The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap Platform: Game Boy Advance Released November 4, 2004 (JPN) January 5, 2005 (US) Directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi Co-Developed by Capcom and Nintendo Published by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack
I like that they don’t pussyfoot around with the mine tracks. Boom, shotgun takeoff at breakneck speed, and Link can walk off the sore neck afterward. Whiplash? Pssh, that’s why he’s the hero! Do you think the asshole at the shop who charges 200 rupees for 30 seashells could be thrown from a mine cart at 80mph and then continue on without so much as rubbing his neck? I think not!
I wanted to play Minish Cap for the first time in twenty-one years because, frankly, I didn’t remember much about playing it as a teenager. I remembered certain aspects like the Kinstones, the limited usage of the shrinking aspect, that you fight a giant Octorok, and how small in scale the game felt (no pun intended). But I didn’t remember anything about the dungeons or even the items. Not one single detail. My brain completely deleted the gust jar and digging claws, the boxes and jars used for growing and shrinking, and even the main villain. But back in 2005, I was still recovering from life threatening injuries sustained in November of 2003 and had basically just started gaming full-time again. The main thing I did remember was liking Minish Cap a lot and thinking it was one of the better Zelda games.
One of the few clever usages of the shrinking mechanic is climbing into Armos knights and turning them on/off. Usually, Nintendo games feel like they mine a game’s key gimmick for everything it’s worth. That is NOT the case with Minish Cap. I feel like they barely scratched the surface with the growing/shrinking stuff and, actually, the shrinking stuff is kind of arbitrary.
Metroid: Zero Mission was another game that I played during the same binge that I first played Minish Cap, and it was kind of in the same boat in that memories of it besides basic things just didn’t take root. Zero Mission is also the reason I put off this review. One thing I did remember about Zero Mission was thinking it was a masterpiece and one of the best games I’d ever played. It’s not. When I replayed Zero Mission for an IGC review, I still had fun but I was also really disappointed, too. So I’ve had one question on my mind: “am I a bad person for wanting to catch a fairy and then shake the hell out of the bottle, or is it okay because fairies are just another breed of unholy abomination that populates Hyrule and the whole ‘restore life’ thing is clearly a ploy to give them better public relations than, say, Moblins or Wizrobes?” Wait, I meant “since I can’t remember sh*t about Minish Cap, did I overrate it too?”
Oh, and I remembered fighting this. Sort of. I remembered that a giant green ChuChu was the first boss, but I completely forgot about how you fight it, and I forgot that you rematch an electric version of it later. The rematch is pictured above.
Graphically, Minish Cap is trying to look like a 2D version of Wind Waker, which is another game that’s a lot smaller in scale than you expect from a Zelda game. In my memories, Wind Waker felt simply massive, but the overworld is lacking in consequential locations and the actual dungeon count was really low. I still enjoyed it, but I was legitimately startled by how wrong my own memories of the game were, to the point that I’m now terrified to replay the N64 games. But I wasn’t worried about that happening with Minish Cap. I remembered a small-in-scope Zelda game, and now that I’ve 100%ed the game, I can confirm that’s exactly what it is.
I have a question: if the scale when using the shrink boxes changes to this, and there’s levels based around being this small when you play them, why can’t Link just hover above the level at full size, stab his sword down, twist it a couple times, and then wipe the element off his blade? Why does he have to go through the rigmarole of finding the map and the compass and the special weapon? Just stab the level!
The overworld of Minish Cap is like an abridged version of the Zelda map. All the tropes are here: the town, the swamp, the forest (complete with fog effect), the rugged mountain area, Lake Hylia, the graveyard, etc. But a person can travel even without warping from place to place in just a couple minutes by foot. Oh, they’re mostly well constructed. Mostly. There’s a few letdowns, like the graveyard also combines the Lost Woods concept but the actual scale of the area before you enter the lost woods gimmick is compact and can be explored in a minute or two. The fields that surround the center of the map are even smaller. It’s like condensed soup. Zelda boiled down to the bare essentials, but what’s here does feel fairly packed with content.
Minish Cap has a decent but unspectacular variety of overworld enemies.
I’ll give credit for a game that’s overflowing with treasure teases. I don’t know if they have a name or what else to call them. “I see something that I know I can’t get right now, but oh boy am I excited for when I get the item that lets me do it!” That’s a treasure tease. The Zelda franchise is built around this concept, and for its small size, they packed a lot of these moments into Minish Cap.
Gaining the ability to push those bookshelves is actually a big moment that takes a while to reach. You can see that you’re going to do it, and a character even teases that there’s an item that lets you do it, but you’re going to have to wait until much later to be able to. Okay, so it’s weird that Link can lift a gigantic f*cking seed over his head without any item needed to open the game’s second level but you’re still going to wait quite a while to push a bookshelf, but whatever. They set it up well. Too bad the majority of setups have lousy payoffs.
But, they overstuffed the game with these teases and vastly undelivered on payoffs to them. This is largely tied to these doohickeys called “kinstones.” Kinstones are broken discs that come in four colors and a variety of shapes, like so:
And the game wants you to locate someone who has a matching disc and fuse stones with them. When you walk up to someone (or a wall, because sometimes it’s a f*cking wall) and they have the ability to “fuse kinstones” a little thought bubble will appear that tells you what the reward for this fuse is. If you press the L button, you’ll go to a screen where you have an opportunity to fuse stones with them. If you’re carrying a stone that fits their stone, they fuse and something will happen somewhere in Hyrule. It might spawn a treasure chest or a golden enemy, open a previously inaccessible walkway, reveal a hidden door, and a variety of other surprises.
When I say “you’re constantly getting kinstones” I am not exaggerating. They’re everywhere! There’s usually multiple in a level.
It’s not the worst idea, but the execution is the worst, because there’s not actually a fixed amount of kinstones in the world. For the most part, only the yellow kinstones are context sensitive plot devices that are functionally like keys for the overworld and necessary towards completing the game. If there’s a yellow kinstone, you’ll get it exactly when that is the next area of the game and not a moment before and you absolutely will never have extra ones.
This is your reward for completing every fusion in the game. So let me get this straight: all the figurines that you collect in one spot in the town nabs a piece of heart, but the fusions that you have to explore the entire f*cking world for gets you a goddamned trophy?
For the other three colors, the game gives players way more kinstones than there are people or things to actually fuse kinstones with. Apparently there’s 100 total fusion moments in the game. After I activated the final fusion, I still had 136 unused kinstones. That means I had collected a total of 236 kinstones, over twice as many as the game actually requires. They’re dead inventory. The Hyrule version of Skylander or LEGO Dimensions figures. That would be like finishing a game with 136 unused keys. It’s a satisfying mechanic rendered VERY unsatisfying.
Granted, a lot of these were purchased, one way or another. But that’s another problem: too many rewards are kinstones. For example: there’s three tiers of rooms in the hotel and the clerk promises a reward for each tier with the purchase of a night’s sleep. Regardless of how expensive the room you stay in is, you get a kinstone for all three price points, every single time. I assume “rarer” ones are in the more expensive rooms, but look at my inventory. None of these f*cking things are all that rare.
I legitimately think the kinstone concept is the worst one in the history of Zelda from an execution standpoint. Of the 100 fusions in the game, 9 are gold ones that happen on a set schedule. Of the 91 remaining ones, 24 of them reward a fusion of a kinstone with ONLY more kinstones, in some form or another (a chest or a merchant selling them). After beating the game, I went around to find the kinstone fusions I missed. When I got to the final two, I was also missing three pieces of heart to 100% the game. I knew one of those pieces of heart was going to be from getting all 136 figurines in the town, but the other two I was sure must have been from fusion. Nope. The last two fusions I did placed treasure chests in the world that gave me a different kinstone.
Just like the light rings in the water from Wind Waker, they ruined a good idea with overindulgence. Kinstone collecting and fusing SHOULD have been exciting, but the lack of tight design around them takes the zing out of them. Plus, some of the characters in the game can fuse with you multiple times, and 16 out of 49 green fusions, along with one red and one blue, are determined completely at random, along with which reward they unlock. I think it would have been so much more interesting if every character had a unique fusion item. Would that have complicated things? Maybe, but hey, we’re smart. We can grasp that an item belonging to Smith goes to the character named Smith.
This was the last thing I had to do to 100% the game: grinding up seashells 30 at a time for 200 rupees.
And while I’m whining about tight design, there’s 44 pieces of heart, but one of them I’m almost certain you can’t get until after you beat the game. It’s this one:
(flips bird) By the way, it’s actually just a coincidence that I finished fusion part of the game with the same amount of stones leftover as there are figurines to collect.
The game teases this piece of sh*t heart right from the moment you’re able to fully explore the town. But to get it, you have to collect every single figurine from a capsule game in the corner of the town. Only, you can’t actually spend money at this game. Do you remember the secret seashells from previous Game Boy Zelda games? Those are the currency for this one part of Minish Cap, and you don’t spend them on the capsule game. You bet them to increase the probability of getting a new capsule. This is the one aspect of Minish Cap I cheated via rewind with and discovered the game is semi-rigged. You’ll get the same capsule every time until you pass a threshold. Early on, I didn’t bet my shells wisely, so my last hour with Minish Cap was spent grinding coins via another gambling game (yeah, I cheated there too) so I could spend 800 rupees for 120 shells to win toys so I could get a piece of heart I didn’t need anymore.
This is BORING! And why can’t I just rob the place, huh? I have a bow! I have a sword! I have bombs! Let me do one armed robbery, Nintendo! I won’t do it again! Pinky swear!
And the kicker is that the house with the heart piece belongs to a Richard Branson satire (not f*cking kidding) who, after bragging about how rich he is, is so impressed with the amount of time you wasted getting Zelda’s most tedious and boring collectables that he lets you steal 600 rupees and his heart from his home. All those worthless kinstone fusions and THIS is how they decided to pay off this treasure tease that you saw right at the start of the game? Despite its small size, Minish Cap manages to fail to deliver on so many promises that it’s stunning.
But, those are just the side quests. The actual adventure is a different story. The big gimmick with this Zelda game is the ability to shrink at designated spots. It’s a fun gimmick, no doubt……. But don’t get too excited. The actual tiny Link exploration only happens in designated areas that, ironically, usually aren’t large in scope. Take this spot in the mountain, before you reach level two. I’ve circled the area where the game zooms in on tiny Link.
You shrink in the rock with the hole in it, and can move around freely, but you can’t actually do anything besides grow big again or enter the area that I circled.
Once you shrink down, you’re so small on the screen that the game has an indicator to point you out, along with any of the Minish tribe that happen to be nearby. But when you enter the little mountain pass that circled above, the game activates a brief set piece where you run down a straight corridor while avoiding rain drops.
And that’s it for that section. It does make for an exciting one-off set piece that lasts, oh, fifteen seconds, maybe twenty. But it’s also pretty basic and not memorable. That’s the shrinking aspect of Minish Cap in a nutshell. It’s very gimmicky, but the actual gameplay red meat feels too narrow and short, to the point that I wonder if it was the smartest idea to base the entire game around it at all.
It makes for a good excuse to have common enemies stand in for bosses, but again, why fight them like this? Why not grow and kill them with one or two swipes, and then shrink back down and collect the macguffin? And don’t say “so the game can happen.” At least do the Yoshi’s Island thing and have a wizard cast a spell that grows the enemy and buffs them.
Places where you can transform are usually roped off in a way where escape is impossible, which they sort of HAD to do to make sure players didn’t use this ability to softlock themselves. So, even tall grass, a doorway or a crack in the pavement will stop you. Yeah, it’s not exactly like a Link to the Past’s “two completely different worlds in one game” is it? Hell, locations you have to shrink to enter like the Minish Village or the Minish Mines in the mountain are functionally just normal villages that require an extra step to enter. For those locations, the shrinker is right there next to the entrance. And the shrinking also leads to many other eye-rolling moments. One of the places you shrink are upside down pots, like seen in this picture to the left of Link.
By the way, this is yet another moment where you can see a treasure chest for basically the entire game but can’t quite reach it until the game opens up much later on. The pay off for this treasure staring at you…. MOCKING YOU…… is a f*cking kinstone that you likely already have a dozen exact copies of. F*ck you, Minish Cap!
Those pots start normally, but you can’t just flip them with the same two hands you’ve been using to fight monsters and save the world with. Oh no. You need a magic item to flip THOSE pots. The most comically lame item I can remember in a Zelda game: the Cane of Pacci. An item with the sole ability of flipping things. Link does have thumbs, right? I can suspend my belief and say, yes, Link actually does need to shrink and fight giant sized versions of enemies in dungeons that are, in theory, so small that he could step on them and pick through the rubble to find the magical element to defeat Vaati and save Hyrule. But he can’t flip a f*cking pot? It’s heavy? There’s other people! They know you’re trying to save Zelda! Ask them for a hand!
Weirdly, this thing isn’t while you’re shrank. That’s a giant sized Goron who gives you the Mirror Shield, which reflects enemy attacks. He only wakes up when you activate the right kinstone. HEY, a kinstone that doesn’t suck! But waking him up isn’t enough. You have to then do a special quest for him to get the mirror shield. What is that quest? (checks note) Beat the game. This is post-game content. Wait, really?! So, what happened? Was the mirror shield part of a deleted dungeon or something?
Over the course of the game, there’s really only one major moment that’s heavily set-up that gives you a taste of how good the concept of shrinking could have been, and it’s the quest to get the item that lets you shove objects while being small. It happens in the central village and you can suss out what route you’ll need to take is long before you’re equipped to do it, but it’s well foreshadowed and executed perfectly. I so wish the game had more of that. So while the shrinking has its moments, including a few VERY satisfying side quests, it feels like an upjumped dungeon item that somehow got star billing.
This is what I’m talking about.
Of course, the main reason I play Zelda is the dungeons. If Nintendo were to ever put out “Legend of Zelda: Oops! Only Dungeons!” I could seriously live with that. I think most fans could. There’s only six full-size dungeons in Minish Cap, and the first one is like baby’s first Zelda dungeon. It’s basic even by the standards of a tutorial dungeon and I was just bored out of my skull like you wouldn’t believe. I sincerely thought “oh no, I’m not going to like Minish Cap and Nintendo fans are going to be so mad at me.” Thankfully the other five are a lot of fun and probably saved Minish Cap by themselves.
Hell, I even liked the ice level, which also doubles as the water level, where a large section is based around navigating a lily pad through the stage.
And I even enjoyed items like the gust jar, which I’m not even sure why it’s called “gust jar” when it mostly sucks and only blows a little, literally. “Vacuum Jar” makes more sense. I liked the digging claws too. The cane was stupid as f*ck, but, hey, I liked the Superman cape, especially when they came up with cute gimmicks for it, like one spot where Link has to use a fan to assist with the jump. I’m not sure why Hyrule’s superheroes wear capes like superheroes in Earth’s fiction do. Is there a Hyrule version of Superman? Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be Link?
You’ll believe a pointy-eared child can fly!
I wasn’t sure if Minish Cap was truly unmemorable or if it was just me. I think it’s probably a little of both. I struggled to write this review because there’s very few moments that actually stand out in Minish Cap. The main villain, Vaati, is one of the most forgettable big bads in a major gaming IP. Not a single puzzle stumped me except one: I didn’t realize you could pick up this giant seed. Well TECHNICALLY it’s a normal sized seed and I just happen to be small in this picture:
In my defense, by the time you reach this point, I already realized there were book cases in the town that I couldn’t shove as Minish Link yet BUT would be able to with the right item, and for whatever reason, I didn’t press the lift button next to seed because, I assumed, I wasn’t strong enough to lift anything yet. So I tried everything with this seed but lifting it. I assumed there was something I was missing. I probably spent close to thirty minutes going back and forth trying to figure out what exactly that was before throwing in the towel, hitting up Google, then returning to the seed red-faced and embarrassed while also muttering “that makes no sense.”
The light arrow is given to you not in a dungeon but from (checks notes) some guy. This is one of the worst inclusions of the bow in the Zelda franchise. It’s not set up at all. It’s not necessary towards the game. It’s a total afterthought. So, like, why not do THIS as a tough fusion thing?
That was the only part I needed help with besides the last three heart pieces post-game. None of the dungeon puzzles were that hard, and the layouts were some of the easiest to navigate in Zelda. Hell, the swamp was harder to find my way around than any dungeon. While dungeons were fun, as Zelda dungeons tend to be, there’s no “oh my GOD!” moment in any of them, with one exception: this boss, the highlight of the game and one of the best 2D bosses in the franchise.
This giant flying manta ray is flanked by a smaller, blue flying manta ray. You hop across them, create duplicates of Link so you can then hit the eyeballs that are open at the same time. It’s exciting, challenging without being unfair, and different from the typical Zelda bosses in both theme and execution. But is it memorable? It doesn’t look like a Zelda boss, or feel like a Zelda boss, and I already totally forgot it once before. While playing its level, for the life of me I couldn’t remember a single detail about the boss. Not one.
I also didn’t remember anything about Vaati, aka the worst last boss in the franchise, who is presumably evil for having an eyeball where his crotch should be. He could hook up with Dracula from Castlevania Bloodlines, aka “mouth crotch” and search out nose crotch, ear crotch, and chin crotch to form Crotch Voltron.
But ultimately, I never thought any element of exploring or puzzle solving, whether it was the overworld or any of the dungeons, was all that clever. Minish Cap is Zelda: The Zelda Game. It looks exactly as good as it needs to look. It has a roster of enemies exactly as big as it needed to not get slammed by critics. It has the bare minimum amount of dungeons to not feel like a rip off. It’s Zelda kept just exactly at subsistence level. It’s one of the strangest gaming experiences I’ve had because normally I’d be so pissed about a game that aims as low as this does. But I can’t really get all that angry at Minish Cap because it’s a lot fun. I think that probably speaks more to the Zelda formula than the raw content of Minish Cap. Zelda as a franchise is so good that THIS is lesser Zelda. Wow!
Ah, see, it’s not the MASTER SWORD. Oh no, it’s the Four Sword in this game, so that’s different, right?
I wasn’t kidding when I called this “abridged Zelda.” That’s literally what it is. It’s the boilerplate Zelda game with all the expecting fixings and none of the highlights. The action is fine. The exploration is fine. The dungeon design after that first level is fine. That’s not to say it doesn’t excel in other areas. It controls great. The combat is nice and crunchy. It’s also a beautiful game when it needs to be. Like, look at these screenshots:
Golly, that’s gorgeous. It’s not always that good looking, but again, it’s almost like it knows exactly when you’ve reached a part where it needed to visually strut and do the heavy lifting for a game that’s otherwise often lacking in inspiration. Because, in gameplay terms? Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap never rises very far above fine, except for one damn boss that isn’t even the last boss. It gets a YES! because it never sinks too far below “fine” either. The kinstones, figurines, and heart pieces might have annoyed the sh*t out of me, but those are the distractions that I think only matter if the main parts are bad. The overworld. The dungeons. Well, those are fine, so Minish Cap is fine. How fine? Exactly as fine it needed to be, and not a drop more. It’s THAT Zelda game.
I think Vaati, aka the last boss, is generic and lame and a major letdown. It doesn’t help Minish Cap’s case that it just has a terrible villain and a terrible final battle that refuses to end. Nothing from the moment you start the fight against Vaati’s first form until the end credits rolled worked at all for me. I think that’s largely on the character being very bland as a final boss. It made me appreciate what they accomplished with Ganon. I know some fans scream bloody murder, but I personally believe Ganon in the first NES Zelda is one of the all-time sh*tty last boss fights. Maybe the worst of any Nintendo game. You are literally stabbing blindly at air and hoping the invisible Ganon is in front of you. No finesse at all. Horrible. What were they thinking? That probably should have been the end of the character, but the sprite was just good enough and the “hit him with a silver arrow to kill him” bit memorable enough to continue with him as the series antagonist. Ganon in Link to the Past was probably the best boss in the game and felt appropriately last-bossish, and now everyone considers Ganon one of the great villains of gaming. These days, he can be a pig, or a thief, or a Mumm-Ra cosplayer and it usually works. I sincerely don’t mind that they keep going back to Ganon. Ganon is awesome. Vaati sucks as a boss and a big bad. Never again, Nintendo. Stick with Ganon.
I’ve wanted to play this since reviewing Metroid: Zero Mission and it turns out this is to the Zelda franchise what that game is to Metroid: it checks all the boxes, and it checks them well, but it also only checks the boxes it needs to. I would never have picked up on that as a teenager. Both Minish Cap and Zero Mission feel like games that aren’t made to dazzle anyone who is deeply experienced with their respective franchises. They feel like they’re made to satisfy fans while leaving any truly good ideas on the table for a bigger, more important game later on, and preferably one that costs more than a GBA game does. Minish Cap and Zero Mission feel like games scaled down for the Game Boy Advance in not just size but scope. That’s the sense I got. It’s like someone looked back on that one time Nintendo released two brand new Game Boy Color Zelda games on the same day (and they originally meant to do three, jeez) that each were full-sized (and huge) 2D Zelda adventures, with ten dungeons each and said “whoa, whoa, let’s not do THAT again! We ain’t running some kind of adventure charity over here!” Verdict: YES!
Wario World Platform: Nintendo GameCube Released June 20, 2003 Directed by Kouichi Kimura & Hitoshi Yamagami Developed by Treasure Published by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2
“I hope doing this piledriver move never gets old!”
After Super Mario Sunshine, I guess I hadn’t gotten the idea of searching for treasure out of my system, so why not turn to THE treasure hunting Nintendo character? Plus, Wario World is actually made by Treasure, as in the legendary studio made out of Konami cast offs. Prior to Wario World, I’d only reviewed one other Treasure game: McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure (yes, as in THAT McDonald’s) for the Sega Genesis that was seriously one of the best 16 bit platformers I’ve ever played. Go read McDonald’s Classic Video Games: The Definitive Review for that review. If Treasure didn’t phone-in a Ronald McDonald game, there’s no way they would do that with a Nintendo IP, right? RIGHT?!
“That doesn’t look too bad.” Oh, but it is.
Calling Wario World a 3D game is a little misleading. I don’t think it’s truly 3D most of the time. I’ve heard it described as 2.5D. I’ve heard comparisons to Crash Bandicoot. Either way, the game is framed so that it feels like a 2D game that has depth. “Isn’t that 3D?” No. It’s closer in gameplay to a top-down 16 bit game. A throwback to SNES/Genesis collect-a-thons, with a fixed camera angle that offers only a little wiggle room. When I say “fixed camera” I mean strictly the angle. The camera follows you, so don’t expect old school Resident Evil. Think more like a Zelda game or something like Super Mario RPG. There is absolutely no “looking around” in the levels themselves. You can view a little in front of you, and sometimes you can tilt the camera at a downward angle, but this type of looking:
Super Mario Sunshine (2002 – GameCube)
Well, you just plain can’t do that in Wario World, and I never found a single instance in any level overworld where I found the limited camera options to be useful. Even a level based on using reflections in a mirror, where you’re specifically told to use the camera angles, I didn’t think it helped. Hell, changing the default camera angle usually made things worse. But that’s not always the case, as the bosses and puzzle rooms can feel closer to the type of 3D game that was well established in the early 2000s. Wario World has eight levels, and each level has eight trap doors that look like this:
Doing a butt stomp into the trap door takes you to a “puzzle room” and in those rooms, you can do a full 90 degree rotation of the camera. It’s still not a free camera, but you can also tilt the camera downward (never upward) or make the game take place entirely from a bird’s eye view, and sometimes it’s actually helpful.
