Not to be confused with the Amiga game of the same name, Pipeline for Windows features a type of gameplay that was fairly popular on the Macintosh, but that I found here the first time for the PC. Just as in Pipe Dream you get random pieces of pipe, but your goal, similar to EmPipe, is to connect the two end pieces. However, and that is what makes the game more difficult than the other pipe variants, at least on first look, most of the pieces are T or X-shaped, and you may not have any open ends. That, as in Loopz or Trubis, you can rotate your pieces, only partially alleviates your task.

But, unlike Pipe Dream, you are not required to use every part that is presented to you. There is no penalty for letting it ride up in the elevator, only for picking it up and then dropping it (which will often happen accidentally as long as you are not used to the interface, e.g. rotating a selected piece by clicking the right mouse button while keeping the left depressed). So, once you figure out you can let all those Ts and Xs just pass you by and build your pipeline only with straight and bent pieces, it is not all that difficult any more.

What makes Pipeline remarkable beyond the platform-uncommon gameplay is the style of presentation. The first thing I thought when I started it up was, hey, that doesn't look like 1993. A couple of years later, the hand-drawn, cartoony and sometimes pastel games would become all the rage (Roof Rats isn't pastel, but you'll see the similarities). For a 3.1 game, it came quite as a surrprise. My second surprise came when I transferred it to my IBM PS/2 57 to make some screenshots under 3.1. I had forgotten I had set it back to 16 colors and hey, didn't the game look completely different before? Indeed:

Pipeline is the only game I know that has completely different graphics for 16 and 256 colors, different far beyond the inevitable. Nothing hand-drawn here, instead the straight lines and more or less exact circles anyone who ever has worked with Paintbrush or a similar program will be familiar with.

Which one do you prefer? I, personally, gravitate towards the 16-color graphics. They could have been done better, but they are more appropriate for the medium. The pale distant skyline is really good, and the pipes themselves even look more realistic. But this is, of course, a matter of personal preference.

The menus of the game are German only. This should not be a problem, you will hardly need them. On the title screen, there is a Start field in the top left corner. Spiel is the usual file menu with start, pause, and end. Under Optionen you can set the difficulty (start at level 1, 5, or 9), view or clear the high scores, or set the volume for the few sound effects. The only reason I ever opened a menu was to write this paragraph.