REVIEW: Pinball

Game: Pinball
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: October 2010
Rating: 5 Stars



Pinball is video pinball game developed by Nintendo. It chronicles the epic story of a ball and its journey to bump into things and increase the score. It features two screens of bumpers, drop targets and bonuses. Targets include seals, penguins, baby birds and classical pinball elements. If you are lucky or skillful, you can find the bonus round and help Mario save the girl.

Where is the theme here? Weak, at best.

There is a wide variety of different targets to shoot for, and this does a good job of making the two screens feel very different from each other. For an early pinball game, it does a good job of keeping the screen busy and packed with targets. This helps stave off the long, dry stretches that were present in Atari pinball games. The bonus round was a nice addition, and bouncing the ball on Mario to break through the wall and free the princess made a nice change of pace to the traditional pinball screens.

Pinball has a number of flaws which keep it from being a true classic. The ball behavior tends to be rather light and floaty. This is a common problem with earlier video pinball games, so it is easy to forgive. There is no common theme to the boards and targets, and this makes the tables feel like playing pinball in a garage sale. Many other pinball games have a tilt feature, which often gives a little extra influence over the ball behavior. I’m not sure if Pinball omits this as a design decision or a technical limitation, but it does limit your “sphere of influence”. There are no multipliers on the table and this makes high scoring games more a matter of endurance than skill. Finally, Pinball really would have benefited from music beyond what played during the title screen.

In modern video pinball games there are two schools of thought. Simulation type pinball games take great care to accurately reproduce the sights, sounds and physics of an actual pinball table as accurately as possible. This can provide all of the fun and excitement of a physical table and make us miss the classic arcades and pizza parlors.

For the record that is Pauline from Donkey Kong. Not Daisy, not Peach.

The other option is to embrace the video game aspect and use unreal environments, movable targets and boss battles that would not be possible on a physical table.

This Pinball attempts a middle road between the two...and falls short at both. It’s not hard to guess that Pinball loses its appeal pretty quickly. The lack of a theme probably hurts it the worst. A couple changes in sprites and sounds, and this could have been a much more entertaining “Mario Pinball”. Modern pinball machines work best when they put the player into sensory overload with flashing lights and sounds. However Pinball does very little to capture and deliver that energy and you are left with a competent but dreary rendition of the game. Video pinball games have come a long way since Pinball, and in this case you really can’t go home again.