By “sometimes” I mean I felt I had to use it once. It was in this room, which is the very last puzzle room in the game. And I only used it here because it’s the biggest room in the game and consists entirely of narrow walkways. Going top-down made this downright easy to navigate.
So, right out of the starting gate, Wario World feels like a relic in terms of style of game. A massive, massive downgrade from the humongous levels of Super Mario Sunshine. But hell, it’s not 2003 anymore and I’m all about exploring different styles of games, so what might have hurt in 2003 just plain doesn’t matter in 2026. Despite that, I found Wario World to be a total slog and one of the worst Nintendo-published mascot games ever made. I literally can’t believe Treasure made this, because Wario World is f*cking boring.
This, the second level of the game, is the one decent level and the only one I had to do significant backtracking to 100%.
For whatever reason, the game leans into Wario as a sluggish, lumbering oaf. Okay, so he’s fatter than Mario, but so what? He could jump and platform around every bit as good as Mario in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Virtual Boy Wario Land. Then, following those two games, for Wario Land 2 and 3 Nintendo turned the character into a high concept “you can never die” puzzle platforming experience where Wario changed form based on allowing enemies to hit him (I’ll review those soon).
Falling off a ledge doesn’t result in your death. Instead, you’re taken to a penalty room where you have to punch boxes. All but one box will have a bomb. The correct box, which more than once was the only one left after I broke literally every other box, will have a spring that returns you to the surface. You don’t lose health, or at least I don’t think so. Instead, you lose coins if the ghost rhinos grab you or if you touch the water or whatever that is. Since coins are everywhere, I never came remotely close to finding out what happens if you lose your coins. This was just a massive waste of time.
So there’s a precedent that Wario is every bit as limber and capable at platforming heroics as Mario. That’s all out the window here. Wario can barely jump and the pitiful level layouts do well accommodating that, IE they’re not exciting to navigate at all. He also doesn’t spring off enemies and has to rely on ladders or these little balls scattered throughout the world to climb even small structures. Very rarely, you might use an enemy for climbing, but those moments are few and far between. It’s also one of the poorest controlling Nintendo games in that the timing feels….. off.
Behold: the treasure hunting aspect. The majority of these are just laying around somewhere.
But Wario’s games are about finding treasure, right? Well, about that………
In Wario World, each of the game’s eight levels (not eight worlds. EIGHT LEVELS) has eight treasure rooms that are guaranteed to have a crystal in them, so 64 total red crystals. You need X amount of crystals to unlock a level’s exit and face the boss, but you’ll just naturally pass by enough puzzle room doors to get them if you don’t go for 100%. There’s also eight statue pieces per level, some of which are in the puzzle rooms and some of which are “hidden” on the levels. Another 64 things. There’s eight separate treasures per level that have to first be spawned by hitting their corresponding button and then locating the platform the chest is on:
Sometimes a button requires a little backtracking to find its treasure platform. Thankfully the buttons and platforms are color matching and once you nab the treasure, the platform turns gray to show it’s claimed.
And sometimes the buttons are up against a wall and have to be activated by having an enemy thrown at them. So I’ll call it 64 for the buttons + 64 for the treasures themselves. Finally, there’s five elf things trapped in boxes in each level, and again, sometimes they’re in the overworld and sometimes they’re in the puzzle rooms. There’s forty in total and, apparently, they’re the only thing that changes the ending. As per tradition, Wario World has multiple “endings” though your reward for 100%ing the game is a f*cking static screen of Wario sitting on a throne.
Oh f*ck off with that lazy sh*t. Seriously, really?!
But the journey is the reward or whatever. 64 + 64 + 64 + 64 + 40 = 296 total things to find in Wario World. Gosh, that sounds like quite the treasure hunt, right? Yeah, no, as maybe two dozen total things require a little bit of off-the-beaten-path searching to locate them. Most of the crap you’re looking for you’ll pass along the one and only main path in each level, with MAYBE a small hint of having to walk up and down to spot something.
Wario in Baby’s First Treasure Hunt.
If it actually requires searching, it’s not THAT much searching or backtracking. Sometimes you’ll pass a treasure platform and then the button for it is a little further up ahead. If the elf boxes or statue pieces aren’t in levels themselves, you’ll probably find them right next to the crystal in the puzzle rooms. It’s baffling. Less than a handful of times, the puzzle rooms separate the crystal from whatever the other reward is, but not in a way where you have to do additional challenging things.
The “puzzle rooms” are more like ultra-stripped-down versions of the “pure platform” challenges in Mario Sunshine.
And the puzzle rooms are completely toothless bores. If you fall off the edge in those rooms, there’s NO punishment besides having to start over. You don’t lose any health. They’re the most rudimentary of platforming challenges. Maybe two or three out of sixty-four in the game put up an actual fight or made me stop and think about how to tackle them. And locating them isn’t exactly hard. Because the levels are fairly linear in their layout and branching paths don’t branch off too far, I could count on one hand how many times I needed to actually look around to find things I missed.
The Christmas theme goes to waste too.
Thankfully, if you miss stuff and need to restart a stage to 100% it, you can quit and return to the hub as soon as you gather the treasure and it still counts. So, total times I needed to significantly backtrack? Twice in the entire game: once in the second level for a single statue piece and once in the Christmas/ice theme because there’s a slope that you can’t climb up once you’ve passed them. It took me like five minutes to get what I was missing. The rest of the stuff I got just by spotting it through normal progression. The treasure hunt is a complete failure.
If the puzzle room has steel doors, like seen here, you must piledrive an enemy through it to enter it. Or, instead of an enemy, just the little weightless bombs the enemies fire at you. Holding ANYTHING that you can slam will work to open these doors. Since enemies respawn (sometimes you have to walk away and come back a couple times to make this happen) this is just busy work that adds NOTHING to the game. Sure does pad out the run time like a champ, though. See, that’s why they give you the big bucks, Treasure. You think of things like that.
So if that’s the case, what’s even the point of Wario World? They seem to have been aiming to make a brawler-platforming hybrid. The game constantly spawns the same tiny handful of enemies that are reskinned to look different on each level, but functionally they’re the same two or three basic enemies you were introduced to at the start of the game. You can punch and tackle them to kill the smallest ones. The medium or large ones have to be “finished off” by using a power move.
By the way, this clip is the entire Wario World experience in a nutshell: fighting the same couple reskinned basic enemies you met less than a minute into the first level while you “locate” a chest full of coins, a puzzle door and a treasure chest just by literally crossing paths with them along the level’s main path. Astonishing in how uninspired it is, really.
I’d say the brawling was probably the main focus, except it’s just too limited. When enemies are seeing stars, this indicates you can pick them up and do a power move. For example, you can jump in the air and do a piledriver, which not only kills the thing you’re smashing but does splash damage to everything around it. It’s the quickest and lowest effort of the power moves. Or, if you’re stupid, you can throw them, but this has to be charged up and aimed. The piledriver doesn’t require charging or aiming. Just pick-up, jump, and press a button for maximum splash damage to everything around you. You can also swing them, and I’ll get to that. But that’s the extent of the combat.
This seems to have been the sole idea the development room had and they had to base an entire game around it.
Now the game does reward you with coins for throwing enemies at other enemies or hitting piledrivers off higher and higher ledges, but coins are literally everywhere. The infinitely repawning enemies drop them, and if you leave a puzzle room and come back to it, all the coins are restored and the treasures you got out of it are replaced with chests full of coins. But unlike previous Wario games, coins don’t boost the ending you get. Neither do the statue pieces, which instead increase your health by a half heart if you get all eight out of a level. The treasures are useless on the Nintendo Switch 2 since, on the GameCube, they unlock samples of MicroGames from WarioWare Inc.: Mega MicroGame$. The only thing that affects the ending is the boxes with the elves. So combat is both the focus of the game and usually unnecessary towards progress. After a while, I found myself avoiding combat sections.
The one clever bit in the game happens twice. In one level, you have to knock out evil flying magnets and throw them at steel walls to turn them into platforms. In the final level, they do the reskinning trick and turn the evil magnets into evil flying garden shovels that you throw into dirt walls. It’s not the worst idea, but it’s wasted in this game.
Technically the game is split into four worlds that each have two levels and a big boss, but the worlds have no connecting themes at all. Like, the final world starts with a magic mirror level, and then the final level of the game is a totally uninspired Ancient Egypt theme. AND BY THE WAY, TREASURE: the desert/Egypt theme is very well established as a mid-game theme. Especially in the Mario universe, where Wario, like it or not, will forever be compared to. You can’t end a game on a desert level. It makes an already short game feel downright sawed off.
And it actually feels exactly like a mid-game level too. There’s NOTHING special or unique about it. It’s the boilerplate desert style level. Like the mirror level that starts world 4 would have made so much more sense as the climax of the game because at least it has a unique gimmick.
And what’s frustrating is none of the levels feel like they have their own personality, with two exceptions and one of those doesn’t last. The first is a creepy circus level. Oooh, that’s a titillating theme for a Wario game. Imagine what you could do with it! Except, again, almost all the enemies are just reskins of the same enemies you’ve been fighting from the start. Same attack patterns, same weaknesses, different looks, and that muffles the potential for the theme to land because if the enemies are just a facade, logically the set dressing will feel like a facade too. And that’s exactly what happens. Then, halfway through the level, it turns into a generic city theme anyway. Look! This screenshot is from the circus level!
It’s like they ran out of ideas for a circus so they just stopped. Wario World is like drinking a glass of flat soda. There is something missing with the experience. There’s no pizazz. No kick to it. All the levels feel samey because the themes are superficial and mostly feature the same kind of enemies and puzzle rooms you’ve been fighting all along. The mirror level is the most notable stage in that you’re supposed to use your reflection to navigate, and for about ten seconds, it does an interesting thing where you can only see enemies by their reflection. It sounds great, but the actual level design isn’t ambitious at all. It’s so basic that it makes you realize they never actually got far past the “use your reflection to navigate” pitch. It’s basic, because they didn’t really think it through.
That’s just so lame, you know? Not once in the entire game did I look at something and say “that was really clever” or “that was really elegantly crafted.” That last one really bugs me. You expect Nintendo publish games to be elite in terms of craftsmanship. Maybe they thought “well, it’s Wario so we don’t need elegance.” The character is inelegant. Fine. But the worlds Wario has been established to explore have always been thoughtfully designed. They didn’t bother with that here.
This might LOOK cool, but it’s just the hub world, which has no hidden stuff to find. EVEN THOUGH THE PAUSE MENU HAS THE SLOTS FOR THEM! In retrospect, that was an ominous sign of how bad the entire game would be.
For me, the swinging attack is the element that shows they just didn’t care. Knocked out enemies can be picked up and swung around, taking out other enemies or activating switches. The game leans so heavily into this that almost every level has a segment where you’re locked into fighting wave after wave of enemies for 60 seconds, usually with columns nearby in order to do the spin attack (even though some enemies block literally every shot from them). But you have to physically rotate the control stick, so it doesn’t happen instantly. And then they incorporated it into the navigation, like so:
In that clip, I didn’t slip off the platform, but you can, and it’s actually easy to do so. To do these things, I had to literally place my controller down and then spin the analog stick because anything shy of spinning perfectly will likely cause you to wobble off. At other times, there’s dials that you have to rotate, sometimes clockwise and sometimes counter clockwise. Using enemies to solve puzzles is fine, but the cartoonish violence vibe they were aiming for doesn’t land at all because the controls are so fickle and sloppy. There’s no joy in these moments.
To damage this tree, you have to knock the acorns off it, then butt stomp the ground to cause them to roll at an angle where you won’t hurt yourself picking them up, then you have to throw them back at it. But the collision is imprecise and I usually took damage anyway. It feels like a game that’s still in its beta stage. I just can’t believe the same people who turned out a masterpiece starring Ronald McDonald could make such an amateurish mascot adventure FOR NINTENDO. It’s actually weird Nintendo said “this is fine.” It’s really not. It’s a pretty bad game, folks.
So the treasure hunt is a total fail. The combat is repetitive and pointless. The levels feel hollow, with poorly executed themes. What else could they possibly f*ck up? Well, it’s Treasure and Treasure makes awesome bosses, so SURELY they didn’t screw up the bosses? Actually, Wario World’s bosses are some of the most janky and inelegant I’ve ever played against. This is where I actively question if Treasure’s heart was in this or if this whole game was a holdover from the PS1 era that they inserted Wario into years later or what (apparently this came about because Nintendo and Treasure enjoyed making Sin & Punishment together). Each level has a boss at the end, and then every world has an additional boss, then there’s a final boss. So how many bosses are good? One, and it ain’t the first big boss, which is this thing:
The scale is awesome, but the the battle isn’t exactly the art of video games at its peak.
I was totally pumped when I saw the huge scale of it, but then the actual battle feels like an enemy that’s much smaller. The only addition to the normal combat is having to grab its tail and do a butt stomp to it. You don’t really do anything all that clever to fight it. Most bosses you still cause damage by picking up and doing the throw or piledriver to them. You might have to wait for an opening, but the combat feels, more or less, identical to the exhausting and repetitive combat that wore out its welcome during the levels.
And this somewhat hurts when the game does do clever bits. That mirror level I talked about? That stage’s boss is a play on the “follow the cup” thing that’s usually a bonus game in these types of releases. I’ve never seen it turned into a boss battle. Cool. After you do the normal punches to the boss and avoid his attack, he’ll retreat to one of three cups. Then the cups mix up and you have to follow it and select the right cup. Oh, and he’ll hide inside the correct cup so after selecting it, you then have to punch the cup in the air to knock him out of it. They should have made THIS the damaging move, but they’re really committed to the “mad moves” bit so you have to pick him up and piledrive him here (or do a charged-up throw).
A for effort, at least this one time.
But the bosses don’t scale right either, and sometimes the big bosses don’t feel any more or less special than the stage bosses. Like the second big boss is a two headed dragon that you punch like a basic enemy, then get out of the way and let the other head fry it. I didn’t even realize I was doing damage to this because it’s one of the few enemies you don’t execute the power moves to.
This was ALMOST clever, as the boss can attack by spitting out dozens of platforming sticky balls that, if you cling onto them, will pull you out of the battlefield and cost you health. But I beat this thing in about a minute on my first attempt. OKAY, so it took me down to my final hit. (shrug) I won, didn’t I?
The actual battle features sloppy attack patterns and strange timing between the two heads. And besides that, the scope of the battle doesn’t feel bigger than the two stage bosses you need to beat to unlock it. While I don’t think either fight is particularly good, they were a lot more memorable in their character models and just plain better as boss fights because they felt a little less sloppy. Look at the screenshot above and then look at the two below. Would you be able to guess which is the world boss if I hadn’t already told you?
Level 3 Boss
Level 4 Boss
So Wario World was a total letdown for me. I actually had this when I was a kid and I remembered basically nothing about it outside the piledriver. I don’t think I ever played past the second level, but I didn’t remember it being bad, exactly. I think it’s in the same boat as Luigi’s Mansion: one of those games I put off playing because nothing about the first couple stages held my attention. But, unlike Luigi’s Mansion, I think I always assumed it would get better and I just wasn’t far enough along. Boy, was I wrong. I was SO bored playing this in 2026. I was hoping it was a slow riser that would eventually make me nod and say “okay, they had SOME inspiration.”
One of the best examples of lacking polish is the Medusa fight. It drops these rocks that you have to throw into volcanoes that cause them to erupt which causes it to crash so you can punch it, pick it up, and piledrive it. Except, there’s a pronounced delay in when the eruption happens. Like they thought it was too easy so they programmed in wonky timing with the movement of the boss flying overhead and the thing you activate to knock it out of the sky. But it doesn’t come across as challenging. It comes across as f*cking amateur hour programming.
Instead, Wario World comes across as one of the most cynical Nintendo releases, and probably Treasure’s worst game (though I’m going to need to review a lot more to certify that). At best, Wario World feels unfinished and uninspired. At worst? Hell, the worst thing I can say about it is the worst thing I can say about any game: it has no heart at all. It clearly doesn’t come from a place of inspiration. It exists to fill out a release schedule. You can tell from the puzzle rooms alone, because they’re so interchangeable and lack any imagination or stakes.
It’s like they didn’t have enough ideas to fill eight per level. Then don’t make it a hard rule that each level must have eight. You know, in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Virtual Boy Mario Land, there was no guarantee a level had one of the game’s treasures, and that made locating a piece of treasure a little more special. They didn’t shoehorn one into every level for the sake of a checklist. Incredibly, the relatively primitive Game Boy or Virtual Boy adventures with the same character have way more personality in their settings than a less technically limited game made by two of the most revered companies in gaming. Wario World has no charm, no personality, and given the circumstances, I’d be hard pressed to name a more disappointing video game. Verdict: NO!
Let’s face it: the only thing anyone remembers about this game is the pause music.
Super Mario Sunshine Platform: Nintendo GameCube Released on July 19, 2002 (JPN) August 26, 2002 (US) Directed by Yoshiaki Koizumi & Kenta Usui Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2
This type of thing is the good stuff, in a game that’s overstuffed with plenty of bad stuff.
Believe it or not, Super Mario Sunshine was my first day one console Mario game. Well, my first mainline Mario game that wasn’t part of the Mario Advance series. That means, even though I became a full-time gamer at the age of 9, I didn’t get my first day one Mario game until right after I turned 13, and it’s the Mario game that most people would probably call “the weird one.” Despite being promised for Switch Online around the Switch 2 launch, it took a while for Mario Sunshine to arrive, but I finally replayed for the first time in nearly a quarter-century (well, I did start a game in Mario 3-D Collection but didn’t keep playing long), and had a lot of fun. And also nearly threw my controller about two dozen times, give or take.
You certainly fight too many of these sludge plants early on, and it gets old fast.
The funny part is, even I remembered Sunshine as the Mario game where you had to spray gunk off various playfields and walls, but the reality of the game doesn’t quite match that. The overwhelming majority of Mario Sunshine isn’t about cleaning up levels. Oh, those are there, and there’s a learning curve to using the sprayer, but most of the game is an exploration-focused platformer. There’s seven primary levels, each of which has eight chapters that end with you nabbing a star or “Shine.”
“Shine, come back!”
Despite being only the second 3D Mario game and the direct sequel to Mario 64, Sunshine is a massive improvement over that game, at least mechanically. The camera is a LOT better, among other things. In fact, the camera works so well 95% of the time that the 5% of the time it completely sh*ts the bed and simply does not work, it’ll have you inventing brand new swears.
“YA GROGFROCK’N WHORE!”
Thankfully the controls were adjusted to make the game work on the Switch. On the original GameCube, you had to lightly press one of the shoulder buttons to move and squirt. BUT, on Switch, they mapped “run and squirt” to its own button. So if you were worried about winning the battles against Shadow Mario, hey, all you have to worry about is how tedious, repetitive, and boring those segments are.
Every 7th chapter (out of eight) in each of the seven levels is entirely based around chasing and squirting Shadow Mario, along with another pair of “chase and squirt” missions in the game’s hub world, and they ALL suck. Just the most samey, dull mission. Sunshine feels like the Mario game where the people in charge were told “no” the least because when it’s bad, it’s really bad.
For the most part, the water pack named FLUDD is a platforming tool that allows you to hover and, eventually, blast high into the air. The “rocket nozzle” feels like a big deal when you locate it in most levels, as it opens up (and often quickens) exploration.There’s also a “turbo nozzle” that I used less than a handful of times and honestly they could have removed it from the game and lost nothing. Meanwhile, the primary starting nozzle, the hover nozzle, is just about the most genius and intuitive platforming enhancement in 3D gaming. It was fun and intuitive to use in 2002, and it holds up in 2026.
For all the crap the water pack gets, I had basically no adjustment period for using it to hop around. It was like the last twenty-four years never happened. I wish that was the case since I enjoyed being 13 a lot more than I enjoyed being 37.
Unlike my experience replaying Zelda: Wind Waker, where my brain deleted the majority of things I disliked about the game in the decades since I first played it, I remembered everything that I hated about Mario Sunshine, specifically the maddening challenge of some of the missions. Each level has eight primary chapters, though you only need to beat the first seven on each to face off with Bowser. Even with modern emulation tomfoolery that Switch 2 includes, IE save states, the challenge was still insane. So insane that I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to go for a 100%. I finished the game with 89 Shines 90 shines and that’s fine by me.
I remember HATING the red coin challenges as a child, but this go around, they were almost certainly a highlight every time they showed up. Well, except when they’re bonus missions, where I found the time limits too strict. Attempting the first one was such a miserable experience that I immediately decided to skip all of them.
I think it’s safe to say they went a little overboard with some aspects of Sunshine. There’s far too many timing based challenges where I wonder who exactly play tested the thing. The worst chapter was one where you have to ride a Yoshi and squirt Cheep-Cheeps with fruit juice because it turns them into platforms. I assure you that I didn’t have a stroke and just type out gibberish there. That’s literally what you do, but the platforms you create aren’t on set paths. They are, however, moving platforms. EVEN USING SAVE STATES, I think it took me an hour to finish the chapter, and the entire time I was thinking “they intended people to start this mission over from the beginning if they screwed up even one jump?! Are they sadists?” The answer is, yes, they might actually be sadists.
I breathed out a sigh of relief when it was over, though I just barely made it before the Yoshi vanished.
That’s the thing that bothered me about Sunshine: the game’s hub world and the seven primary levels are all well constructed and lend themselves well to exploration, but there’s so many BORING chapters where the boredom is based almost entirely on bloated difficulty. Back in 2002, a single mistimed jump in the Yoshi sequence would have you starting over, which means climbing out of the water, returning to the dock, retrieving the fruit to wake the Yoshi from its egg and beginning the massive journey to the star all over. It’s a long way to the goal and the timing gets more and more fickle as you go along. F*ck that. Seriously, WHAT THE F*CK?! WHO TESTED THIS?!
And on top of all that, Yoshi has a time limit, limited ammo, and the platforms you make move, so it’s not like you can pace yourself.
When time limits are involved, Mario Sunshine tends to suck. It’s not universal, but it’s close enough. Personally, I think Mario Sunshine is at its best when it’s you, the water pack, a whole lot of climbing and looking for things. Chapters based around making you explore high into the sky are exhilarating. The game sets off an even more satisfying sense of vertigo than something like Shadow of the Colossus. It’s an incredible experience when it’s based around the sky.
Yes, more of this. (taps wrists) Put it in my veins.
These segments work out so well that I’m left completely astonished that the people who created them didn’t recognize when something was f*cking boring, like chasing Shadow Mario down for the eighth time or having to roll a watermelon without touching a single tree or one of the two billion enemies between the start and the goal. I’m always kind of baffled when good games become boring, but it’s especially jarring in Sunshine because they seem to have grasped that the vertigo was the game’s bread and butter. MOST of the game builds around this idea.
Sometimes the blue coins are fun to nab, especially when, again, they’re built around vertical exploration. Blue coins like this one are a hoot. Blue coins where you have ten seconds to cross a continent and the camera f*cks up so badly that you’re not even sure where it’s at? Not so much.
And those segments work so well that, when you move away from them, the game immediately suffers. It’s not just the primary levels, either. Of course, there’s the segments where you lose the water pack. Every chapter has one or two such segments, which play a remix of the original NES Super Mario theme to let you know these are the “pure” platforming parts of the game. Sometimes they involve spinning platforms. Sometimes they involve a lot of wall jumping. Hell, one is shaped like a giant Pachinko machine.
