classic game we all know and love from Windows. And having installed it and playing for a few hours now I can say this - it runs beautifully on Linux.
From looking at the Github page for the project it seems that all the game files from the original game are required. Luckily when the Flatpak was complied someone linked to the original game files all bundled up nicely in a pinball.zip out on the Internet Archive and sucked them right into the Flatpak.
To get playing all you have to do it go install the Flatpak (and set up Flatpak if you've never used it before).
I've currently got a high score of 8,681,500. If you beat it, let me know and I'll stick your record here!