Usually the “pure platforming” stuff still has some kind of gimmick. Like this entire segment is fashioned like a slide and is probably one of the easier ones.
Personally, I thought these got really old, really fast. I didn’t care so much about losing the FLUDD. It was the fact that the sense of exploration was off the table, as these are (mostly) straight forward “go from point A to point B” moments. Mario Sunshine is so much better than Mario 64 when it focuses on looking around. I sincerely enjoyed looking for the blue coins (you can cash in ten of them for a Shine), and hell, I even enjoyed gathering 100 normal coins for a bonus star. Okay, sussing out which chapter is the one to go for 100 is annoying (some have more coins than others), so I didn’t do it for every level. But it’s not a deal breaker. What is nearly a deal breaker is the fact that grabbing the 100 coin star ends the level and sends you back to the hub world, so you can’t really do anything else. Why’d they design it like that? It makes no sense.
Usually the 100 coin Shine is then placed on the other side of the globe from you. You know, it wouldn’t have killed them to just hand you it.
I don’t think it’s just the FLUDD and the toxic waste that makes Mario Sunshine the weird one. Sunshine is haphazardly paced and lacks memorable bosses. My brain had completely deleted memories of the giant Wiggler, the manta-ray that divides into smaller ones, or the King Boo that you defeat by feeding it peppers. Actually, the only boss that I did remember from 2002, the giant Blooper, is repeated two more times when the original fight would have been enough. So really, even the good bosses are run into the ground. And hell, even the final encounter with Bowser (set in a giant hot tub) feels like it happens out of nowhere and is completely forgettable.
And I beat it on my first attempt too, so all the save states I laid down with the intent to cheat were a waste of time.
Actually, the whole ending sequence made me wonder if they had no clue how to end it in a satisfying way, so they just didn’t bother and phoned it in. After you defeat the final Shadow Mario chapter, the hub world floods and you follow Shadow Mario into a volcano that’s a relatively short final level. Some of the chapters where FLUDD is taken from you are longer than Sunshine’s entire ending sequence. When I say I was startled that the game was wrapping up, I mean it. The entire finale takes place in a long corridor with a few instakill spikes and fire traps and then an extended boat sequence where colliding with any rock is an instakill. And after that, you get the rocket nozzle and launch yourself up a handful of cloud platforms that have no enemies or other obstacles, and then you reach the final boss. Talk about going out on a whimper.
The kicker? It’s a BORING final level, especially compared to the excellent Bowser stages in Mario 64.
Having just spent a few days with Mario Sunshine, I get why it’s not among the most popular Mario games. Even though it was the #3 best-selling GameCube release (behind only Smash Bros. Melee and Mario Kart: Double Dash), a lot of people didn’t like the FLUDD, and I’m not really going to argue passionately that they’re wrong. I liked the hover aspect and the rocket, but the sludge cleaning and the combat? Well, I could do without, because it’s completely lacking in elegance. Sometimes, the combat with the FLUDD feels like it barely works at all.
Even the first big boss (and its rematch, seen here), there’s an inelegance to the combat. It doesn’t really feel like I’m drowning it with water. It feels like I’m hitting a solid target and the boss is growing fatter, but the two things feel disconnected. I just didn’t “buy it.”
I’ll also credit much of the dislike to the settings. Even though levels have gimmicks (IE one has a theme park, another a hotel), every level is still in a tropical, seaside setting with the same generic villagers. Compare this to the massive variety of themes that Mario 64 had and it feels like a major step backward. You would think a theme park setting is a great idea for a Mario game, but half the level is a completely separate tropical beach, IE that thing half the levels and the hub world itself have.
This screenshot was actually taken in the theme park level. What, can’t you tell?
Once you enter the theme park section of this stage, regardless of which chapter you’re in, I’m pretty sure you can’t return to the beach. As for the rides themselves, they’re not really all that interactive. The highlight isn’t the roller coaster, which sucks, or the Ferris Wheel, which you can’t even get in the carriages. No, in an entire theme park setting, only the two swinging ships feel truly “interactive” in the way you’d expect a Mario theme park level to be. What a letdown.
The best idea they could come up with for a roller coaster was not one but two target shooting segments, and neither of them is particularly fun.
So Mario Sunshine is plagued with samey levels, a lack of a balanced challenge, and an ending that’s given the bum’s rush more than the final couple seasons of Game of Thrones. But, I still had more fun than not, and really, it’s not even close. Oh, I’m not going to argue it’s an unsung masterpiece. I’d even say that the lack of variety (real or imagined) paired with the inelegant combat makes Mario Sunshine feel like it’s a third party game that somehow scored the Mario license. “Well, we were HOPING for the SpongeBob license but hey, we’ll settle for making a Mario game. I guess.” Like, the required-by-law level themed around the Boos is a hotel that’s not even outright themed like a haunted hotel.
“What if there was a hotel with a casino that was haunted by boos?” “As long as there’s a beach in front of the hotel and sludge to clean up.” “We’ve got, like, a dozen other beaches in the game. There’s other places people go on vacation besides beaches, you know?” (shakes fist) “I SAID PUT A BEACH IN FRONT OF IT!” “Fine, then I’ll, like, add a ghost manta ray on the beach that poops electric slime and splits into smaller manta ray ghosts when you squirt it or something.” “As long as it happens on a beach.” “Sigh.”
And I had an incredible time exploring the hotel. It really feels like they squeezed it for everything they could. There’s all kinds of hidden rooms, secret pathways, trapdoors, etc. But then there’s a casino section inside the hotel where just some guy blocks your entrance to it because it’s not supposed to be part of the chapter you’re playing right now. Then the actual casino is very limited and not really anywhere near as fun as exploring the hotel had been. There’s nothing clever about it at all, really. You just spray the reels on not one but two oversized slot machines with the FLUDD, then spray panels of a not-puzzle puzzle until they’re flipped the right way. Yawn.
Part of the unlock method is just spraying the reels until they match up. Nothing clever about it at all.
Then the King Boo fight is a slog as well. Even though it takes place on a giant roulette table and he has a slot machine that decides his attack pattern, none of it feels like it meshes well. Again, I just get this weird vibe that no idea was ever said “no, let’s try something else” to. So one of the best levels in the game has an entire section that sucks and a boss fight that didn’t really work for me at all. That’s the Mario Sunshine experience in a nutshell. Two-thirds of it is really fun, sloppiness and all, and one third of it ranges from boring to misery.
In theory you can just grind on this boss, deliberately avoid attacking him and score 100 coins via his slot machine. Again, haphazard.
Oh, there’s more than enough good game here for me to give it a YES! I think I fell just short of outright loving Mario Sunshine. Of the GameCube’s “big three” it was the weakest of the three for me and I’m guessing most GameCube owners. As a child, I loved Metroid Prime and Zelda: Wind Waker, but I’m fairly sure that I never even finished Mario Sunshine and walked away from it without regrets. Had I not been able to cheat, I would have likely done the same thing in 2026. I fully admit I used save states during this play session, mostly to eliminate the agony of falling and having to re-climb large sections of the game. I turned what could have been a months-long play experience into one that lasted just a few days.
Hell, I probably saved several hours on just the “you died. Return to the hub world, re-enter the level entrance, re-select the chapter, re-watch the opening spiel, and then start playing again” downtime. Like this, the only main course chapter where you lose the FLUDD, saw me die plenty during my childhood. That’s a LOT of resetting and restarting that you no longer have to deal with.
Sunshine is one of those games that’s actually better with emulation cheating because it can be used to eliminate so many tedious restarts and downtime. I used it to create my own checkpoints, not eliminating the difficulty entirely (I still had to, you know, make my jumps) but taking the edge off. That Yoshi segment I whined about? Setting my own checkpoints sure as hell didn’t make it any less challenging. What it did do was eliminate the time climbing out of the ocean and starting over from the beginning. You know, the part that would have been so boring that I never would have finished it at all, otherwise. Save states assured that most of my playtime with Mario Sunshine was fun and not frustration. So like when I died dragging this f*cking thing around:
How I hated this level as a child.
I didn’t need several minutes of downtime to start over and try again. I laid down the save state as I approached it, so that I could make a good faith effort at actually completing the full challenge. If I felt they went overboard, I would heel-toe it through a chapter. So what? I still had fun! Now that Sunshine is a game that can be played on your own terms, I can finally appreciate it on gameplay merits besides how damn weird it is for a Mario game.
Another example of “eliminating downtime.” This chapter took me days as a child. Through the magic of save states, I beat it in maybe an hour or so. The challenge was still there. I had to navigate it correctly and, thanks to a problematic camera, it’s still a pain in the ass. But if I fell, the misery of starting over from the beginning was gone. I wish I could play every game this way, even new games. I’m in favor of fun by any means a game can be fun.
I can’t stress enough that there were many, many chapters I loathed as a 13 year old that I enjoyed the hell out of as a 37 year old playing this with save states. For that reason, this might actually be the true killer app for the GameCube lineup on Switch Online. So, if you weren’t excited to play Super Mario Sunshine, my pitch is that, with save states, it feels different now in the best way possible. A game where the good parts are still good, but you might discover the bad parts are now, in fact, also good as well. Of course, it also makes the bad parts feel worse than ever when you realize not even save states can make the act of playing them fun. Ahem.
By the way, literally as I was finishing writing this review, I was going to be fine with that mission being the one and only main chapter I didn’t finish. But then I realized I had no screenshots of it, so I went to get them and about three minutes later I had the Shine. I’m not entirely sure what I did differently. The things that had been aggressively swarming me suddenly felt like they couldn’t care less that I was rolling the watermelon right past them.
Thus I finished with 90 Shines and, hey, I’m totally satisfied with that experience. So if Mario Sunshine left a bad taste in your mouth back in the 2000s, or you felt it was too challenging, give it a second chance on Switch 2. It’s not necessarily a whole new experience, but an optimized version of a flawed game. Imagine if you could remove just the frustration out of the most frustrating game experiences. That’s sort of what Sunshine is like now, and I’m all for it. Verdict: YES!
Okay, so I missed two 100 coin challenges. (shrug)
New Pokémon Snap Platform: Nintendo Switch Released April 30, 2021 Directed by Haruki Suzaki Developed by Bandai Namco Studios Published by Nintendo $59.99 was mistaken for a Crystal Bloom in the making of this review.
Needless to say, you ain’t playing the N64 game anymore.
I almost never get excited for the announcement of new Nintendo games because, well, I grew up. You can take it for granted Nintendo is going to keep releasing their cash cows and it’s embarrassing that adults act surprised when they’re announced. “Wait, they’re making a new Mario game, you say? Gosh, I thought the last one was certain to be the last one. Do you think it’ll have Bowser in it? OMG, it DOES have Bowser?! Are you kidding me?! Mario is back, baby! This is the greatest moment of my life! HYPED!” Yeah, I was like that once. You know, when I was 10 years old. But when New Pokémon Snap was announced in 2021, I reverted back to being a squealing 10 year old. I didn’t see it coming. I don’t think anyone did, as it’d been over twenty years since the original game. Easily the most hyped I’ve been for any video game in this decade. Then, when New Pokémon Snap was released, it not only lived up to my expectations, but left the original game in a smoking crater. New Snap is the rare sequel that improved upon the formula to such a degree that it rendered the original game practically unplayable.
And apparently despite selling two-and-a-half million copies, almost nobody actually put that much time into it. It probably killed the franchise off for good, and I even have proof of that, but I’ll get to that.
For all the bitching that I’m about to do, make no mistake that New Snap’s scoring system is so much better than the original. There’s no ridiculous “doubling the points for centering the photo” crapola. No, there’s all kinds of other crapola. I think I’m about to set the world record for complaining about a game in a positive review of the game.
The core gameplay from the first game returns. Don’t think of Pokémon Snap as a photography game but rather as a video game version of an old school arcade shooting gallery where the bullets cause the robotic contraptions to react. While traveling along an on-the-rails path of each level, you can interact with a series of mostly preset encounters with Pokémon. You can feed them or bash them over their witless heads with apples, or use the apples to lure them towards other Pokémon or points of interest, and while they do this, you’re trying to center them in the frame and snap photos of them. The challenge comes from the fact that you can only submit a single photo of each species of Pokémon to be scored each run through a level.
Since the franchise is basically fantasy cockfighting for children, of course there’s multiple instances where they fight, but it usually involves multiple steps. As an added bonus, in many fights, you can actually choose who you want to win by throwing an illumina orb at either one. This isn’t one of those cases, as this fight can be interrupted with a call for peace. It’s adorable.
It might sound exactly the same as the original, but New Snap is a much, much meatier game. The original Snap only saved one photo for each of the game’s 63 total Pokémon. Once you found the highest-scoring pose for each Pokémon and got a quality photo of it, the game was basically over. The scoring system was pretty simple and kind of primitive, doubling the score of a photo just for centering it, among other balance issues. So while it might take a while to get that one coveted photo centered or angled just right, it wasn’t exactly the deepest game.
You also needed to be zoomed in for the original game in order to take a picture. That’s no longer the case. Plus, I mean….. Christ, look at that. Nintendo 64 should be renamed the Dairy 64 because it aged like milk and now all that’s left is cheese.
New Pokémon Snap not only has nearly four times as many Pokémon at 234 total, but it’s seeking four different (wink wink) photos of each of them. Original Pokémon Snap challenged players to find the 63 highest scoring poses of each Pokémon. New Pokemon Snap? It wants you to find an eye-popping 936 photos for the Photodex, aka the thing that tells you what your ultimate score is.
Sometimes crappy pictures score fairly decently and sometimes good pictures don’t score what they ought to. And sometimes you wonder how you found an extra two points between one crappy picture and another. Welcome to New Pokémon Snap.
The scoring system is more elaborate too, measuring things like pose, size, direction, and placement within the photo to the single digit. The poses are placed into different “star rating” categories, with the more basic poses being one star and the more complicated ones being four star. In theory, at least. Whether or not it makes sense is another matter that I’ll get into, but it certainly adds to the excitement. I’ve literally had dozens of instances of beating previous photos by a single point, and hundreds of new photos won by single digits. Anything that scores 4,000 or more points earns diamond status, IE the maximum rating.
Outside of the photodex itself, you can save any photo you want. I’ve never really played all that much with the editing tools but they’re pretty extensive. The re-snap button shown here allows you to change the angle of the picture like you’re back in the level, zooming in and out. It doesn’t count for your score, obviously, but it’s a nice addition. You can also earn, through the special requests, things to present them like frames or stickers. It’s really elaborate, so if you’re a creative type, this will have even more meat on its bones than I’m going to talk about.
And that’s not all the content, either. There’s also 234 special requests that don’t necessarily have to count towards your Photodex. For the requests, your score doesn’t matter at all, and the first time you submit a request photo, the request is fulfilled forever and that photo is permanently saved as a memento (and can’t be replaced, even if it really, really sucks and/or likely shouldn’t have even counted).
When a photo fulfills a request, it’ll have this little “talk” bubble on it, so at least it’s not a random guess whether or not you’re submitting a correct photo. BUT, you do have to actually submit the photo for evaluation to clear the request, so if it’s hard to get, you might not want to take other photos of that species and have the temptation of finishing a request versus scoring on a photo. I kicked myself many times for passing on a special requests to roll the dice on a high score opportunity.
Throwing apples at the Pocket Monsters and the flute returns from the first game, as does turbo boosting, but in the new game, you can now also do “scans” that not only locate Pokémon, objects, and alternate routes, but the scan causes various effects to the Pokémon. The majority of the time, it gets their attention and makes them perk up at you, and usually interrupts whatever they’re doing. The scan might also trigger an event or scare off the Pokémon. The pester balls from the original game are gone, replaced with “illumina orbs” that light up the Pokémon, sometimes activating effects (such as picking the winner of a fight) or just making them stand out more in pictures (it matters too).
One time I got these two Pikachus running through the beach. They’re not supposed to be reachable like this, but I was both smashing them with apples and getting other Pokémon to stop the vehicle.
Another new idea that’s barely covered (if it is at all) in the game’s instructions is the fact that you can subtly manipulate the approximate physical location of the vehicle on the track, along with delaying various timing-based Pokémon actions. Okay, so this is kind of hard to explain. While you’re on a preset path, the direction you point and zoom the camera DOES actually make teeny tiny adjustments to the physical location of the vehicle. Let’s say you’re approaching a Pokémon on your left and you want to get closer to it than the “natural” path does. If you turn your camera left, zoom in (zooming slows the vehicle down) and stay that way, even if you’re not focused on anything, you will actually be a hair closer to Pokémon when the vehicle arrives at its location. It’s called drifting and it’s the key to a lot of photos.
This was done using the drifting technique to get a fraction closer. If you zoom in directly on a Pokémon, you ALMOST approach it. Think of it as the Autopia at Disneyland where you’re not really driving a car but kind of wiggling it just a little bit back and forth.
And this zooming in on nothing can also prevent certain actions from beginning, allowing you to be closer when specific animations happen OR when Pokémon spawn into the course. This is absolutely essentially for some time-sensitive photos such as in the forest when Pancham and Bulbasaur are riding a Drampa and you have to get a photo of Pancham smiling at the camera, UP CLOSE, in the split second before they round a corner and the shot is no longer possible. If you look down at the ground or to the side or anywhere but the location the Drampa flies into the playfield, it will delay when it makes its entrance. There is no other way to get the 4K in points needed for the diamond status. So even the movement of the on-the-rails vehicle itself offers a LOT of user-controlled flexibility.
And that’s what I have to show for it. It scores 4,284 and took me roughly a million attempts, give or take.
Finally, if needing over fourteen times as many photos as the original game to complete your album isn’t “big enough,” there’s the actual levels themselves. The original game had six levels and a “boss fight” for lack of a better term where you try to get a photo of Mew. What levels it had were fairly straight forward and offered little in the way of alternative ways to play. New Snap has fifteen locations and six boss fights. I called them locations and not levels because every single location offers multiple variations, or “levels” of content that are further split into day and night, which usually involves roster changes in the level and has a different variety of pose opportunities.
Sadly, only The Reef has “evening” as opposed to “night” and a truly awe-inspiring sunset. This is seriously a beautiful game when it wants to be. God, I would love for this to get the full Switch 2 upgrade treatment.
While you can look at the “levels” of each course as a difficulty setting, really it’s best to think of them as a complexity setting. The higher the level, the more variables there are. BUT, that doesn’t mean high score chasers will want to only play on the highest level. Sometimes specific events only happen on lower levels. One of the best examples is a pose that happens between the Carbink and Sableye. Both are found in the Cave courses and, exclusively on Level 2, there’s a scene where three Sableyes are chasing a Carbink. Giving the Carbink two illumina orbs causes it to attack the Sableyes.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, this is the only spot in the entire game where you can get a 4,000 point or “diamond status” three star photo of Sableye and THE ONLY three star pose Carbink does in the game, and it happens outside of the highest level of complexity the Cave has to offer. You don’t even go that direction in the Cave on level one and the scene doesn’t happen at all on level three if you take that branching path. By the way, in creating that clip, since I didn’t know if I should focus on the Sableyes reaction or the Carbink’s attack, I did both and ended up nabbing two new high scores.
Even after you reach the maximum levels, the game gives you plenty of reasons to adjust to lower ones because there’s dozens upon dozens of other poses that only happen on those levels. So, how many total levels are there in the game? Well, following the free-to-download DLC update, the map has fifteen selectable locations, like so:
Still plenty of blank spots, Nintendo. Just sayin’.
But, keep in mind that “Illumina Spots” are boss levels and are NOT the same courses as those they’re paired with. So when you click the dot for Florio Park and you see that you can play day, night, or illumina spot, it’s one course remixed five ways (3 Day, 2 Night) and a separate boss course remixed twice. There’s six bosses, so just this map alone has twenty-one different courses. Occasionally, an alternate route in a course is so dramatic it might as well be two different courses in one, as is the case with the Undersea course, but I’ll just count it as one. “There’s only fourteen dots on that map.” Right, but the game’s main menu is also itself a course, the Research Camp (you click the upper left hand corner), which also has two variations. If the menu screen looks like this:
You’ll start the course near that campfire. However, if the main menu looks like this:
If you want to change which of the two starting locations you’ll enter, it’s a cinch. Just click research, then exit back to the main menu and it’ll be the other one. The Research Center is by far the shortest level in the game, but even it’s packed with stuff.
You’ll start in front of the lab and have completely different poses and photo opportunities. Even the alternate path that takes you briefly inside the lab has changes based on which of the two starting locations you pick. So with that said, how many total levels, alternate paths, and hidden paths (IE the game doesn’t prompt you and it requires a special activation) are there in the game? Hell, I don’t know, so I’ll list them, or at least the ones I know about.
Research Camp (Camp): 2 Different Starting Locations or “Levels” One major alternate path in each that takes you into the lab
Florio Nature Park (Park): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels, and 2 Illumina Spot Levels Day level 3 and Night levels 1 & 2 has a minor alternate path that takes you across the Bidoof dam.
Both Day & Night can transfer to Secret Side Path, although any pictures taken there are scored separately.
Level 2 in the Illumina Spot has four different randomly decided starting positions for Meganium.
Secret Side Path (Side Path): 1 Day Level, 1 Night Level
Both Day & Night have a major alternate path that takes you off the main path and into Snolax’s den.
Day has a minor hidden path. Playing the flute in the first hollow log will take you above Torterra instead of underneath it.
Both Day & Night end on a remixed version of Florio Nature Park’s final scene, though any pictures taken there are scored separately.
Founja Jungle (Jungle): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
Every level Day & Night has a major (but short) alternate path that takes you off the main path and through a swamp.
Day level 3 & Night level 2 has an additional (but short) major alternate path that takes you off the main path and behind the waterfall.
Night level 2 has an additional (but short) hidden path where a Liepard knocks you off the tree in the main path.
Mightywide River (River): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
All levels have a major alternate path that takes you off the main path through a cave.
Day level 3 has a minor hidden path where a Quagsire knocks you off the main path (can’t go into the alternate route if you activate this).
Night level 3 has a minor hidden path where a Feraligatr (briefly) knocks you off the main path.
Elsewhere Forest (Forest): 3 Levels and 2 Illumina Spot Levels The level is like a maze structured as a main chamber, a scene based on a season, a main chamber, and an ending scene Level 1 will take you randomly to Spring or Summer for the second scene.
Level 2 will randomly take you to Fall or Winter for the second scene.
Level 3 allows players to control which of the four seasons they go to based on how they interact with the Espeon, so four major alternate paths.
Level 3 has a hidden path that’s permanently unlocked as an alternate path to a different finale if you lead the Deerling through the second main chamber.
Blushing Beach (Beach): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
Every level Day & Night has a major alternate path that takes you out into the water.
Maricopia Reef (Reef): 3 Day Levels, 2 Evening Levels
Every level Day & Evening has a major alternate path at the end.
Day levels 2 & 3 and Evening levels 1 & 2 have minor hidden paths based facing left or right when you approach Wailord.
Lental Seafloor (Undersea): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
Levels 2 & 3 have a major alternate path near the start that takes you through, for all intent and purposes, an entirely different course.
Level 3’s alternate path has an additional major hidden path if you rescue a Lanturn from a pair of Frillish that takes you into Lugia’s lair.
Sweltering Sands (Sands): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels Day levels 2 & 3 and Night level 2 have a major alternate path leading to a different final scene.
Barren Badlands (Badlands): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
Day levels 2 & 3 have a major alternate path that changes the entire middle of the level.
Night level 2 has the same major alternate path as Day, but it requires you to photograph at least three Digletts at the start of the stage to activate.
Fireflow Volcano (Volcano): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
Level 3 has a major alternate path that takes you to a different final room.
Level 2 in the Illumina Spot has a hidden path based on how soon you put out the fires in at least one Volcarona.
Shivering Snowfields (Snowfields): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
Day Levels 2 & 3 and Night Level 2 have a major alternate path.
The alternate path either rejoins the main path or you can take a second major alternate path that takes you to a different ending.
Outaway Cave (Cave): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
Level 3 has an alternate path in the middle of the level.
THAT alternate path has a hidden path that takes you to a different ending.
If you stay on the main path, there’s another hidden path near the end of the level that takes you to a different main path ending.
Level 2 in the Illumina Spot has a major alternate route with a different ending.
Ruins of Remembrance (Ruins): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
There’s a minor alternate ending to all three Ruins levels.
That’s a sh*t ton of game for $59.99. With all the character variables factored in, we’re talking millions, if not billions of variables at your disposal. In a game based around finding the highest possible scores in four different tiers for each Pokémon, that’s a lot of flexibility a player is given. After over 800 hours of gameplay (UPDATE: despite it saying that in my profile, I did the math and it’s physically impossible I played the game so much from where I started this review, so I think the game is counting hours even when the Switch is on sleep as long as the game is on, so it’s probably closer to 200 hours) and at least four multi-week binges since 2021, I’m still finding new high score poses. I just found this one a couple days ago literally in the first course of the game. It had been staring me in the face the entire time.
After over five years of playing this, including six weeks straight of addiction to this, I’m still finding higher scoring pictures off total flukes. Like I would never have found this photo if I hadn’t zoomed through the park before the Dodiro runs away AND taken this one single picture of it, thus forcing my hand to choose this photo for evaluation.
And of course, a new discovery doesn’t end with the discovery. Like in the above example, once I realized the scoring opportunity that happened there and the angle that the game desired, I replayed it and ended up increasing the score from the 4,796 it started the day at to 4,942, and loving every moment of it. Multiply that experience by 936. THAT is what New Pokémon Snap is offering players. That’s a LOT of gameplay for one game.
Most importantly, I never got bored with New Pokémon Snap. Every single main course is a banger and there’s just so much stuff inside each of them and so many different ways to approach each run you make. I’ve been playing this since the week it came out in 2021, and for this review, I’ve been playing New Pokémon Snap for SIX WEEKS STRAIGHT, and I really don’t even want to stop. If you wonder where I’ve been for the last six weeks, this really is it. It worked out for me too, except the way it worked out for me also made me realize we’re unlikely to ever get a Pokémon Snap 3, even though this sold around two-and-a-half million copies.
Mew was the last boss in the first game. Now it just shows up as post game content in the Jungle course, both day and night. “Is that 5,923 points for a photo not even centered in the frame?” Yep.
As a scoring-based game, New Pokémon Snap has global leaderboards, the main one of which measures what your Photodex’s score is, IE the combined score of the highest scoring version of each photo. You wouldn’t expect me, someone with shaky hands and not exactly a professional-quality gamer, to be ranked high on New Pokémon Snap’s leaderboard. The game is five years old so people have had plenty of time to get their scores up. And, well, it’s Pokémon. One of the biggest franchises in the world. But, as of this writing, in a game with 2.5 million copies sold and even more players, I’m ranked #212 in the world for Photodex and (with the help of my family, since not all course records are mine) #403 for total course score.
Individual photos don’t have leaderboards. Only the Photodex, the total course scores, and the individual courses. At one point, I couldn’t claim my Photodex score was entirely mine, as I play this game a lot with my family and they had some high score photos. But I’ve since replaced every photo not taken by me (I think there might be one or two exceptions but come on) with higher scoring photos, and any family sessions take place on a separate account, though it’s not high scoring because I ain’t allowed to play. I can watch, but I’m banned from playing because I “know where everything is.” You know, fam, I really don’t. Total bullsh*t, I tell you.
UPDATE: The day after this was published I climbed to #208 in the world. I’ll quit at 200. Cross my heart.
This should be a huge deal for me. I mean, I’ve set literally dozens of digital pinball world record scores, a few of which still stand, BUT, digital pinball isn’t exactly on the level of popularity as Pokémon. Plus, it’s not like I found myself this high on the leaderboard because the game just came out. I started this review six weeks ago ranked around 90,000th, give or take, and now, I’m 212th. I’m not THAT good. Something about that sounds fishy, right? Well, the score is legitimate and I didn’t use any cheating tactics or glitch the game. Well, except maybe this photo, which my family and I have dubbed the “Mystery Bidoof” photo.
Absolutely no clue why that scored so high, as it normally doesn’t get 945 pose points. Something happened. It’s not facing the camera. It’s not even lit-up. We’ve tried to replicate it and never come even close to getting 945 in pose. When this was declared the new high score for the two star Bidoof, I almost didn’t realize it. The only reason this was submitted for evaluation was because it was the only photo I had of Bidoof that run. (shrug). But otherwise, my Photodex is legit, and #212 in the world. What. The. F*ck?! The problem is, people don’t seem to be “beating” New Pokémon Snap. But at least it gave me a direction for this review: WHY?! Why is this amazing, immersive, unique gaming experience that’s overflowing with content getting so little engagement?
It’s really not even that high of scores in my Photodex either. This pic right here is still my four star photo for Starmie. Top players are easily over 5K for photos like these. I’m not using guides to find the photos outside a handful of instances when I was still trying to get one of every picture so that I could have this review up in a reasonable time (hah, how’d that work out for you, Cathy?!). Actually, online resources are woefully out of date for this game and often not helpful at all. Guides to “diamonding” the pictures usually are just advice to get the bare minimum 4K and not pictures with higher-yielding photos. Sometimes the advice is outright bad. Most of my photos were found just by plain old looking around. That’s the point of the game, right? That’s the fun stuff.
Well before I had any clue where I would end up in the rankings, I wanted to have a different angle for this review than contemporary reviews. The game is over five years old, after all, so ironically “New” Pokemon Snap isn’t really new anymore. I chose this for the next review after the big video pinball feature because I knew I was guaranteed to have fun and have plenty of stuff to talk about, but I didn’t want to just do a plea for a second chance for New Pokémon Snap. I needed an angle, so I came up with “how hard is it to 100% the game?” I defined 100%ing New Pokémon Snap as scoring a diamond rating (4,000 points or more) on all 936 photos and completing all 234 special requests. I thought it would make for a neat review, and I did end up reaching my goal. This link takes you to all my scores. 4K or more on every photo. Done and done.
This three star photo of Swinnub was one of the final diamond pictures I needed (I think it was second-to-last). This only scored 4,049 points and took me a half hour by itself to clear the 4K mark.
Except, something startling happened along the way: my global ranking. Not just how high I was, but how fast it happened. I entered into the top 500 global rankings before I even had all 936 photos. Actually, when I tied for 499th, I still had seven photos missing from my Photodex and nineteen others that didn’t have the diamond status. What?! And THAT got me into the top 500? Okay, so most gamers don’t ace games these days. That’s not a newsflash, and anyone who has heard the “rare achievement” chime on their Xbox knows that way too many achievements get that chime because most owners never actually play the games, Hell, I’m sort of guilty myself with this very game since, again, even though I’ve been playing this at least a couple weeks a year since it came out, I started this review ranked around 90,000th and with a very incomplete Photodex. Like so many others, I never tried for 100%. Once I did try, I realized a really, REALLY low amount of players are actually exploring New Pokémon Snap.
Technically I’m also ranked #403 in total course score, but that one isn’t ALL me. When you play a level, you get a course score based on the combined score of each photo you submit multiplied by the number of Pokemon you took pictures of. Unlike my photodex, some of the course records on the Indie Gamer Chick account don’t belong to me, but instead my family, and I didn’t really try for any during this review. I’ve reached the point where I’ll enter a level and just take pictures of two or three Pokémon I’m working to bump-up the scores on. So *I’m* ranked 212 in Photodex while the Vice Family is #403 in course score.
I thought the Pokémon franchise’s fans were into “catching ’em all” and all that jazz. That clearly isn’t the case with this game, which didn’t capture young people’s imaginations the way the original game captured mine. My nieces and nephew all agreed the low engagement has to do with the sparse roster (234 sounds great, but it’s still nowhere near a complete franchise roster even in 2021) and the lack of “Shiny” hunting, which is a popular mechanic in the franchise. They’re big Pokémon fans so I assume they might be right, at least for their age group and general Pokémon fans.
This is a totally RNG-based pose, as all characters “idle” from time to time, and most have multiple idle poses chosen at random. Pikachu alone has five or six different ones, if not more. I actually like that luck factors in a little bit. While it doesn’t totally prevent the characters from feeling like animatronics, it comes close. I also like that there’s no shiny hunting. BUT, if they wanted to include it, they could use it to incentivize high score chasing. Like make it so you can’t get a “shiny” photo unless you’ve diamonded the character. There’s so much untapped potential in this, not just for casual Pokémon fans like me but hardcore Pokémon fans who this game, apparently, doesn’t really appeal to.
Based on how I climbed the leaderboard and what those scores I passed along the way were, I guesstimate that, conservatively, less than four-thousand players have gotten all 936 photos (unless they just walked away with poses scoring 3,000 or less on tons of photos) and well under a thousand players (out of over 2.5 million) actually tried to get a diamond rating on every photo. Not get every diamond, but just tried. The truth is, it really wasn’t that hard to get one of each photo. The diamonds and a couple of the special requests were, but one star through four star photos themselves? I could probably count on one hand how many put up a real fight. Yet, I’m in the top 0.00848 of all players.
Look! It’s Luxray’s butthole! Confirmed: Pokémon poop!
It’s like a f*cking dagger to my heart because I love Pokémon Snap as a concept and as a gaming franchise, but with engagement THIS low on a Pokémon game? Hell, it’s probably the death of the Snap series. And I’m not even using some of the lame ass tactics the top ranked players are using. A popular strategy involves pausing and unpausing the game repeatedly, which automatically centers the camera’s focus and also increases the scoring window for specific poses, even glitching them out somewhat (IE you can see the pose on the screen before it actually starts to animate). I swear to God, I’m not trying to judge anyone based on their style of gameplay and if you actually have fun doing this sh*t, more power to you. But personally, *I* think it looks like a boring, tedious slog of a way to play a game, and what are you accomplishing? A high ranking on a game that I entered the top 500 on without even finishing all the objectives? You’re turning THIS game into a slog for THAT accomplishment? It’s like I said in my Pac-Man review: I might not be setting any world records, but I bet I’m having more fun than the people who are, because that sh*t looks f*cking boring.
Of course, in fairness to those players who are turning an exciting game into a slog, that strategy does exist for a reason. Okay, here comes the negative side of this review, and please, remember, this is a YES! review. I love this game. I want you to play it. I want to plummet down the rankings because New Pokémon Snap gets a second wind and a new wave of popularity. I would be VERY happy to wake up and find myself 250,000th in the world. Got that? Good. Here comes the bad.
Look, it’s Wailord. What, you don’t see it in this photo? Neither do I.
I have a theory as to why the game isn’t being finished by more players or even just played more, and that’s because New Pokémon Snap is (checks notes) broken. Like, broken-broken. People are quitting not because they dislike the concept but because the game often doesn’t work and who wants to bother with a game like that? The #1 most obvious broken element is sometimes the game takes the picture of the wrong f*cking thing. Each photo counts towards one Pokémon or object, and only one. Even if they’re the same species and all clustered up, while you’re getting points for all of them, only one is considered the focus of the picture and the main thing being judged. So take this photo:
This pose happens at the end of the River course on level 3. To activate this pose, you have to throw illumina orbs at three Swamperts “hidden” along the river course to set up the pose and then one final orb right at the very end of the level. The three Swamperts will launch out of the water and dive back in within a single second. Because it takes work throughout the whole level, this isn’t the type of picture you can just spam and quickly submit over and over. It takes time to set up. Even with those circumstances, I’ve activated this “pose” at the end of the river course a few dozen times and this was my highest scoring photo of it. Top players using the pause technique are scoring between 5,500 to over 5,700. I’m stuck at 4,924.
Notice I said “highest scoring” and not “best.” I’ve actually had WAY better pictures of this sequence. Ones that should, based on my research, have scored 5,200+ minimum, only when I submitted them for evaluation, they scored under 4,000 points. Wait, what? How? Because the camera wasn’t focused on the closest Swampert, but one of the rear ones. This is why players who discovered that the game automatically centers photos and delays or extends scoring windows started pausing and unpausing, sometimes extending one second poses into nearly a minute to get that one photo. If you’re like me and think that sounds miserable and ruinous towards fun, your only other option is to aim, shoot, and hope the game focuses on the correct one. Remember the panda on the dragon?
This one?
That’s another photo that you have to manually activate over the course of a level, and this pose happens at the end of what is probably the longest course in the game. Even if you go for ONLY this photo, each time will take five minutes just for this, give or take. Again, I’ve had MUCH better photos than this one that sits in my Photodex. Dozens of better ones, in fact. Closer, with the Pancham facing me. But they weren’t counted as Pancham pictures. Instead, they counted as Drampa pictures. Unless you’re slamming the pause button over and over like you’re doing your best NES Advantage “slow motion” impersonation, you don’t have time to stop, aim, and shoot on this. This pose is gone in a second, and there’s nothing worse than THINKING you got the picture you were looking for only to find out it’s actually something else after the level ends and you see what you got.
I’ve had worse examples but I wanted to give you an idea of how hard this is.
Normally as a game critic, I don’t offer solutions for problems with games. That’s not my job. I’m a reviewer and a critic, not a game maker. But the solution is so self-evident that it’s stunning it wasn’t part of the game all along, or patched in later. Nintendo and Bandai Namco should have looked at how f*cking tediously top players were playing the game to earn their points and adjusted the game accordingly. I don’t mean blocking the pause technique. If people want to be boring while playing a game, no skin off my teeth. But they could have eliminated the need or desire to do that by allowing players to select any Pokémon in the photo as the focus on the photo. Look at these three pictures of Grookey:
Grookey – Two Star – Park Day Level 3 – Score: 5,177
Grookey – Three Star – Park Day Level 3 – Score: 5,476
Grookey – Four Star – Park Day Level 3 – Score: 5,124
They look the same (which is another huge problem I’ll get into), but they’re actually three different tiers of photos that happen in a two second window at the end of the Park. You only have a split second to get the four star photo of Grookey, and then it shifts to the two or three star photo. Again, I’ve done MUCH better, for all three. But even with Grookey focused and perfectly centered in the frame, hundreds of different times the game said “this must be a photo of the crystal bloom” or one of the other Pokémon in the picture.
While there is a crystal bloom section in the Photodex, they’re not Pokémon and score no points as photos. In the linear story part of the game, you’re required to photograph them, which is why this is a thing. The problem is, long after you NEED to photograph them, the camera, in any close call, will always prioritize them over the Pokémon. There’s no way to stop it. There’s no toggle to prevent the camera from focusing on non-Pokémon, which is another fix that’s so obvious that it makes me think the developers are morons for not including it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is why, going off the global rankings, literally millions of players quit the game early and never returned. Those above pictures are in the FIRST COURSE IN THE GAME!
The big photos of Pichu, Shaymin, Scorbunny, and Grookey have them grouped together around the crystal, and literally every photo in this area becomes problematic. It would be REALLY nice if they patched-in a toggle that the camera would never, under any circumstance, focus on a crystal bloom or ancient ruins. Allow players to opt out of it. Since they never even attempted to fix this, I assume it’s deliberately trollish design, signed off on by all bosses at Nintendo and Bandai Namco, for the sake of making it “challenging.” God, I can’t imagine why this had such low playtime among its 2.5 million copies sold.
While I sincerely believe New Pokemon Snap is an immersive game, this problem actually breaks the logic of the immersion. In the story logic of the game, you’re handing these photos to a professor for evaluation. So why would a professor look at this photo:
It’s actually more rare to get the photo you’re trying for during this sequence because the hit boxes for the mushrooms are overlapping where the Cleffa is placed. Why even set this with a gap large enough to clearly see the Cleffa if the zooming and focus will always go to the Morelulls? “Maybe it’s meant to be a scene for the Morelulls?” Nope. The Morelulls have their backs turned to you, thus assuring very low direction points and making it clear this is NOT a scene created as a photo opportunity for them.
And not ask the person handing him it “what is this picture about?” Why does it have to be decided at the moment the photo is snapped if the whole shtick of the game is that a photographer is handing already taken photos to someone else to have them rated? Wouldn’t the photographer be able to decide what the photo is about at any time before they submit it for review? This is immersion shattering to a degree that’s stunning. It’s such an obvious fix, and one the game engine should easily be able to handle because it already recognizes and awards points for everything in the photo. This is EASY, guys. As easy as any fix in the history of video games is. This type of thing is not a rare slip. VERY often, you can have something appear suddenly in the camera, like this Gliscor that is so very clearly the focus of the picture:
Oooh, look at the pretty butterfly. So majestic. What, you don’t see a butterfly in that photo? Yeah, me neither. You’ll also note that of the five pictures it thinks are Vivillon above, three of them can’t even be submitted because they’re so far away so as to be absurd to rate. Even though the photos DO have a Gliscor up next to the camera. GOLLY GEE F*CKING WIZ, DO YOU THINK IT COULD BE A PHOTO OF SOMETHING ELSE THEN? This is a deliberately brain dead engine because presumably Haruki Suzaki was more worried that this photography game for children might be too easy than he was about turning players off forever because the game feigns ignorance about what the subject of photos is in the name of adding difficulty.
So you quickly snap photos because it happens suddenly and then is gone from the screen. You’re excited because your reflexes were sharp. You saw the thumbnail in the corner during the course and KNOW you got the picture in the center or close enough. Then you finish the level and the photo isn’t there. Instead, you have pictures of Vivillons (which are in almost every course) in the far, far, far, far background of the photo you THOUGHT you got of something else. Why would any photographer give this photo to a professor and say it’s a Vivillon? Why would any professor assume this is a photo of a barely visible butterfly in the background? THIS IS NOT IMMERSIVE, BECAUSE NO PHOTOGRAPHER OR PHOTO RATER WOULD BE THIS DENSE! This is why most players quit early and never returned and others are pausing and unpausing the game in a way sure to self-lobotomize the fun center of their brains. Because otherwise, once the camera focuses on something, it’s hard to unfocus on it and refocus on something else. There’s a spot in the game where a Squirtle rides a Lapras, and if your timing is true (or you have burst mode on the camera) you might even catch it winking at the camera, which lasts for about a tenth of a second and scores maximum pose points.
Awesome photo, right? But it only scores 4,728 points. I’ve had it where it was bigger in frame, more centered, and facing me more when I captured the elusive wink, but instead of it counting as a Squirtle photo, it counted as a photo of the Lapras. Now Squirtle has a wide variety of poses in multiple courses, but sometimes a Pokémon only has a single viable pose for the diamond rating and it’s almost entirely luck if the photo actually is correct. Such is the case with Mawile. Its only other four star poses are physically impossible to score 4K on (it’s buried head-first in snow, so direction gets basically nothing), so this is it, but the overwhelming majority of the time, the photo instead counts for the Mamoswine its literally engulfed in, and the picture MUST be taken at the point of impact for maximum (IE enough to clear 4K) points.
I seriously can’t imagine why my relatively mediocre photo gallery is ranked 212th in the world. And hell, sometimes it really, REALLY makes no sense what it focuses on. Look at this photo, which broke me. I mean seriously, I’m about to lose my f*cking sh*t.
I assure you that I was not aiming at the f*cking Bidoof in background in this photo. I was clearly aiming at the bunny I just beamed in its f*cking face with an apple, so why would even a bad AI camera focus assume I wanted to take a picture of the thing far in the background and not the other thing that’s closer, dead center, and had literally just been interacted with by the player? Even the stupidest, glue sniffing, window licking idiot on the planet would look at this photo and choose the Scorbunny as the focus of the picture. And yet, because of how I zoomed in while playing the game, it decided it had to focus on something while I was waiting for the bunny that I knew was going to run up to the stick BECAUSE I THOUGHT THAT’S THE F*CKING OBJECT OF THE GAME: TO FIND THE F*CKING POSES AND WAIT FOR THEM! Somehow the brain dead engine decided I was aiming for the sleeping Bidoof and never unfocused on it even after I unzoomed the camera and rezoomed to get this picture. Hey, sh*t for brains idiots that made this game: what the actual f*ck was wrong with you? Have a little f*cking pride in your work and fix this sh*t! OH, IT’LL MAKE THE GAME TOO EASY? WHO CARES ABOUT CHALLENGE?! YOU KNOW, DIFFICULTY AIN’T WORTH SH*T IF PEOPLE JUST QUIT PLAYING BECAUSE THE GAME IS SO F*CKING STUPID IT CAN’T TELL THAT A CHARACTER THAT IS DEAD CENTER IN FRAME IS THE FOCUS OF THE PICTURE AND NOT THE THING COMPLETELY ENGULFED BEHIND IT! YOU SERIOUSLY SIGNED OFF ON THIS ENGINE? ARE YOU STUPID?
Actually, THIS is the one that broke me from two days earlier. Yeah, it happened twice. Actually it’s probably happened to me alone about forty or fifty times for this one photo alone (thankfully I found a better version and never have to do it again). I swear to god this review is technically an endorsement and I admire the creativity of this game, and I also think the people who made it are dumb f*cks that couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Sigh. I feel like an idiot for caring because clearly nobody in charge of making this game did. And there’s other problems. Actually, the crystal blooms cause lots of issues, and not just because they suck the focus away from the Pokémon so much that I’ve apparently taken over 1,300 photos of them (yes, it counts them). The game requires you to take, like, five or maybe six to complete the story, and that’s exactly how many I would have voluntarily taken. But an even bigger logic problem comes with “background” points and how the crystal blooms relate to them. “Background” in general is a problematic scoring category. Look at the very worst photo in my Photodex:
This is a photo of a Sobble and it scores 4,680, ranking it #150 out of 234 three star photos. It scores 556 points for “other Pokemon” and 291 in “background points.” Huh? Okay, first off, “background” in this context doesn’t really mean “background.” It means anything in the photo the makers of the game have decided is point-scoring neat. Any photo taken with the waterfall in view on the jungle course scores high in background points, even if the photo is so obviously not as good. See:
By the way, this picture is now over 5,000 points and I don’t hate it anymore.
While the right picture is CLEARLY a better, more interesting picture of the cat that someone collecting photos of wildlife for, say, the Pokémon version of National Geographic would prefer, the left picture is providing much more background points. So going back to that Sobble, even though the waterfall is in the foreground, the picture is being boosted by just the presence of the waterfall, and by one other thing. Did you spot it?
That little red fleck? What is it? Well, it’s the edge of a crystal bloom, and the crystal blooms are so heavily prioritized that even having just a tiny sliver of the tip of a leaf from it, or even the glow from one if you activate it with an illumina orb, boosts the background points significantly. So while this is advertised as a game where the object is to photograph Pokémon, really it’s Crystal Bloom: The Game and the actual object is to try to get Pokémon photographed around them. Bonus points if you do it with a background that scores points. Remember that beautiful sunset from the reef course? Well the game actually doesn’t have a concept of beauty. Look at these photos I just took:
Seriously, Reef Evening might be the single most beautiful video game level ever made. Total background points between those four photos: 181 points, and they’re all for the fourth photo. The first three pictures above scored zero background points.
After this, I played the Research Camp for about, no exaggeration, ten seconds and got not one but two separate photos right off the bat that scored more background points than all four of those beautiful reef pictures combined. Take a look:
So wait, what’s the background? The vehicle. Anything taken with the vehicle in view is guaranteed to score tons of points. Or hell, I just today got this photo while I finished editing this feature:
112 in Background points? Where? The grass? Nope. That photo was shot right in front of the vehicle, and even though you can’t see it at all, apparently the “glow” of it or something is boosting the background score, because LOGIC! But hey, new record for my two star Meowth photo so yeah for me. Now let’s compare two pictures taken on the beach. This Lapras pic has a tropical island behind it that draws attention to the eyes. Surely that island is there for some reason besides set dressing.
Nope. It scores NOTHING for background points. Now don’t get me wrong: set dressing is important for immersion, and make no mistake that New Pokémon Snap is one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played specifically because of the variety of settings and how well dressed those settings are. BUT, with that said, when background is given such a high scoring premium in this game, you really need to go through the environments you’ve created and assign background scores to anything that catches the eye. That is NOT a random tree or a tuft of grass. It’s an island. It stands out prominently, and then they specifically placed a Lapras to swim directly in front of it. Compare that photo, which scored zero background points, to this photo that scored an insane 232.
This isn’t actually my three star Pikachu pic.
What are the background points for? The coastline? Nope. The shovel, which will eventually (on the Beach’s night course) be a Pokémon, but isn’t now. You don’t even need to have the Pokémon interact with the shovel, either. If the photo has a shovel in it anywhere, it will score at least some points for it. So the scoring system is deeply, deeply flawed, as neither the crystal nor the background stuff makes the game better. It kind of makes it worse, because you’re no longer incentivized to try to get the best action shots wherever they happen. Instead, you find yourself trying to get the best pictures within the limited scope of the crystals or whatever else awards background points. You’ll note that Pikachu is scoring 766 pose points and 232 background, so obviously my three star picture of Pikachu is a better version of that picture, right? Nope. It’s this photo:
Where are the 131 background points? The flower? Nope. Just the glow of a crystal bloom right next to it. For comparison, here’s my one star photo of Shaymin with a flower right next to it:
Zero background points. It’s glowing because I lit it with an illumina orb. So what could be worse than having to base pictures around crystals? How about not doing enough to make sure each tier of photo has no look-alike photos. This is a BIG problem. My two star and four star Pikachu pictures are basically identical, taken in the same location during the opening moment of the Beach at night on level 2.
Because there’s a second Pikachu there, that photo scored 543 “other Pokémon” points for the two star and 409 for the four star. So even though there’s a HUGE variety of Pikachu poses in the game and lots of things they interact with, it’ll be tough to beat the four star picture. At the research lab, you can get Pikachu to pose on one of the vehicles, but the amount of background points the vehicle scores can’t compete with the bonus points for the second Pikachu, plus you’re just plain not close enough.
The tier concept is kind of the problem. Needing more than one picture of each Pokémon is great. It’s part of the reason why I can never go back to the original Snap. But, sticking like glue to the “four pictures AND ONLY four pictures” format for each Pokémon is kind of insane. Not all of them have four pictures worth of content, while some have significantly more. Pikachu is like that. In the research camp level alone, in addition to the special pose of him getting on the vehicle, you can make him jump on the trough. While this isn’t the best example since I didn’t get the timing for framing perfect, you can still see how big the gap the score has. It can NEVER hope to compete with the picture I have.
The thing is, the sleeping picture you pass right by without doing any work to make it happen. All I had to do was light the crystal and hit him with an apple. The trough picture is actually pretty fickle to activate. I can’t just “do it” and make it happen by will. You have to lead him to the thing, then hope he jumps up it. Sometimes he just stops moving like the CPU’s run cycle is stuck. So of the two photos above, one takes maximum effort and one takes almost none. But it’s the one that takes almost none that is all but unbeatable against all other three star photos, and that’s not even the worst example. At one point, Pikachu rides a Mantine in the reef, which is its four star pose. To activate it, you need to light two crystals, and then time it perfectly because it flies by you quickly. I’m SO proud of this picture:
BUT, that’s actually my three star picture of Mantine, not my four star Pikachu picture. Getting the Pikachu version of this picture is really hard because literally every “something riding something” picture is hard to get the camera to focus on the rider. Eventually, someday, I will turn THAT picture into my Photodex’s four star Pikachu picture. I almost did a few minutes ago grabbing the photo for this review. But look at the pose points:
The degree of difficulty to time that picture, center it, aim, shoot, AND THEN have the focus actually be on Pikachu and not the Mantine is so much higher than that boring beach picture. They’re so far apart in the skill required to even get them that it’s kind of insane that the two shots are actually in the same category. But the Pikachu riding the Mantine photo only gets 500 pose points and competes head to head with the beach picture that can also be the two star photo depending on what the second Pikachu is doing. Again, I could beat that four star, and I will eventually. But why are they even put against each-other in the first place? They’re nothing alike.
UPDATE: Here’s a couple better examples, including one of a Pikachu that’s very clearly evil and, now that he’s mastered riding Mantine, is going to take over the world and enslave humanity. I messed up getting a screenshot of the second pic’s score, but it gained size points and lost “other Pokémon” points. These pics are actually taken at two different locations on the reef course and utilize different angles, but it doesn’t matter. The degree of difficulty is many multiples higher than those beach pics, but both the Mantine pics still only award 500 pose points, putting a much more visually interesting and desirable concept of a photo at massive disadvantage at the moment they’re taken over the bland and easy to grab beach scene that doesn’t just cover one tier, but two. It’s ridiculous. And that’s far from the only identical photo in my album.
What the f*ck? There’s actually TONS of poses for Pichu, but because they made it so the same f*cking moment changes from two star to three star based on whether or not Scorbunny is also celebrating, you can actually get two 5K photos in the three second window, and the only real challenge is making sure the camera focuses on the Pichu and not the Torterra. This pose happens every single time you play the level. You do nothing to activate it. It’s the finale of a battle between a Torterra and Dodrio, and not one of those “you pick the winner” fights.
Update: GOOD BYE double Pichu, though the reason it took me so long to get this photo is because every previous attempt photographed the bloom or something else.
Speaking of Torterra, here are its monster-scoring one and two star photos.
Again, no work needed for either of these besides lighting them with the illumina orbs. You pass right by them. I could use the “they’re the same picture” meme but instead I’ll just note that there’s at least six or seven situations where Torterra does something visually interesting in the two courses it appears in (Park and Side Path), but none of those things score the pose points, other Pokémon points, or background points the above two almost identical situations taken in the same location do and can’t hope to compete. Also, the game weirdly prioritizes sleeping pictures. Shaymin is the worst about this. Here are its two, three, and four star photos.
Again, despite its small size, of course it does more things. You can feed it apples. You can make it jump for joy. But none of it matters because THREE OUT OF FOUR pictures of it are sleeping pictures taken right next to clusters of other Pokémon. The game doesn’t lack for variety. It might actually have the biggest variety of stuff to do in any game I’ve ever played in my life. The problem is, it actually doesn’t reward you for discovering that variety. All the Pokémon behave differently after you hit them with an apple. Some growl at you. Some play it off cool. Some dust themselves off. The Bewears even try to kill you, the only such instance in the game where Pokémon attack you so aggressively that the game automatically speeds up, cinematically running for your life from the murder bears.
But typically, none of the post-hit animations score the maximum pose points, and in fact, they usually score under the 500 pose points average, in the 450 range. Even if you match size, beat direction, beat placement, and the timing is much, much more difficult (since the timing of the hit is almost entirely user controlled while the reaction isn’t), the game simply does not reward the harder to get photos. It rewards the most uncreative, unimaginative ones.
Even though the “dust off” animations are unique and memorable, the game heavily rewards the moment the apple impacts the Pokémon. That usually scores anywhere between 750 points to even the max 1,000 points (2,000 for “special” Pokémon). There’s exceptions of course, but it’s yet another example of how the game created these elaborate personalities and then actively punishes you for thinking they’re the prize.
Sometimes the game wants Pokémon facing you and sometimes it wants them from the side, but sussing this out is actually part of the fun. For all my bitching, I really enjoyed feeling like the world’s most unhinged zoologist in this game. “Ah yes, but what if I hit them with an apple while they face due east?”
The same goes for feeding the Pokémon apples. That takes time, and you have to wait while they eat them. You would think the slowest Pokemon would yield massive rewards for their “joy” poses after they finish eating and some actually do, but most don’t. The big prize is the moment of impact, IE the one thing in the game where almost every character, regardless of shape or size, acts exactly the same way.
I won’t say that finding the low scoring poses or stuff so far in the background that it’s useless towards scoring isn’t fun. I had fun when I found out there’s a moment where Kangaskhan places another character in her pouch, even if it happens so far from the camera that it can’t ever make the Photodex. I was having fun before I understood the game wouldn’t know a beautiful background if it bit its ass and I was having fun afterward when I started looking for these arbitrary point getters. But I kinda wish they just threw out the background category and the four-tier limits altogether and just allowed more photos. Ideally, the game should be a scavenger hunt for the poses, and it’s not. Applin is a great example of that, and it shows ANOTHER problem in that photos can’t show off motion. Here’s its one star and three star poses.
As you can clearly see, both those photos are nearly identical. Oh, you think the three star is a higher ranking because it’s eyes are slightly more wonky? Nah, it’s because it’s actually rolling in that picture, whereas the one star is completely stationary. The rolling picture doesn’t actually look like it’s rolling, because, you know, it’s a photo and there’s no sense of motion (there’s an idea for a sequel: have players search for ten second clips of Pokémon. Something the TikTok Generation can get behind!). But I promise you it is rolling, and its only other three star pose can’t compete with the roll. How someone seeing the photo in a scientific journal would know it’s rolling is beyond me. The sad thing is, the other three star photo is the perfect alternative to prevent that sameness.
It’s hanging upside down from the tree and when you draw near it, its eyes pop out to get a good look at you. Great photo, right? Nope. That is also a three star pose, and because the Applin spooks too easily and retracts its eyes before you’re close enough to get its size points up, I’ve literally never gotten 4,000 points from it. The “direction” points plummet if the eyes aren’t out. So distant photos of this compete head-to-head with the rolling pictures, which will always look vastly less interesting than the hanging-from-the-tree picture but yield much, much more points. Applin is one of the smaller Pokémon and is very, very hard to get close enough to get enough size points to clear 4,000. For the smaller ones, you practically need the f*cking things pressed up against the lens. Meanwhile, some other Pokémon have such limited and low-scoring opportunities for some of their tiers that I swear to God it’s like the entire f*cking development team forgot about them. Here’s my four star Inkay photo.
Pretty lame, Milhouse. So, to get that photo, you have to light a crystal bloom that’s well out in front of you, and then race these two Inkays who are swimming to the bloom. They’ll separate when they reach it, and then jump out of the water and cross paths. This is the only time IN THE ENTIRE GAME they’ll do that. If only one Inkay is in the photo, it drops to the three star tier. That above photo is only the second time I’ve cleared 4,000 points. The only saving grace is that it happens right at the start of the Reef Evening levels 1 and 2. But in literally hundreds of attempts, that’s my best: 4,016 points. F*ck. Off. It’s universally regarded as one of the toughest diamonds in the game. In the clip below, I got 3,994 points.
So why not scoot back when it’s easier to get them both? Well, because size becomes an issue. For Inkay, THIS is a 2,000 in size:
This is 1,999 in size:
Okay, so size changes based on the pose, right? Not really, as the two pics above are actually kind of the same size. What you’re seeing in my jumping pic scored 1,360 in size. The size points drop that quickly, and there’s also a “focus” issue of course as you want the one facing the camera to be the focus, but it happens in a split second. I just grabbed a quick example and it’s not a perfect example because it’s not even close to centered, but it should give you an idea of how quickly size points drop. Literally every fraction of a frame in distance traveled subtracts exponentially more points. Just a teeny, tiny bit further away from the camera and I’ve lost nearly 300 points in size alone.
What’s with the 762 in pose? Again, some poses are measured in fractions of a second. Like, the game is frame-specific on pose points. For some, that fraction of a fraction of a second is the one and only max point chance for the entire character in a tier. Oh, there’s another four star Inkay photo, just like how the Applin has a second option for the three stars. And, like the Applin, it happens so far away from the camera that it can’t score enough points. It’s actually one of those special requests that takes approximately six weeks to complete (now you know the truth of where I’ve been this whole time) and involves feeding two Inkays an apple, then feeding them each another apple in another spot along with third Inkay, then feeding the third one again, and then feeding another along with four others, and if even one of them doesn’t eat the apple because two of them are bumping into each-other, you have to start over. BUT, if everyone eats their apples, THEN they’ll f*ck off well away from the camera and do this four start pose:
It’s a tedious nightmare of a task that takes forever, is super easy to f*ck up because sometimes they just refuse to eat the apples, and the end result happens so far away from the camera that it can’t score 4,000 points because you’re not even close to getting the size bonus. The photo I submitted of all five jumping scored around 3,700. So that crossover picture is the only option, and you have literally a split second to get this one diamond photo of one of the smaller Pokémon. The small ones are problematic in general. Look at the size scores on Minior, one of the smallest Pokémon in the game.
Now sometimes you get too close and it takes points away, but these aren’t of the “too close” variety. Despite how small this thing is, they actually expect bigger photos than what I have. You can see in the one star picture that Minior is barely bigger than the apples you throw. That means not being able to get any interesting looking photos since you have to be so close up that details like backgrounds or other Pokémon are going to be nearly impossible. Look at my four star photo of it:
Sigh.
The process to activate that pose involves waking up seven different Miniors buried in the sand, using only your scan to find them (and even then, you don’t throw the orbs where you think you should). It’s awful and one of the most tedious poses to activate in the game. Even then, it took me roughly a dozen attempts to break 4,000 points because the pose literally flies right on by AND it also lumps in the “focus on the wrong thing” problem because if you focus on any of the other Miniors but the center one, your size points will plummet. It wouldn’t have f*cking killed the people who make adjustments to the “size” for smaller Pokémon. It might have made the game more fun, but their priorities were completely out of whack.
Which of these three do you think is the focus of this “I literally can’t believe this scored 4,894 points” photo. If you guessed the Piplup, thanks for actually reading this review because you’ve clearly been paying attention. This is yet another example of both finding a monster score because it was my one and only photo of the thing and thus I had to submit it and also me trying to take a picture of one thing and the game counting it as a photo of something else, though in this case, it broke my four star record for the Piplup by over 500 points, as the logical “center the Piplup” shot didn’t score THAT much. I can’t see how it’s possible to beat this photo, actually. So hey, thanks for once you miserable broken piece of sh*t engine.
Believe it or not, I haven’t even shown you the single worst photo opportunity in the game. The canary in the coalmine that shows how little they gave a sh*t to make sure every Pokémon has logical and/or exciting high-yield scoring chances belongs to Drampa. Drampa is an elderly dragon and he’s located in the Elsewhere Forest, which is a great level with awesome themes. So in theory there should be plenty of stuff you can do with this character. You saw the panda and the lizard with a cancerous tumor called Bulbasaur riding it. That’s a four star photo of Drampa, but not THE four star photo. If you beam the Bulbasaur with an apple after they hop off the ride, Drampa gets pissed.
This scored 5,217 points, plus, you know, it just looks cool.
It’s actually a legitimately frightening moment the first time it happens, and it’s such a cool f*cking picture. So they actually did do well by it, except for the three star photo. As far as I can tell, and apparently as far as anyone on the entire World Wide Web can tell, there’s only one single three star picture for this thing in the entire game, though it’s in the same spot on all three levels of the Forest during the standard finale. Here’s my version of it:
Yep, that’s it. In theory, I could make it better by having a nearby lizard appear a little more prominently in the picture (you can still see it a little bit in the bottom left hand corner, hence the 19 “other Pokémon” points), but 4,189 is actually a very high score for this piece of sh*t picture. The problem is, this is literally the game’s only three star Drampa opportunity. I don’t mean the only one capable of scoring 4,000 points. I literally mean THE ONLY THREE STAR DRAMPA OPTION IN THE ENTIRE GAME. It’s sleeping in a way where you can’t even see its face. There’s no way to cut that grass to get a better shot, and if you wake it up, it changes to a two star or one star photo. What the f*ck is that sh*t? In a level that has more variables than any other level in the game, that’s it. Your one and only three star photo pose of Drampa, and hell, it took me dozens of attempts to line it up in a way that scored the diamond rating and another few dozen attempts (done only because I was playing that level and you pass by it every time in the standard finale) to get the score up to 4,189. But at least there’s multiple other places to find Drampa for his other tiers. Can’t say that about Jolteon.
F*ck this thing.
Jolteon appears exclusively at the end of the hidden path found in the alternate path of the Cave on level 3, so even reaching it requires both taking an alternate route AND then manually activating a time consuming hidden route. AND THEN it has to be prompted to actually jump into the play area with not one but two apples, which if the apples bounce wrong, it’ll walk away from you to go eat them. It has an easy four star photo. Just hit it with an apple once it’s walking around. But its three star photo is notorious despite having two options. The first is the one in the above pic of it leaping onto the playfield after you hit it with two apples. The above photo is so hard to get that it was literally the final diamond rating I nabbed for the full set of all 936. That photo above scored 4,012 points, and that’s considered very high for the jump since it doesn’t score a lot of pose points. The other option is this:
That itch scored 948 just for the pose, ultimately awarding me a whopping 4,168 points (that’s the 9th lowest among my three star photos). And I did literally nothing, because that’s one of its random idle animations. Almost all Pokémon have one or more RNG based idle animations if you just leave them alone. They’re one of the few RNG elements in the game and sometimes they won’t happen if you’re zoomed in and waiting for one, I assume as some kind of trollish “a watched pot never boils” thing. So getting that RNG picture of Jolteon close enough to score 1,521 size points (yes, that’s really all that photo got for size) is totally luck based. And here’s a clip of the room it’s in.
The room it’s in is lumpy and thus hard to use apples to lure it because they bounce awkwardly, covered with dense foliage that blocks it from view and dramatically takes away points, and the area it can travel before being stopped by a drop-off is very limited. It doesn’t move very fast, and if you hit it with an apple, it’ll stop to do its angry electric storm animation. Like, the limit is just a few seconds short of where that clip ends. So in Jolteon’s only appearance in the entire game, and an appearance you have to actually take multiple steps to even activate, you have just a matter of seconds to get the full range of poses in an area that’s covered thick with things that block it and lower its score. In the above clip, I did successfully get a centered pic of its gratitude pose. How’d that do? Not even 4,500 points, because it wasn’t close enough.
Note that the heavy photo-bombing weeds scattered all over its lair don’t even give you background points.
Better in pose. Better in direction. Better in placement. BUT, a teeny tiny bit further away from the camera, but that teeny tiny bit cost me 407 points. Compare that to this photo:
WHAT THE F*CK?! REALLY!? Well, I can explain. Most levels have some kind of “special” Pokémon that, if the reaction to my nieces and nephew is any indication, are there as a fan service. These special Pokémon score bonkers points just by existing. These aren’t bosses, which I have no objection to scoring higher. These are just normal Pokémon, though some (maybe all) show up as post game content after you’ve finished the linear story of the game. The game so dramatically overloads scoring for these that it’s fish in a barrel. Look at this one:
It’s not even in the f*cking frame properly and it’s scoring 5,509 points. That’s my 12th highest scoring one star photo. So what did I do to activate this high-yielding Pokémon? Nothing. It literally is just there at the start of every single level, 1 through 3, in the Ruins course. Just the act of throwing an illumina orb at it changes it to a two star photo. Here’s that one:
Again, not a great photo. Timing was somewhat off. 5,505 points, my 10th highest scoring two star photo, and again, I can’t stress enough: it literally just slowly floats directly into view at the start of the Ruins, without doing anything, and it shows up at other times in the level too. (throws up hands) I get that it’s special in the Pokémon story, but for the purposes of this game, it’s really not and it shouldn’t get that many points, especially when it takes no work to get it. Compare that to the enormous pain in the ass that is Jolteon, and it really just makes the whole thing feel kind of half-assed. Hell, my #1 scoring Pokémon isn’t a boss. It’s Celebi, which to its credit, you have to hit with an orb as it zooms around the start of the standard finale of the forest to be able to get poses. But it’s not THAT hard to do so.
As of this writing, that one star photo of Celebi is my highest scoring photo in any tier. A one star photo beats even my highest four star photos, and I wasn’t even really trying for it. I was stunned when I got it, and I only got it because I actually screwed up activating the four star photo, which looks kinda the same.
That one star Celebi photo, taken because of a screw-up on my part, passed this photo of last boss Xerneas by five points, even though THIS photo takes a few steps to activate and is pretty difficult to frame correctly.
So the game has way too much emphasis on these special Pokémon, many of which outscore the f*cking bosses with a fraction of the effort even if the photos are no good. It’s so demoralizing to work your ass off trying to get the perfect picture of something that’s hard to move, hard to center, has a touch of RNG, and might even require interacting with other Pokémon, only to then get monster points for a photo of the “special” Pokémon just f*cking laying there in the same level. F*cking really?
By the way, that picture, taken back in 2021 and probably only submitted because I missed the crystal blooms that wake it up, is still my #1 photo of Lugia just because of the 448 points for background. THAT picture scores more points than the three harder to get action pictures of the same thing.
Again, is it any wonder I’m ranked #212th in the world despite not really having amazing photos? New Pokémon Snap is, at times, outright broken in a way you don’t expect from a Nintendo-published game, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to figure out why 99.99% of all people who spent $60 on it didn’t bother to try and get high scores. It didn’t have to be this way. They also didn’t have to make the bosses so f*cking miserable to play. The bosses are my final major complaint, because, well, they’re kind of boring. It’s not enough to simply photograph them. You can, but they won’t score very much. Unlike normal Pokémon, you MUST light them up, often with multiple illumina orbs, to get them to glow in a way that looks like they have magical stink lines coming off them.
What the f*ck is with sleeping photos scoring so much? EVEN THE BOSSES? Did the development team just really need a nap or something?
While lightning the bosses doesn’t sound too bad, three specifically are really, really hard to actually hit with the orbs. Steelix (when he’s not in slumber land), Wishiwashi (which has slow motion underwater physics to the throwing mechanic), and especially Volcarona cross the line from innovative takes on the photography format to trollish snoozers. They move fast and erratically but you still have to hit them with orbs and then still manage to get the photos when they barely fit into the frame. Wishiwashi and Volcarona have additional steps, as Wishiwashi requires you to orb multiple versions of the smaller fish that make up the larger one, while Volcarona is on fire and has to be put out with TWO apples AND THEN lit with an orb, and also there’s two of them on level two. They’re slogs, plain and simple. Wishiwashi is especially boring to play, and on top of that, it’s the lowest-scoring boss by far.
It should feel like a sea monster which is like seriously my #1 phobia, but it’s so boring that it doesn’t even give me nightmares. The cutesy, sweet and innocent Milotic actually has given me two nightmares where I was in its lake and couldn’t swim to reach the shore (only one less verified nightmare than of the sea serpent from Shadow of the Colossus), and it’s lovable and huggable. I mean, allegedly, if you’re into that sort of thing. I think it’s an unholy abomination but that’s just me.
If it sounds like I hate New Pokémon Snap, well, I kind of do. And also it’s maybe my favorite video game ever. Again, I’ve spent six weeks in a row playing it basically all day and I don’t even really entirely want to stop. The only real thing I hate about it is that they stopped updating it. It needs a lot of work. I didn’t even mention all the times I’ve crashed the game on the park course. I’m almost certain it’s tied to this thing:
It doesn’t crash during the course, but in the transition between taking your last photo (or even just hitting the exit) and the photo selection screen. I think it’s Florges specifically because most crashes happen when I’m excited about some photo I got of it that also uses up the end of my 72 photo roll. Without exaggeration, it’s over twenty crashes back to the Switch or Switch 2 menu, and if they haven’t fixed it by now, I assume they never will. I’m not happy with my 19,730 points for Floges (which comes in five randomly selected colors) because I f*cking know I’ve beaten every single one of those four photos and it didn’t count. I know they can fix it. I know they can fix the focus issues. They’re just choosing not to.
I want to go to this place. I mean without the monsters.
Most of all, I know they can add more content. I can’t stress enough that all the main courses in the game are outstanding. There’s SO much to do and so many variables. Plus, they just feel alive and real in a way the Nintendo 64 game could never hope to do because of the limitations of the tech. The preset locations do give the game a dark ride vibe and make the Pokémon feel more like animatronics than living creatures, especially when they have a plastic look to them like this:
Most don’t look this way, but that means the ones that do stand out so much more. These look like a diorama, don’t they? A plastic diorama.
But the actual environments can totally pass for ecosystems that you would expect exotic creatures to live in. Combined with the Pokémon themselves, owning New Pokémon Snap is like owning your own collection of sixteen really amazing interactive Disneyland rides that you can go on anytime, and I love it for that. But there is so much more they could do with this. If they want to stick to the natural environment theme, fine. New Pokémon Snap doesn’t have a mountain level. It doesn’t have a true swamp level (a swamp appears for about ten seconds in the jungle level), or a grasslands style plains. There’s an underwater level that’s essentially two levels in one, but no level set in the sky. Hell, there’s enough alien or robotic Pokémon that they could do a course set on a moon.
Actually, scratch that one. They might base it around this thing.
But, like, why stop at the whole “nature environments” theme? That makes NO sense, because in the world of Pokémon, they’re everywhere on the planet. Not only is the entire global economy based around them and literally everyone owns one, but they even have rights and work jobs in cities. So why not roll with that and have levels set in cities, offices, carnivals, haunted houses, graveyards, museums, etc.? I felt physically ill when I realized that, despite selling 2.5 million copies, very few people are actually playing this. No updates are coming. This is the end of Pokémon Snap. This isn’t an alarmist view. This is reality. I’m 212th in the world despite having some fairly pathetic photos still in my Photodex, like these:
To my credit, those are all really hard photos to diamond at all, but they’re hardly record setting. Yet, out of 2.5 million owners of New Pokémon Snap, 99.99152% of them have lower scores on their overall Photodex than me. Look at those last four photos and ask “is she awesome at it or is nobody playing it?” I’m not awesome, and nobody is playing this. Nobody played it in 2021 and nobody is playing it in 2026. I think people probably tried to play it, but when the game constantly f*cks up what the focus of a photo is, you know, not everyone has the stomach for that. Challenge is awesome, but if that challenge is broken, you should actually expect people to just opt out instead of accepting that challenge. That’s how I, someone with shaky hands, could brute force myself into the top 250 of a major multi-million selling game. Because most people quit playing it after getting f*cked by the focus one too many times, and I can’t totally blame them.
Realistically, most Pokémon are not going to be THE focus of pictures. Yet, sometimes I just like to look at what’s happening in a level. There is always so much going on, especially on the higher levels. It really is something special, for all its problems.
Still I’m going to make this plea to everyone who has passed on New Pokémon Snap or quit early on: give this one another chance. Don’t look up guides for it. Just turn it on and look around. Even five years later, it still has gas in the tank and offers an experience unlike anything out there. Give everyone in charge of this game a reason to second guess this franchise. Nintendo seems to be under the impression that even owners took a hard pass on New Snap’s gameplay. I think they’re wrong and it’s NOT the gameplay that made people opt out. It’s the jank. The gameplay is awesome. For all of its many, many flaws, I could not put this f*cking thing down, putting my website’s momentum at risk because, f*ck it, I was having fun. That’s the whole reason I have this blog, and it hurts my heart that so many of my readers passed on this, and will continue to pass because, yeah, I had to do my job and list all my grievances with it. And I have many, many grievances. Stuff like this:
DIRECTION MY F*CKING ACHING ASS! IT’S THE SAME F*CKING POSE, ONLY CLOSER TO THE CAMERA AND MIRRORED, WITH THE OTHER DOG AND XERNEAS EVEN MORE PROMINENT! AHHHH! CATHY MAD! CATHY SMASH! GET REVENGE ON WORLD!
Well, I can totally understand why putting up with that isn’t for everyone. I might even call New Pokémon Snap the most broken good game ever made, because make no mistake, it is broken. (nods) Broken-broken, with no fixes in sight, even if those fixes would be the most obvious fixes in the history of video games. You know how Nintendo is doing “Switch 2 Editions” of many prominent Switch 1 games? Yeah, I wouldn’t expect such an update for this game. It didn’t sell enough because “2.5 million copies? Pssh, chump change.” And it obviously isn’t being played enough to justify such an overhaul. Just the act of hitting the game’s stated top scoring goal of 4,000 points for every photo put me well into the top 500 global leaderboard rankings. That’s VERY damning for how much engagement this game gets. You don’t think Nintendo pays close attention to this stuff?
They actually put a photobomber in the river level. Look at this picture of Arbok. What, that’s not an Arbok picture you say? Of course it is! Look at what it says! Maybe I was wrong and the people who made this aren’t stupid, but instead are complete f*cking assholes.
Now, read all my grievances again. I STILL WANT TO KEEP PLAYING! That’s my pitch. After six weeks and thousands of instances of getting f*cked by a bad engine, I’m still game to keep going. Maybe I’m just wired for addiction to this type of scoring based thing, and the whole “interactive dark ride” thing (I’m a HUGE Disneyland fan) made this an especially potent addiction for me. But I don’t think it’s just me that’s wired like that. I sincerely think people who haven’t given New Pokémon Snap are missing out. After hundreds of hours of gameplay over the last few years, I’m still finding things I never knew were there. Interactions I’d never seen.
Ready to have your mind blown? I just found out a couple days ago that I hadn’t actually 100%ed the game. Look at this map:
Every course, including the illumina spots, has a map in the Photodex menu. I never used them. They’re kind of worthless. Well, the other day I was playing the Xerneas Illumina spot and nabbed a photo of a random non-Xerneas character that I didn’t know was in that course. After it finished tallying my score it gave me a fake achievement for completing my fifth map, meaning I not only found every Pokémon in the map but every single location of them. Since day and night courses have their own maps, there’s thirty total maps, and I’d just filled out my fifth. “Wait, you meant to tell me I still have twenty-five maps left that have stuff I’ve technically never seen or submitted or whatever?” Yep. If the map is complete, it gets a crown next to it. For all my work, and my high global ranking, as of this writing I’m still missing twenty-four out of thirty crowns. The only ones I have are Park Day, Park Night, Research Center, Side Path Day, Side Path Night, and the Ruins Illumina Spot.
T
Huh. Wow. So, yeah, that’s my pitch: look what I’ve done with this game. Look at the time I have in it. Look at the score I’ve achieved. And yet, there’s still at least twenty four things left I haven’t done. Folks, this game is packed. And broken, but packed, and so very, very fun. You’ll be in for a world of frustration and pain, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll have the time of your life too. OR you’ll hate it and I’m wired for this type of thing and maybe just a little sadomasochistic. I suppose I can’t rule that out. Verdict: YES!
You would NOT believe how hard it was to get that measly 4,011 point picture. I’m almost certain there’s no other 4 star pic of Eevee, either. Dozens, if not hundreds of tries, and that’s the best anyone in my family got (that’s actually my pic).
Okay, so, I’ve not updated since the day I posted Classic Pinball Video Games: The Definitive Review, but I am working on a new review for one of my favorite games ever: New Pokémon Snap. I reviewed the original last month just so I would have an excuse to play this again and do a review. It should have been done by now. Since the game is five years old, I wanted to have a unique angle to the review, and I came up with “how hard is it to ace the game?” Acing in this case meaning “get the diamond rating on every photo.” There’s 234 Pokémon in the game so that’s 936 total photos. The good news is, I did it! The bad news is this act by itself put me in the top 500 scores on the leaderboard. In fact, I was tied for #499 when I got the final diamond photo.
Gosh darn it. I was so hoping to be exactly #500 when I finished.
Jeez, for a game that sold 2.5 million copies, just the act of 100%ing the game shouldn’t put a novice like me that high on the leaderboard. But while going through my photos and creating a database for the review that notes which photos are problematic, which ones are glitchy, and which ones I believe outright crash the game (which happens a lot IN THE FIRST LEVEL IN THE F*CKING GAME!!), I realized I had a lot of low scores. So I started bumping the scores up to “get it out of my system” and, well, now three weeks have passed. But I’ve climbed another 145 rankings and currently have the 354th highest scoring photodex out of 2.5 million total players.
Look, I’ve been #1 on dozens upon dozens of pinball leaderboards so this shouldn’t feel as good as it does, but I’m pretty proud. Only a couple dozen of the 936 photos are my family’s. Most are mine and for a chick with shaky hands, that ain’t too shabby. Yet, it’s a huge bummer to be this high on the board too. This is a game that sold millions of copies and is one of the biggest gaming franchises in history. I should not be THIS high on the leaderboard, especially when I still have a lot of photos that are just barely over the 4,000 point threshold. I’m knocking those low ones out, but still, I’m going to guess there will never be another update to Snap. No Switch 2 upgrade. No more levels. And, worst of all, no third game. Apparently less than a thousand people were invested enough to ace the game.
Once upon a time, my Twitter followers staged an unofficial intervention when I was hooked on Tetris 99. Well, I’m not on Twitter anymore and my family is playing this with me, and given my past with this game and all the productivity lost to it, me reviewing New Pokemon Snap is like me deciding to review Vicodin: a bad idea fated to end exactly like this. I’m sure my readers can tell from the heavy usage of my family in my Classic Pinball Video Games feature that I treasure the time I spend with them. My father just turned 77 and he’s got age-related stuff. Angela will be off to college in the blink of an eye and hell even my mother plays New Pokémon Snap and even though she watched me play games as a kid, she almost never actually played them with me. I’m enjoying this time. Okay, so technically that’s not ENTIRELY my score on the leaderboard, but that makes it even better. The Vice Family (MOSTLY me goddammit) is ranked #354 globally and climbing, and I’m having the time of my life.
The photobombers actually added points.
I never started IGC with the intent for it to be the dominating thing in my life. So while I will be reviewing full time again very soon, I do want to finish this project with my family because some day soon I won’t be able to play games with them. This is what I cherish. The reception to the pinball project was amazing and thanks to EVERYONE who linked to it. And now I ask for one more week to finish this. It’s a fickle game.
F*CKING REALLY?!
See what I’m dealing with? Or how about this? In this screenshot, it doesn’t know what the subject matter is. This photo literally cannot be scored because there’s no Pokemon in it!
Nope, no Pokémon to be seen. No sir.
And other pictures are INSANELY low scoring yet for the life of me I can’t figure out any method to get closer. I finally caved in and started looking up the techniques other people use, but none of the really low scoring “rare” pictures have advice to pump the score up. There’s no truly useful strategy guide out there. A few YouTubers did have a few helpful pointers but the majority of the time I found a lot higher scoring pics than they suggest.
Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of attempts and this is the best I could do for these adorable little jellyfish things in the four star category. You can’t get close enough to diamond in the other four star method.
Most of the advice out there aims to simply get the pics regardless of what the score is or just over the 4,000 point threshold. One guy was genuinely helpful, though even then I found he too often went for the easiest or barest minimum diamond scoring pics. Thankfully some of the comments in his videos DID point me in the right direction, (on the other hand, his videos don’t show him crawling through levels so I appreciated that). Oh, and there’s a lot of weirdness with the four tiers of pics. The most notable one is ultra high scoring Shaymin. Here’s the one star picture.
Shaymin – One Star – Taken on Florio Nature Park – Night Level 2 – Score: 5,266
So far, so good. Here’s where it gets kooky. Here’s the two star photo.
Shaymin – Two Star – Taken on Florio Nature Park – Night Level 2 – Score: 5,313
What’s so bad about that? Here’s the three star photo.
Shaymin – Three Star – Taken on Florio Nature Park – Night Level 2 – Score: 5,839
Uh, seriously? How about the four star photo?
Shaymin – Four Star – Taken on Florio Nature Park – Night Level 2 – Score: 5,649
(throws up hands) What the f*ck? Really? So three nearly identical photos with only other characters sleeping around it and one action photo. Okay. And it’s hardly the only example. Here’s my current high 2 star Pichu.
Pichu – Two Star – Secret Side Path (Day) – Score: 5,161
And here’s the three star.
Pichu – Three Star – Secret Side Path (Day) – Score: 5,046
Here’s the one star photo of Swanna.
Swanna – One Star – Park Night Level 2 – Score: 5,031
And here’s my two star Swanna.
Swanna – Two Star – Park Night Level 2 – Score: 5,103
You get the idea, and there’s many, many more things like that. Sometimes you might have literally less than one second to get one type of photo before it turns into another photo. That’s the case with Grookey at the end of the level 1-3. When you play the Park on the third level, at the end of the course you have a split second to get a photo of him, but the game is kind of janky and often I took pictures of him DEAD CENTER of the frame, only the game decided I was taking pictures of the Shaymin behind it or the Crystal Bloom next to it. They could EASILY patch this by allowing you to choose any Pokemon in the photo, but no, the game decides what the subject of the photo is. And also, I’ve crashed the Park Level 3 so many times I quit counting after, no joke, two dozen.
Grookey – Two Star – Park Day Level 3 – Score: 5,177
Grookey – Three Star – Park Day Level 3 – Score: 5,476
Grookey – Four Star – Park Day Level 3 – Score: 5,124
So if you’ve been curious what I’ve been playing, this is it. It has made me scream and want to throw my controller through the wall. I literally hurt my throat yelling when it crashed after a run I *knew* I had at least two higher scoring photos. And also this might be my favorite video game ever made, and while I’m going to be calling out a LOT of bullsh*t, I’m also going to outright beg those who have been holding out to give it a shot.
I literally felt sad that the picture on the right beat the one on the left. That one on the left is INSANELY hard to get. The one on the right requires you to beam a crab with an apple and then turbo boost to get close enough to see the two Pikachus celebrate. Seriously, it’s F*CKING INSANE how low some amazing pictures score. That pic on the left, dead center, should be a 5,500 point pic, and now it’s not even in my photodex. Neither is the one on the right, but only because I got closer to it a few times over. Same picture but now it’s up to 4,662. Sigh.
I’m not a Pokémon fan. I haven’t played the main series since I was a kid (it’s seriously been twenty years, good lord I’m getting old). But I *love* this game, and after 600 combined hours since 2021, I still can’t put it down. It’ll also almost certainly be a game that never gets a third one. How do I know? I started this process in the six figure range and now I’m ranked #354 on the global leaderboard for a five year old game. It “only” sold 2.5 million copies and a non-professional gamer like me could get a higher than 99.99% of all players (I’m also #446 in “Total Course Score” so by both metrics I’m top 500). But seriously, give it a shot. And hey, Florges…….
These reviews are a repost from Classic Pinball Video Games from 1979 to 2009: The Definitive Review. Because that feature contains full reviews for 130 games, it was causing loading issues for many readers, so this one time, I’m breaking a Definitive Review into smaller pieces. If you get a chance, be sure to check out the full feature as I worked really hard on it.
IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
Kyūtenkai: Fantastic Pinball Sometimes Spelt “Kyuutenkai” Platform: PlayStation, Sega Saturn Released March 31, 1995 Developed TechnoSoft Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE (PlayStation) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED (Sega Saturn) Review Played ONLY on PlayStation
TechnoSoft is the company that did the disastrous Sega Genesis port of Devil’s Crush. The lead producer of Kyūtenkai was also Dragon’s Fury’s lead producer, and presumably there’s other members from that game’s development team who worked on Kyūtenkai. That’s why I’m stunned that Kyūtenkai feels like the rightful heir to Devil Crush’s throne. After a half-decade of waiting, finally a true sequel to the Crush family arrives with this action-packed Japanese exclusive. And I’m not just spewing a buzzword like “action-packed” on a whim. Seriously, Kyūtenkai (roughly translated: “abrupt change”) is the most densely-packed video pinball game made up to this point. As you can see in the above clip, the three main screens are overflowing with targets, hidden mini-games, and hazards. It’s the most overwhelmed I’ve been with a new game so far in this feature. But when that wears off, is the game still fun?
The character design rises JUST above generic. It’s kind of charming. Like that bat spins when you hit it.
First off, knowing Japanese will help a little with this one, but you don’t need it. The basic idea is the same as the Crush games: there’s one primary table that’s three screens tall. The game does have a linear ending that’s unlocked by defeating all four mini-games and a final boss, but after beating that boss, the game continues so you can play for a high score. So far, so Crush. The first difference is that you can choose between three different characters. When the ball builds up enough speed or momentum (including every full-force plunge) it temporarily powers-up and transforms into the character’s ball. What each character does is in the caption below:
The first character’s power-up ball hits three times harder. The second character scores three times as many points, and the third character has a series of balls shadowing the main ball, which can not only score more damage on targets but hit more targets along the trajectory. If you lose a ball, you can switch to another character. Nice touch. No notes.
Because I wasn’t playing for a high score and trying to finish the game, I mostly opted for the first character. I thought my logic was sound since the mini-games are lost on a single lost ball and have relatively short time limits so I needed to cause as much damage as quickly as possible. It didn’t matter, because eventually I threw in the towel and used the game’s built-in password system, which is how continues work, to beat Kyūtenkai using multiple games. Yeah, unlike the Crush games, Kyūtenkai is insanely hard to defeat. Part of that is how you unlock the mini-games. They’re all tied to the bumpers:
Each of the bumpers is a fast-moving roulette.
The bumpers are each a roulette that cycle through the four different boss characters (each of whom is present on the board itself) along with money symbols and crabs. The crabs are whammies that you have to defeat via multiple hits. They also spit bubbles that slow down your momentum and could push you down to the bottom screen.
This is the only time three crabs were on the playfield. For what it’s worth, I’m almost certain this is why Angela got a 1up here, the only time any of us got an extra ball during the play session.
If you can get two of the three bumpers to match a character, it will unlock the entrance to their mini-game. The only way to unlock all four mini-games is to match all three bumpers, which none of us ever did even once to the best of my knowledge. It’s the dullest way to open mini-games, especially on such a busy table. And even if you did match all three, I’m almost certain it wouldn’t matter because the other three close after the ball enters the first mini-game.
Soccer, found on the bottom screen inside the demon’s mouth, is the easiest of the four games. Get four goals to win. Just tee-up the ball and shoot it straight upward. Easy peasy.
Thankfully, the mini-games don’t dominate Kyūtenkai the same way mini-games previously dominated the Crush franchise. In my entire play session, only once did I enter back-to-back games in a span of under a minute. It was the soccer game seen above, which is also far and away the mini-game I played the most. That’s because the doors to the mini-games aren’t evenly placed. Two of them require little to no effort to reach. I played the soccer game the most because its door is right in the center of the bottom of the screen:
Entrance to soccer game.
Because it’s pretty hard to defend against the outlanes in the upper and middle screens, the ball is significantly more likely to cross over its door even if you don’t want to play it. The same goes for the room cleaning game, which is located in the wing a little bit above where the soccer game’s entrance is. It was my first mini-game and I wasn’t even aiming for it. Meanwhile, the other two games are located in spots that are kind of hard to reach.
Room cleaning game entrance (it appears in the wing).
Entrance to Vine Game
Entrance to battle against Bat Demons
At one point, I had the Vine Game’s entrance open and tried every possible shooting angle between the two flippers on the center screen, and the ball never came close, nor did I get any help from the bumpers. The only time I ever entered the Vine Game was via a completely lucky bounce. And if you end up spinning the bumpers and getting a different mini-game, which you might since they’re on the same screen, that door closes. This was just a bad design choice made worse by how difficult the two hard-to-reach mini-game rooms are. While I never lost at the soccer game, I frequently failed at the other three. Hell, I only legitimately beat the Vine Game twice out of around twenty plays. It’s just too f*cking hard:
If you want to count Kyūtenkai as a member of the Crush franchise, this mini-game would be far and away the hardest game in the entire franchise.
Those bunny women quickly climb the tree trunks and you have to hit them a few times before they fall off. Hitting them barely slows them down. If one of them reaches the top of the screen, you lose. You don’t get the character’s gem, and thus can’t get to the final boss, unless you actually complete each game. This is the one that prevented me from reaching the final boss. When I finally did beat it, it was because I got the ball above the creatures in a way where it hopped across the bunnies. Even doing that is no guarantee. in the above picture, I did just that and I still lost. They really needed to dial back the difficulty of that game. I also lost my first time playing the mini-game below in about one second:
Why are the targets so low? And why did they have to use that ridiculous four flipper design from the Crush games?
A single drain ends the mini-games, and my first ever shot in that game deflected off an enemy and went into the drain. The same thing happened a lot in the vine game as well. On one hand, at least they provide a challenge and don’t feel like a massive waste of time. On the other hand, CHRIST, these games destroyed me. Then again, the main table was capable of that as well. I lost count of how many times the ball went almost instantly from the top screen to the bottom. It happened from drains AND outlanes too. Nudging is just not that effective for defense here, and the outlanes especially are pretty soul destroying on every screen. Oh, and unlike previous Crush games, you can TILT in this if you hold the button down too long.
Top screen with moon out.
Top screen with sun out.
TILTing.
So maybe the linear side of Kyūtenkai is a little too mean spirited sometimes, but from the perspective of a fun, scoring-driven game, there’s no denying that Kyūtenkai is one of the best games in this feature. I didn’t even have to think all that hard whether I’d place it above Devil’s Crush in the rankings. I was so close to putting it #1 ahead of Psycho Pinball, but Kyūtenkai got in its own way with some truly baffling design choices. The mini-game unlocking method hurts a lot, and the distribution of those rooms hurts even more. Including the ability to trigger a TILT was foolish. This game made more mistakes than most bad games do. But the worst of them is a violent wind that comes and goes on the top screen. You can see it at the end of this clip:
It was clearly trying to be this game’s version of the magnetic modes in Addams Family. But when the magnets in Addams turn on for Seance or Multiball, eventually they turn off. If there’s a way to permanently disable the wind in Kyūtenkai , we never figured it out. Maybe it’s tied to the bells at the top of the screen, which are barely visible most of the time and we never figured out what they did either.
The camera doesn’t quite follow the action as well as you would hope. It makes shooting the targets on the top screen pretty miserable and is one of the most ill conceived gameplay elements in any YES! game in this feature. It pretty much single-handedly cost Kyūtenkai the #1 position. What were they thinking? WERE THEY THINKING AT ALL?! And while I’m complaining, after three pretty hard mini-games (and one lay-up) the last boss was stunningly easy.
Final boss – First Phase
Final Boss – Second Phase
Final Boss – Third Phase
And if I sound angry, it’s because Kyūtenkai had that #1 rating and let it slip away with that wind stuff in the top screen. Such a letdown when the rest of the game is so much fun. I’m rooting for every game in this feature when I first boot them up, but I was really rooting for Kyūtenkai because what a great comeback story it might have been for Technosoft. In a way, it still ended up being a great story. I know Sega fans hate my opinion on this, but I thought their port of Devil’s Crush wasn’t a good effort. But, they figured out what went wrong with Dragon’s Fury and got the most out of the PlayStation/Saturn’s horsepower to make a better Crush game. I’m mad because when you have a game that’s good enough to be #1 and then self-sabotage to the degree they did here, even placing it #8 is a let down. Folks, this could have been #1. The good stuff was better than any other game’s peak in this feature. With that said, I had a ton of fun. Kyūtenkai was re-released in Japan in 2010 as a PSOne Classic. I really hope someone reads this and gives Kyūtenkai: Fantastic Pinball a global release today. Verdict: YES!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #8 of 125
Percentile: 94%
Extreme Pinball Platform: PlayStation Released March 28, 1996 Designed by Terry Cumming and James Schmalz Developed by High Score Productions Published by Electronic Arts NO MODERN RELEASE
Extreme Pinball looks fine……….. Is what I would say if it were a Sega Genesis game. This is a PlayStation game. Where’s the other 16 bits at? Why does it sound so awful?
Extreme Pinball is a port of an MS-DOS game, only that’s really no excuse for how boring it is. There were some good MS-DOS pinball games. Extreme Pinball would not be among them. What exactly is “extreme” about it? Besides the gravity, I mean. We’re back to heavy physics and limited shooting angles like it’s 1991. The physics never quite shake the sensation of playing pinball with a cannonball. At first, I wondered if that was tied to the medieval theme of the first table, but truly awful physics dominated the entire Extreme Pinball experience. Look at this hop the ball makes (every after the hop is me rewinding to see it again):
I didn’t nudge the table there. The ball just….. Hopped! It was like the ball itself wished it was in a platform game. And a crowd cheered, as if the sound waves raised the ball off the ground. Stuff like that frustrates me about Extreme Pinball (Austin Powers and KISS will eventually do the same thing with a different engine, so maybe’s a PlayStation quirk?!). Not that it could have been amazing, but the terrible decisions with physics and gravity assured a NO! despite some fun elements and genuinely good shots.
Okay, you got my attention.
Yep, that’s a loop de-loop in the middle picture. Monkey Mayhem made me roll my eyes at how obviously it wanted to be based on Donkey Kong Country, but I have to admit that there were multiple shots in it that made me sit up in my chair. It’s too bad the physics and shooting angles are so poorly programmed. There’s no backhands. You can’t pass. The tips of flippers constantly fail. And LOOK HOW FAST IT MOVES!
I don’t know if they thought that a fast ball would make the game more exciting. It doesn’t. Like, at all. Assuming it doesn’t outright give you a headache, the snapping camera just sucks the fun out of making shots because you don’t have any time to process what you’re doing. It’s up and down and up and down and it’s so exhausting. It makes me appreciate what Pinball Fantasies and its ilk accomplished, because getting the speed right is apparently hard to do. And is that f*cking Garbage Pail Kid in the third pic?
Monkey Mayhem – Upper Playfield
Okay, you got my attention.
Monkey Mayhem – Lower Playfield
Thankfully, you seem to get unlimited nudge, even though you’re not supposed to. The instruction book says you can TILT, but one of the first things I did in every single game review you just read that features a nudge is to shake the sh*t out of a table to get a feel for how effective it is and how much it can handle before TILTing. If I do enough to assume there is no TILT, that’s telling. Maybe the instruction book’s warning of a TILT is as sincere as when my parents threatened that Santa Claus wouldn’t come if I didn’t behave, but Christmas always happened right on schedule even though I was so bad.
If you’re going to have double upper flippers like this, you better have some damn good shots for them, or else you’re just jamming real estate. But three out of the four Extreme Pinball tables just waste real estate on boring shots.
The generic, by-the-numbers themes, slow gameplay, and boring shot selection made Extreme Pinball genuinely exhausting to play. You can have boilerplate pinball themes and still give them energy and pizazz. The closest Extreme Pinball comes is probably the Urban Chaos table, but even it flows like a bowel obstruction. There’s just no exciting shots at all and the highest-yielding shots are low risk because they separate the table into two zones, with the upper one being not just low risk, but zero risk, and that’s just boring.
Look at Medieval Madness. Nobody can accuse that of lacking in personality, because, get this: you can start with a generic base theme and finish somewhere above that. Now compare Medieval Madness to Medieval Knights, which is Extreme Pinball’s take on the swords and sorcery trope that’s practically as commonplace in pinball as the ball itself. The nonsensical split at the top of the playfield that makes it look like one table ripped itself out of another table is bad enough, but what’s your goal besides just making the point counter go up?
What are you shooting at? I had to consult the instruction book, but the whole point of pinball and having lights is to make it intuitive and guide the players. Because the table goes up and down as much as it does, good luck spotting targets at all. On top of all that, this is far more limited in shooting than, say, Pinball Dreams from years and years earlier. It’s very unimpressive for a 1992 game, but for a 1996 PlayStation game? It’s downright embarrassing.
Medieval Knights – Upper Playfield
Medieval Knights – Mid-Playfield
Medieval Knights – Lower Playfield
Pinball Extreme isn’t intuitive at all. It’s also not suitable for multiball AT ALL, yet every one of these damn tables does a terrible multiball that you shoot completely blind, and the Jackpot shots are especially misguided. They’re placed in spots that require the supplemental flippers, which only makes sense if you could see the whole table at once. To not shoot it completely blind, you have to launch both balls at the same time. That’s Extreme Pinball in a nutshell: flailing blindly for “fun.” Hell, in four hours of gameplay, I never even figured out why the balls change shape. The instruction book doesn’t say. You know what? It might look like a 1991 game, but Extreme Pinball would have still been a slog in 1991, or any year for that matter. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #75 of 125
Percentile: 40%
True Pinball aka Tekkyuu: True Pinball
Remake of Pinball Illusions (Amiga) Platform: PlayStation, Sega Saturn Released April 5, 1996 (Saturn) May 31, 1996 (PSX) Table Designs by Andreas Axelsson and Olof Gustafsson Directed by Fredrik Liliegren Developed by Digital Illusions Published by Ocean NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Dave confidently predicted True Pinball would snatch the crown as the greatest video pinball game ever made at the time it came out. He was right, though he makes no promises it’ll reign for very long. So how did a remake of Pinball Illusions rise to the top of its genre? You’ll remember that Pinball Illusions had issues with shots that had no attachment to reality. Not every shot, but enough to be notable. That has been completely fixed with True Pinball. Every shot off the flippers goes where you want it to. True Pinball is also the first no-doubt-about it example of realistic ball handling. On some tables, including Law ‘n Justice (seen above), passing in the form of post transfers is finally possible. So, the perfect video pinball game? Nope, but we’re getting closer.
Get used to seeing the ball there right before it comes back.
No, True Pinball might be the new #1, but it’s VERY beatable thanks to its massive problem with nonsensical rejections. The ball will fly cleanly up a ramp on any of the four tables with the speed and momentum to easily complete the shot, only it’ll throw on the brakes and reject on a dime at the apex of the climb. It doesn’t look realistic at all, because it’s not. True Pinball appears to be the first game in this feature that programmed spin into the ball, but this also seems to be tied to what’s happening with these nonsense rejections. When the ball rejects, it’s spinning downward while traveling upward. This should not cause a rejection, and to explain why, I have to get into the weeds of real pinball.
Not only is the same thing happening here but the ball has already started to turn the corner. This shot also rejected and came back.
In real life, pinball plays the way it does because the stainless steel balls have no grip on the wooden table or any surface that doesn’t have rubber (like slingshots or the flippers). They don’t generate enough friction, so when you shoot the ball, even if it’s rolling counter to the direction you shot, if the shot is a flush hit that experiences little to no interference from walls, the speed of the shot should be greater than the amount of friction the spinning generates. These aren’t rubber tires on a car. There’s nothing in a stainless steel pinball that should be able to grab the surface to cause the stop. Also, although the ball is spinning, it’s also sliding thanks to the lack of friction. But none of that matters in True Pinball. Take a look at the following clip. The funny part? The rejections look EXACTLY like what happens to new tables in Pinball FX before they get patched, and it’s probably the same thing happening. It’s hard to program realistic pinball, then and now.
So what’s actually happening? We didn’t come to a clear understanding. In True Pinball, either the spin causes rubber-like gripping or the gravity itself has too much friction OR they simply miscalculated the gravity at the peaks of the ramps. Possibly some combination of all three. When the rejection happens, it doesn’t slowly reject, but instead looks like a ball ricocheting off an invisible trampoline that sends the ball back at the flippers with a return speed that’s just as fast as the original shooting speed. You can see it prominently in the full game clips in this review.
The shadow of those rejections looms large over True Pinball. It shatters immersion and it’s common enough that it absolutely gets in the way of what should be a near-perfect video pinball game. There are rejections in True Pinball that look lifelike. But rejections that have the speed and clearance needed to complete the shot and rejecting suddenly at the peak of a ramp happens uniformly across all four tables. As Angela said with sadness in her voice “ain’t no patch coming for these.” Indeed.
Angela wanted me to note that she would consider this layout to be a MASTERPIECE by the rating system of the Pinball Chick. I said “well I’m avoiding using that system in this feature” and she said “you either tell everyone I said Law ‘n Justice is a MASTERPIECE or spend the next year sleeping with one eye open.” What I’m saying is she really liked this. BUT I HAD THE HIGHER SCORE!
I need to stress that not every shot rejects that way, and when it happens, it tends to happen in streaks. There were games where it was relatively rare (a fourth option: Angela thinks it starts happening more once you need to nudge defensively, causing something to change in the ball behavior). But it happens often enough to be very frustrating. As annoying as it is, True Pinball is still breathtaking in how well it plays. It really helps that all four tables are especially strong. That’s in part thanks to the new 3D camera angle, but these were already elite table designs.
Law ‘n Justice, a futuristic police theme, has a layout that feels exactly like a tangled sci-fi highway and a selection of shots that perfectly mimic a high-speed chase. It really is something special and, if not for the rejection issue, this sucker would flow like melted butter. It’s SO good. If Pinball FX did an ideal port of it without any technical issues, it would immediately jump into their top five non-coin-op pins.
Babewatch – Upper Playfield
Babewatch – Lower Playfield
Babewatch feels exactly like a tribute to Data East/Sega Pinball from 1992 to 1996. Especially the works of John Borg, who went on to be one of Stern’s main designers and one of the greatest pinball designers of the 21st century. Although this was the second strongest table in the Amiga build of Illusions, this was everyone’s least favorite of the four tables in True Pinball. It’s still strong but makes for a weak multiball game. It just generally lacks exciting shots except the casino shot on the balcony (where the roulette wheel is). It speaks volumes that the worst table in True Pinball still is a very solid table, but not a thriller by any means.
Extreme Sports – Upper Playfield
Extreme Sports – Lower Playfield AND WHAT THE F*CK IS THAT GUY DOING?! HE LOOKS CREEPY!
Neither is Extreme Sports, but what Extreme Sports lacks in exciting shots it makes up for with exciting modes and a layout that lends itself so much better to ball management. Again, it’s very Data East/Sega Pinball-like. Extreme Sports actually has a legitimate design flaw with the pop bumpers (third pic above). Our theory is that they were trying to create their version of a Lawlor Trail like in Funhouse/Addams Family but didn’t understand the geometry of it. The ball gets caught in those bumpers for far too long, killing the pace of the table. They’re just too close together, so there’s no room for the ball to knock itself away from them without an extended bang cycle.
Extreme Sport’s crappy bumper trail. What the hell were they thinking with this?
Despite this, Extreme Sports plays so much better in True Pinball that we all voted it third best. Meanwhile, the table that got the most first place votes wasn’t, in fact, Law ‘n Justice. While Angela and myself preferred it, Dad, Dave, and Sasha the Kid all enthusiastically voted for Vikings, which was in the MS-DOS version of Illusions but NOT the Amiga version. Ouch. Personally, I preferred Law ‘n Justice’s ultra-fast-pace and silky-smooth transition shots, but I also totally understand why Vikings won the vote. It’s the ultimate pinball all-star game with elements from all kinds of famous designers, old school and new school. It’s a table that lends itself specifically to multiball, which is a good thing because it’s VERY multiball heavy. But both Angela and I felt it was too easy.
Vikings – 2D Camera – Upper Playfield
Vikings – 2D Camera – Mid-Playfield
Vikings – 2D Camera – Lower Playfield
In fact, Angela reached the Wizard on literally her second game and actually had to lay down the game so that I could move on to the next review. She was only on her second ball (still technically Ball #1) and had banked four or five extra balls. I genuinely believe she could have kept that game going indefinitely. Angela is also the best Pinball Chick team silverballer by far, so take that with a grain of salt. Vikings DOES have the widest variety of shots and a unique flow that’s a lot of fun. With its easy-to-achieve multiballs and a layout that lends itself to juggling, I think Vikings could make a great trainer table for newcomers.
I can’t stress enough that nobody should want to play these games in the 2D mode, and yet, I appreciate they included both for those so accustomed to scrolling that they couldn’t get the hang of the 3D angles. That was thoughtful. No joke.
So with four strong tables and the best physics engine video pinball had seen up to this point, True Pinball stands tall as the best video pinball ever at the time it was released. Thank God that, with at least forty games to go, there’s still so much room for improvement that I won’t get bored with everything left. True Pinball’s issues aren’t just limited to the rejections, either. There’s a lack of scoring balance as well, and while it’s not as bad as Slam Tilt, the risk/reward factors are just not there. Basic lit-shots in modes pay off too much and post-ball bonuses pay off WAY too much.
The funny thing is True Pinball would have taken the crown even without Vikings. This just puts it a little more out of reach.
What is with overloading bonus points in these high-quality video pins? If Lyman Sheats had worked Law ‘n Justice’s scoresheet, it’d probably be hands down my favorite video pin ever. I mean if they fixed the rejections too. Still, I would love to see these tables make a come back. Flow is a timeless aspect of pinball, and these tables, especially the first and fourth ones, have flow to a degree video pinball hadn’t seen up to this point. I loved Slam Tilt, but True Pinball blows it completely away. Hail the new champion, at least for now. Pro Pinball is literally about to debut. Verdict: YES!
Holds title of Greatest Pinball Video Game Ever Made from April 5, 1996 to February, 1998*
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #4 of 125
Percentile: 97%
*Technically it might have lost the title in October of 1997 but I didn’t play the PC version of the ultimate champion of this feature.
Pro Pinball: The Web
Sometimes called simply “Pro Pinball” or “Pro Pinball 1” Platform: PlayStation, Saturn, Windows Released July, 1996 Designed by Adrian Barritt and Graham Rice Developed by Cunning Developments Published by Interplay NO MODERN RELEASE
Review Played ONLY on PlayStation
Sure is a looker, isn’t it?
We’re now entering the single-table simulation era of video pinball that will dominate the landscape for a while. This business model for pouring all resources into one single table that strives to simulate the look and feel of a real physical pinball machine was created by Pro Pinball: The Web. It’s the first of four Pro Pinball tables, and it’s the most old school of the group. Most of the table feels like a 1980s widebody with a couple token ramps thrown in for good measure to make it feel modern. Modern being by the standards of the mid-90s. The problems with Pro Pinball: The Web are entirely on its physics engine. If True Pinball was the ancestor to Pinball FX, THIS is the ancestor to The Pinball Arcade. It’s VERY floaty. How floaty? Look at this screenshot:
In this mode, I have to hit the drop targets in the upper right side of the playfield. This screenshot is me missing the drop targets so badly that the ball ended up in the bumpers. It’s a timed mode, and so look at the timer at twenty-nine seconds. And mind you, I didn’t take a screenshot the very moment it went into the bumpers so you can add a second or two.
After over twenty seconds were eaten up, the ball is finally coming back down to the flippers. This is not a rarity in The Web. It happens all the time. It’s not like the ball was banging constantly off the bumpers, either. It was only a few bounces up and down the rollovers, really. The ball is too floaty and too slow for timed modes that have such a short timer. This could have easily been fixed by made shots adding time, but they didn’t go that route. And frankly, the shooting angles are a little on the limited side and we’re back to having limited ball handling abilities. So the nice variety of modes feels kind of wasted by the whole table coming across like an unfinished prototype of a pinball engine.
Pro Pinball: The Web comes with a “slideshow” that shows glory shots of the various elements of the table. That was nice, but instructions with those pictures would have been even nicer.
A bigger problem is that The Web is that the shot selection isn’t amazing. Their commitment to making a realistic table was admirable, but common sense should make it obvious that some pinball elements are only charming if done on a real life physical table.Take the magnetic shot, where the ball is stopped by magnets and teed-up perfectly for the bat flipper to shoot the loop with in a way that’s impossible to miss.
It sounds fun on paper, but it’s only fun if it’s real life and you’re seeing a real pinball frozen to the middle of the table in defiance of gravity. It’s a magic trick, and those are fun if you present them cleverly. But the idea doesn’t translate at all digitally because it’s not a real ball being caught by a hidden magnet, and it’s not even fun for nostalgia because The Web isn’t based on a real table. A better use of magnets, even fake ones, would have been using them to contribute to defense, like a magna-save feature. Slam Tilt utilized them to great effect and those aren’t real tables. Here, the magnets are basically free points you earn by shooting a less difficult target to light them. That’s boring.
The center shot doubles as the only jackpot shot, the extra ball shot, the mode start, and it writes mystery novels under the name J. D. MacGregor. It’s like the dullest possible position for a do-it-all shot.
If The Web had been a +1 for a larger collection where it didn’t have to stand on its own, I would have liked it more. As a stand-alone table? Meh, it’s okay. We all really liked dueling on it, as it was competitive and fun. But once you get the timing down on the nudge, it’s absurdly clockable. The key shots are set along primary angles with no real stand out angles or targets. With its hodgepodge of targets that don’t connect well to each-other, it really comes across like a glorified prototype, because that’s exactly what it is. It’s a decent prototype. I’ll give it that, but when I had what I needed for this review, I was also happy to be done with it. Verdict: YES!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #27 of 125
Percentile: 78%
Power Rangers Zeo: Full Tilt Battle Pinball Platform: PlayStation Released September 27, 1996 Directed by Naruaki Sasaki Developed by KAZe Published by Bandai NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
aka “Super Pinball III: It’s Morphin Time!”
Everyone knows I have a special place in my heart for Power Rangers. I was 4 years old when it debuted so I don’t even remember watching it for the first time, but it was always part of my life despite the fact that I was terrified of some of the monsters. Eventually I gave the original 8-bit/16-bit Power Ranger franchise the full Definitive Review treatment in what was the worst winning percentage of any Definitive Review ever: 2 YES!, 10 NO! and one of those YES! games wasn’t even a Power Rangers game. It was Jetman, a Super Sentai game.
Ranger fans took it well.
Oddly enough Power Rangers Zeo Pinball was marketed in Japan as the US version of the show instead of Ohranger. Makes sense since Ohranger was the Super Sentai that was THIS CLOSE to killing the franchise. By the way, none of this matters for this game. Ignore the platform in the header, because Power Ranger Zeo: Full of Sh*t Pinball is an SNES game in every way that matters for gameplay.
When I think of Power Rangers, I don’t think of Angel Grove or the Juice Bar or Bulk & Skull. I think of generic Ancient Egypt themes or New York City. I’m almost certain this was supposed to be an original sci-fi game that they reskinned.
I actually wonder whether or not it started life as an SNES game before Sony convinced them to switch to PlayStation. When I say that this is one of the Super Pinball games from KAZe, I’m not being snotty. IT LITERALLY USES THE SAME ENGINE! Not a 32-bit upgraded version of the Super Pinball engine, but the same engine as the two Super Pinball SNES games. The same physics, same gameplay speed, and the same quirks. Multiballs not interacting, allowing the balls to pass through each-other? Yep, we’re still doing that sh*t.
The shooting angles off the flippers are the same. The ball movement is the same. It’s the same engine, period. The only difference is the structure of the game. Instead of an attempt at simulating arcade-style pinball tables, this is a linear, level-based action pinball game with live targets. The result is a better game, but still not a good game.
Don’t get too excited. This is just a pre-rendered mid-level cutscene. There’s also clips from the TV show. They got a soundalike for the voice of Alpha 5. They couldn’t even afford Richard Horvitz?! He can’t cost more than my lawn guy.
Zeo Pinball has eleven levels, or twelve if you count the bullsh*t true final boss which is really just a rerun of the EASY mode’s final boss with a different sprite. If you do attempt to play Power Rangers Zeo Pinball, make sure to turn on HARD mode before starting. EASY gives you unlimited kickbacks and longer drain posts, but the shots aren’t harder. Once you realize that the combat is completely inconsequential and no pressure, really you’re just shooting the lit lanes and targets until the game tells you that you don’t need to anymore, which usually means hitting a ball into an exit one time.
Do you think the guy wearing the Staroid suit ever forgot he was wearing it and got stuck trying to walk through a door? It had to have happened at least once, right?
Because the physics are 16 bits and very, very outdated even by the standards of 1996, the game gets old quickly. Most of the key enemy targets and bosses are placed in the center of the playfield, and then KAZe just didn’t program an off-the-flippers shooting angle for them. You have to tee-up cherry bombs to be able to shoot straight up the middle, realism be damned. That’s how you make pinball challenging, right?
Mind you, that above clip is on HARD, and the enemies aren’t attacking the flippers. They’re just cannon fodder, which, okay fine, that’s what the Cogs were on Zeo. But come on! The cogs punch back and absolutely do land punches in the show and there’s plenty of give and take in the fights. Zeo Pinball has none of that. It’s all offense, and that makes for a boring pinball game and an even more boring Power Rangers game.
I won’t say that the over the top cutscenes that functionally act as over-the-top call outs don’t at least partially get me excited. They really did try, bless their hearts.
I’ll also concede that I didn’t play particularly well in that clip, though that’s in part because I was nudging almost the entire time, including when the ball was on the ramp, and I was not triggering a TILT. The game basically requires rotating the D-Pad like you’re playing a Track & Field game before it even issues you a warning, so if you play it right, defense is a cinch. Oh, and don’t worry about all the lives I lost, because lives only apply to each specific level. You get them all back all the ones you lost in addition to plenty of extra ball opportunities in each level. Yep, even on HARD. Look, this is the next level:
Excellent timing on my part because you’d have to be high to enjoy this.
All the balls are back. Stakes? What are those? Even on HARD, this is probably the easiest action pinball game in this entire feature. Now, I’m not completely crapping on Zeo Pinball. It has a fairly fast pace in some of the levels. Others, like the Egypt level, are slogs that lack targets. But most of the proper levels are non-stop one-sided action. It’s not exactly wish-fulfillment since it never feels even a little bit like a Power Rangers game, but most of the levels don’t leave enough time to be outright boring. It’s more about how pointless the whole thing is. Despite having bosses straight from the TV show, hell, this could be any property. It’s the first of what will be many “INSERT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY -HERE-” cash grabs that are about to become commonplace in the rest of this feature.
That looks almost identical to Alien from Galactic Pinball on Virtual Boy. Jeez.
And if you’re a fan of Power Rangers, this game probably has the most characters from the TV show of any Power Rangers game. Many monsters-of-the-days show up as mini-bosses, like Leaky Faucet, the evil sentient leaky faucet (Christ, how did I ever like this show?). But again, they don’t actually fight back. They’re just targets given the shape of familiar characters. The same goes for the big bosses who mostly feel samey. Shoot straight up the middle or maybe a little to the left or right of the middle.
Punch-a-Bunch reminds me of why Ohranger almost got cancelled. The monsters were so bad that the next season was a satire of Sentai. That season became Power Rangers Turbo in the United States, only they didn’t treat it like a satire and THAT almost got the US version of the show cancelled.
Even the final bosses ultimately end with “shoot straight up the middle” crap. I always start each game on the default setting and work from there. Zeo Pinball starts on EASY and the final boss is Prince Sprocket. After beating him and seeing the end credits, King Mondo says to fight him, play the game on HARD. So I did, and after beating Prince Sprocket, Mondo said he was going to fight. And it was literally the same fight, on the same level. Take out the hands, then the head. If they were going to have Mondo be the same fight as Sprocket, they should have had you fight Prince Gasket for the HARD finale and, when people familiar with Ohranger realize it’s the same as Sprocket, they can do the Captain America “I understood that reference” thing.
Prince Sprocket
King Mondo (HARD Mode Only)
At this point, I was really confused by all the KAZe fandom. They’ve not really made a terrible pinball game yet, but their work up to this point was so mediocre and lazy. I would not have guessed how good thing were about to get with them. Seriously, it’s the PlayStation era now! They couldn’t figure out how to have balls clank off each-other? And if you’re going to do Power Rangers, shouldn’t multiball be five balls instead of three? Hell, they tease the Gold Ranger on the cover art but he only appears as part of the table art once. Here:
Actually, the lack of Gold Ranger makes sense. The game was released September 26 of 1996 in Japan and September 30 in the US. The Gold Ranger had FINALLY debuted on the TV show just a couple weeks before this released and the character of Jason (the original Red Ranger) wouldn’t claim the Gold Ranger power until a few days after this came out on October 4, 1996. That kind of tells me that KAZe and Bandai rushed this sucker out as fast as they could. Kudos to them I guess for getting a complete Power Rangers game into stores in the middle of the single season of Zeo Rangers. A game that isn’t a dumpster fire and probably ranks as one of the better games in the Power Rangers gaming franchise.
I legitimately wonder if they were ready to go with a sci-fi alien invasion game and just quickly reworked the models to look like Zeo’s rubber suit monsters. The boss of the final regular stage is Silo, who showed up a few times on Zeo and even was in the finale of the entire Mighty Morphin series in Countdown to Destruction. It looks just like the TV show’s rubber suit monster, too. But the level themes and their total disconnect to the franchise make me think they had the game ready to go as something else before they scored the Power Rangers Zeo license. This level is supposed to be the North Pole. Oh yes, famously a setting in Power Rangers. Not.
Don’t mistake that for being a good game. Power Rangers is one of the worst gaming franchises in the world. It’s so cursed that even Digital Eclipse couldn’t make a good Rangers game. Power Rangers Zeo Pinball is just another crappy Power Rangers game, and this might be the most annoying one of all. It’s a 16-bit game shoved onto the 32-bit PlayStation. It might have decent looking FMV cutscenes, but it’s still the same crappy Super Pinball engine and layout design mentality I’ve given two NO!s to already. Here’s a third NO! for that engine and my 12th NO! to the Power Rangers gaming franchise. Power Rangers as a gaming entity is so soulless that the Z-Wave would have turned it to dust. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #47 of 125
Percentile: 62%
Hyper 3-D Pinball aka Tilt! Platform: PlayStation, Sega Saturn Released January, 1997 Designed by Steve Beverly and Jon Harrison Developed by NMS Software Published by Virgin Interactive
Never Released in North America (PlayStation only) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Review Played MOSTLY on PlayStation
Roadking USA – Upper Playfield
Roadking USA – Mid-Playfield
Roadking USA – Lower Playfield
Yep, this one hurts. (nods) It hurts quite a lot. Based on the above screenshots, you’re probably thinking this is yet another Pinball Dreams-follow up. Spiritually, it’s sort of like that, only with nowhere near as much playability. The shooting angles are even more limited than Pinball Dreams and the whole 2D experience is like the ultimate pinball bricklaying experience. Believe it or not, that’s not even the worst part, either. The worst part is that the game moves far too fast. So fast that it not only had me and Angela having to stop and take long breaks, but even Pinball Chick team member Matt got a little motion sick. Be warned: the following footage is known to make people a little queasy.
Despite this being a game first developed in 1995 that’s being ported to 1997’s 32-bit console lineup, it’s almost a typical Pinball Dreams all shooting, all-rebounding game. Almost. As the European name “Tilt!” implies, Hyper 3-D Pinball puts a premium on effective nudging. This is the first game in a long time that has a major emphasis on defensive pinball. The nudge works really well too, but when the game shoots as poorly as Hyper 3-D does, it kind of takes the luster out of defense. Thankfully, all the 2D gameplay is optional. The real hook is that this tries to utilize a groundbreaking 3D camera. So the same table as seen in the clip above, with the press of a button at any time you wish (except multiball, where it becomes mandatory) turns into this:
What’s astonishing is the 3D versions of the tables don’t feel like they share any DNA with their 2D counterparts. It doesn’t even matter if they have the same shots and layout. It’s night and day. Or in the case of these tables, night and darker night. Yeah, the bad news is the 3D versions of the six tables are even more detached from reality than the 2D ones. I’m going to guess their physics engine just plain never worked the way they hoped, so they cheated. You might have noticed in the above clip that balls actually GAIN speed while traveling up ramps. Well, that’s certainly a unique gameplay feature that I’ve never seen before. It doesn’t just happen in the racing-themed table either.
What the hell am I supposed to do with a pinball game that gives you CPU assistance the moment the ball crosses the threshold for a ramp? Especially one like this where the game has so many ramps. If you’ve ever played pinball where the ramps are too rejection heavy and wondered what it would be like to play something that does the opposite, this is it. That’s not the only quirks with the physics, either. In both 2D and 3D, the ball gains unnatural speed constantly, making timing rebounds too unpredictable. And yet, the flippers have actual brake power capable of stopping the ball when you trap it. Overall, Hyper 3-D Pinball has some of the worst physics in the history of video pinball.
Pour out a drink for The Gangster, which could have been a contender.
And that’s a real heart breaker. While most of the tables were nonsensical garbage that wouldn’t have been fun even if you could transplant Slam Tilt or True Pinball’s physics into this game, Hyper 3-D Pinball does have a pair of tables that could have been really good. The Gangster, pictured above, has such an enticing layout that looks like it could be a professionally-designed machine. Not only does it avoid the bonkers ramp-spamming like Hyper’s Roadking USA or Monster tables, but it has well-measured traditional targets, including a beautiful inline target. Too bad it plays, to quote my normally jovial father, “like sh*t.” They also wasted Star Quest 2049, which seems like it could be decent.
Star Quest 2049 – 3D View
Star Quest 2049 – Upper Playfield
Star Quest 2049 – Mid-Playfield
Star Quest 2049 – Lower Playfield
The problem I’m having with this review is that Hyper 3-D Pinball’s physics are so far removed from real life ball behavior or any other video pinball game’s physics engine that it’s really impossible to tell how good these tables could have been. I’ve played plenty of pinball machines that I thought would be awesome based on the first impression of how they appear that turned out to play “mid” as the kids say. Real life tables like Stern’s Stranger Things or digital pins like Pinball FX’s Princess Bride sure passed the eye test, but then you play them and they’re kind of crap. So, this was one of my tougher reviews because none of the six tables are fun. Not even a little bit, because this is like pinball played with cheat codes turned on that you can’t turn off.
I’m going to take a wild guess and say that the people who made this were big fans of the Barry Oursler/Python Anghelo classic Grand Lizard but fundamentally didn’t understand why that table worked. Fun Fair tries so damn hard to do the “mini-field wholly encased within tight round-the-world orbits” layout like Grand Lizard, only they didn’t set it at an angle and they shrank the gate. Fun Fair is a complete disaster that doesn’t work at all and couldn’t have worked even under the best circumstances. A total farce of the sport and one of the worst layouts in Classic Pinball Video Games: The Definitive Review. It might actually be the single worst Italian bottom pinball layout of all-time. And for once, my family agreed with me, so yeah! That wasn’t hyperbole!
My gut tells me that Roadking USA (a really poor attempt at doing High Speed), The Monster (a really poor attempt at doing a mid-90s Data East/Sega Pinball table) Myst & Majik (a really poor attempt at turning No Fear into a sword and sorcery theme) and especially Fun Fair pictured above were fated to be sh*t either way.
But there’s plenty of games in this that would crawl on hot coals to have two potentially high quality tables like The Gangster and Star Quest 2049. And hell, maybe I’m wrong about the other four. No matter how nonsensical they look, they certainly don’t lack ambition.
Myst & Majik – 3D View
Myst & Majik – Upper Playfield
Myst & Majik – Mid-Field
Fun Fair – 3D View
The Monster – 3D View
I’m even more shocked that I didn’t end up placing this lower in the rankings. My own Hyper 3-D Pinball ranking baffled me so much that I went through the list with it three times, and replayed a few of the tables, and my result kept coming out the same. This might be the only game in this feature that’s carried completely by its unfulfilled potential. Hyper 3-D Pinball is a mind boggling disaster that fails in every way video pinball can fail.
Even the scoring system is terrible. The bumpers pay off too much. Chopping wood (grinding low-risk shots) is viable on every table. Hyper 3-D Pinball fails, fails, FAILS, again and again. In speed, in design, in logic, and in gameplay. But, it fails in ways so unique to only it that it stands out clearly among the NO! games. Apparently that counts for something, I guess. That or video pinball is a sh*t genre. It’s probably that. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #72 of 125
Percentile: 42%
Dragon Beat: Legend of Pinball Platform: PlayStation Released November 27, 1997 Developed by Map Japan NO MODERN RELEASE
Oh, you don’t FIGHT live characters in this game. That would be too fun. They ain’t running a charity over here!
I really thought I was going to be done playing games this bad at this stage of Classic Pinball Video Games: The Definitive Review. Well, at least on consoles. Some of the remaining Game Boy Color/Advance titles look dreadful, but I figured I was home free on console games. Hah. Dragon Beat, aka Dollar General Off-Brand KAZe, is not only one of the worst games I played for this feature, but another game that’s legitimately one of the worst video games I’ve played in my life. That should give you an idea just how bad the bottom 20 games in this feature are. Dragon Beat is the brick layer to end all brick layers, with three miserable layouts, horrible physics, poor shooting angles, all topped off by ugly, UGLY graphics and the most generic soundtrack imaginable. Take a look:
You’ll notice a few things in that clip. Even though we’re right on the verge of video pinball’s second decade of existence, Dragon Beat’s multiballs clip right through each-other. So we’re back to balls that don’t interact. That table is called “Legend” and yes, its auto-plunger sends the ball straight down the left outlane. Every. Single. Time. Unbelievable. That, my friends, is an all-time “out of f*cks to give” design moment for video pinball right there. The shooting angles don’t match the flippers. Targets are placed in a way that the flippers can’t reach them. A flipper is placed completely out of sight from the one camera angle. This is bad, folks. It’s as bad as video pinball gets. And it’s not just this table. Here is Dragon Beat’s best table, Castle:
Those constant “LET’S DO IT!” call outs are like washing your ears out with boiling oil. Balls don’t lock when they enter targets completely. Balls clip right through solid surfaces when they’re not “active” like the catapult. Kickbacks send the ball into the other outlane. Again, targets are placed behind all shooting angles. On top of all those mistakes, the layouts are just f*cking boring. Now, I didn’t hit the upper stand-up target for a long time because there’s no direct shooting angle for it. You need a ricochet that I never got in that clip. When I finally cut the video, a few minutes later it did hit it and the “combat” began. Okay, well, maybe some fun live targets could salvage this from the bottom of the rankings. Except, there’s NO combat.
Angela called that thing “Monty Python meets Slenderman” and it DOES look creepy, but after you get over how neat it looks, its impact on the gameplay only solidifies Dragon Beat’s status as one of the very worst video pins of all-time. When monsters appear (any monster) the object is simply “don’t drain.” The ball doesn’t interact with them at all and they don’t interfere with the table except to stop all active modes. A timer starts and, if you survive, it says that you slayed a monster. It couldn’t be more obvious that they intended to have combat but didn’t have the talent to actually program it and gave up. Or, as Dave put it, Addams Family if Seance happened every mode without a magnet or actually scoring points. A stoppage. Nothing more.
The third table is called “Old Town” and it has a gigantic tower. I wonder if this was the first game inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, aka the book series that eventually inspired the TV show Game of Thrones. In both the books and the shows, Oldtown (one word) is where the Maesters in that show train, and it’s also the home of the House of the Dragon’s de facto ruling family, the Hightowers, who live in a gigantic tower called (checks notes) The Hightower. I wasn’t making a joke either. The tower in the game glows different lights, which is exactly what the Hightower does in the series. The first book was out by the time this came out, though I don’t think all the Oldtown lore established yet.
Take everything I said about the first two tables, give players even less sh*t to shoot at, AND add a “spin table” like in the 1972 Bally classic Fireball and you have Old Town, the third table and one of the worst tables in this entire feature. There really isn’t much to shoot, and what limited targets are there are incredibly tough to find the shooting angles for. And this time around, there isn’t anything to ricochet the ball into the targets, either. This table is dead inside, but then again, the whole game is.
The only nice thing I can say about Dragon Beat is that you can disable all the interruptions, turning the modes off and just playing pinball. Only, they didn’t adjust the scoring for that mode, making it the same three tables with even less to do. Spectacular. I’m STUNNED that of all the Japanese exclusives, this got a global release? THIS?! Seriously?! Completely lacking in charm or logic, I have to assume Dragon’s Beat’s subtitle “Legend of Pinball” is purely sarcastic. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #106 of 125
Percentile: 15%
Pro Pinball: Timeshock! Platform: PlayStation Released February, 1998 Directed by Adrian Barritt Developed by Cunning Developments Published by Empire Interactive Remade in 2016 as Pro Pinball Ultra
Why does Mount Rushmore look like the Three Stooges? I swear to God I thought that’s what it was at first, like a satire. Thomas Jefferson’s head looks like Moe. So it’s wrong all around, because Jefferson would have clearly been the Curly of that group.
It looks like Attack From Mars f*cked Centipede, but Pro Pinball: Timeshock! is a pretty big improvement over Pro Pinball: The Web. This despite the fact that Timeshock’s biggest problems were both carry-overs from the original Pro Pinball game: short mode timers and floaty physics. Maybe that’s what the whole “time shock” thing is about, because I’m shocked they didn’t recognize the timers were too short for physics this floaty. If making shots added time, that would be one thing, but they don’t. Floaty balls also make multiball tougher because the balls linger longer, clogging up the flipper zone and shooting angles. In fairness, I’m a mediocre-at-best multiball player to begin with, but I especially struggled with this one.
Maybe I just suck. I probably suck. BUT, that short clip really does make it clear that a single slip-up can quickly lead to the flipper zone getting completely jammed. My biggest problem with Timeshock is it just asks for too much perfection from players. Just like The Web, I watched multiple modes end because of one early-in-the-mode missed shot that simply got caught-up in table mechanics, so by the time the ball returned to the flippers there was no hope of winning. It really doesn’t help that the nudge is incredibly ineffective, so there’s essentially no defense. And some of the modes are just completely f*cking brain dead. There’s a multiball that does my least favorite gimmick: reversing the flipper buttons. I’ve always hated that sh*t, but Timeshock has the worst version of it ever, because the upper flipper doesn’t reverse. So pressing the right flipper activates the left flipper BUT ALSO the upper right flipper. But hold on, because what happens when the lane that the upper right flipper blocks is the lit lane?
That one took my breath away. It’s just such a careless design, but at this point, it tracks with everything I’ve seen from the Pro Pinball series. It’s pinball made to look like real pinball to non-pinball fans. But the physics aren’t good enough to pass and the nudge isn’t good enough to defend most situations. So, no, I don’t think Timeshock really deserves legendary status. It’s just kind of okay. Maybe even good, but certainly not great. It looks fantastic, I’ll give it that. It’s probably the best looking game in this entire feature so far. I really like the green and red. Attack From Mars superfan Angela said they were clearly trying to mimic the look of it, and she didn’t mean that as a knock on the game. So, that’s Timeshock! It’s okay. Oh, except one thing. If you play Timeshock! with this angle:
It’s not much to look at, but trust me, this is f*cking awesome.
It becomes easily the greatest pinball video of its time. After a game of that angle, I called my family in to play just one more game of Timeshock. It didn’t end up being just one more game. Had it not been late already, I probably would have lost a full day to my family wanting to play more of it. Everyone sat in wide-eyed shock at what we were experiencing. Angela was the first to say what we were all thinking. “Honestly, I like (these physics) more than Pinball FX.” Yeah, me too. Timeshock! is amazing. The floatiness? Gone. Ball handling? Possible. Defense? So well done. Timeshock! in this camera angle, and only this camera angle, is an incredibly convincing arcade pinball experience, in gameplay if not in looks.
Playing Timeshock with these very convincing physics made me appreciate just how well designed Timeshock! is as a pinball table. I could totally buy this as a sequel to Attack From Mars that isn’t made by Brian Eddy but has some input from him. The Japanese fan layout is similar and it has a prominent driver placed smack-dab in the center. But the evolution of the concept is the addition of a third flipper with a Steve Ritchie loop that’s just a joy to shoot. Excellent scoring balance, too, with proper risk/reward considerations. If there’s any lingering problem with the physics, it’s that the ball CONSTANTLY gets caught in extended bumper cycles. Sasha the Kid had one that lasted over a minute. Honestly, I think the bumper situation is even worse with this camera and it still causes problems with the mode timers. I don’t know what the solution to this could be. Maybe spread the bumpers out a little bit, but otherwise, this sucker has better flow than central air conditioning.
I wonder if they originally had a gate for the time chamber thing, only it was a little TOO close to Attack From Mars and they dropped it. The shot is too open and it does mess with the pace a little bit. Angela was using it as a dumper during multiball, though it also doubles as a key shot during those modes.
Timeshock is, for all intents and purposes, the true start of “modern” video pinball. The spiritual father of The Pinball Arcade, Pinball FX, and Zaccaria Pinball. Though I’m going to continue the feature up through the PlayStation 2/GameCube era. I consider Pinball Arcade and its DLC model to be the start of video pinball as it exists today, so we have some time left to go. But what Timeshock accomplishes in this camera angle feels like a watershed moment in the evolution of video pinball. There’s really no asterisk to go with it. I didn’t expect lifelike physics in this feature at all. This is a true pinball simulation.
This camera angle was more of the floatiness and bad ball handling physics. Really, its ranking at the end of this feature is ONLY for the 4th “overhead full table view” game.
To give you an idea of how overjoyed everyone was when we played this, the kids recognized the Pro Pinball name from my Steam library and, when I told them it was THIS table and only this table, only updated, they all were like “let’s play that.” Make no mistake: the original Timeshock lived up to the hype. It was, at the time it was released, the greatest pinball video game ever made, and nothing topped it until the modern era. Verdict: YES!
Final Holder of “Greatest Pinball Video Game Ever Made” before the Modern Era
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #1 of 125
Percentile: 100%
ParanoiaScape aka Screaming Mad George’s ParanoiaScape Platform: PlayStation Released May 28, 1998 Directed by Joji “Screaming Mad George” Tani Developed by Jorudan Published by Mathilda Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Mom?!
You might not have heard of Screaming Mad George, but you know his work. He did the special effects on movies like Big Trouble in Little China, Predator, and the 3rd and 4th Nightmare on Elm Street films. After looking at his filmography, I was positively stoked to see what that guy came up with for his one and only video game. Oh, actually playing it? My spidey sense told me it probably wasn’t going to be all that good. The concept sounded a little too ambitious for the capabilities of the original PlayStation: a first person shooter set in a surreal world that replaces guns with flippers and a ball. Sounds neat! Make it for modern platforms! Oh, only PS1? Yikes.
Well, hold on. That doesn’t look too bad. I mean it clearly looks like a PS1 game and also what I saw when I accidentally chemically cooked my eggs in lysergic acid instead of citric acid. Hey, the bottles looked similar (I ate the eggs anyway because waste not, want not, and then came the rampage and people died. You know what? It’s a long story), but my point is the above game looks cool. That blue fireball you see on the right between the ear and the sentient golf tee is the ball, and the object of ParanoiaScape is to move forward, batting the ball up and down to take out enemies and the occasional boss using pinball mechanics instead of a gun. Okay, okay. Cool. And here’s level 1-2, the second of nine total levels, in its entirety:
Yeah, so it’s not exactly Doom, is it? You can’t turn around. You can only see straight ahead, even if the level isn’t a straight line. While the flippers do bat the ball up into the level, the ball might launch whether you flip or not, sort of like a paddle game. Or hell, maybe the ball will just not react to the flippers and drain. It CONSTANTLY gets hung up on flippers, whether you flick or not. And when the ball travels deep into the playfield, it could be quite a while before it returns to you, so you don’t get to experience the satisfaction of what it’s hitting. You can play with ten balls or unlimited, but really, the main object is to just never walk in front of the ball. As long as you can keep the ball in front of you and avoid bullets and enemies, the game’s a cinch. I beat it on my first try in under an hour and only needed one continue. So the good news is, it’s short. The bad news is ParanoiaScape just fundamentally doesn’t work.
You don’t even get the ball in this level and just have to flip the enemies back, only the collision isn’t very good.
I ended up looking for the Japanese instruction book because I was convinced I was somehow playing the game wrong. ParanoiaScape provides a HUGE variety of nightmare fuel targets to shoot, but the problem is, the ball physics don’t really allow aiming, and the collision detection isn’t so hot. It’s a bad combination. In the above screenshot, I basically waited out the level, charging into enemies and flipping them, hoping they would fly back and hit other things since presumably that was the object. The game doesn’t exactly tell you. The aiming physics are proven to be a disaster by a later boss who shoots a chain of energy balls at you. I used save states to check this one and tried every possible angle to see if there was a way to rattle off a string of hits.
Second boss.
Second boss.
Second boss.
Nope. They just fly off in whatever direction regardless of my position or which flipper I used. I replayed this boss, oh, a dozen times. I think the most hits I ever got in a single pass was three. I also did a full game replay and tried hard to find shooting angles for the more monster heavy levels, like these awesome-looking, terrible-playing stages:
Intestines Stage
Internal Organs Stage
Surreal Stage
All those screenshots look sick and I wish the gameplay lived up to how cool they look. I don’t think there’s a single game in this feature I was rooting for harder than ParanoiaScape. Plus it came with a reader recommendation because it didn’t even show up on my genre search for pinball-related games, and I always want to be able to reward fans of games with positive reviews. But GOLLY this plays like sh*t. You just can’t aim the f*cking ball. It spends most of its time hugging one wall or another, especially when the playfield is crowded with enemies. You really feel the lack of being able to aim during this boss:
This is the only boss that felt like a proper “big boss” that was fought with the ball.
If the boss stayed in one central location WAIT, HOLD ON………… (rubs eyes)
Boss from ParanoiaScape
Cassandra from Doctor Who
Russell T Davies imported PS1 games. Who knew? Anyway, if this boss stayed still, it would be tough enough to hit it, but the fight drags on because it moves around, yet the ball stays to the left or right. I only beat it by allowing the ball to drain when it was up close and basically launching when the thing was in the center from point blank range.
Not exactly elegant design.
I also don’t think the engine is very stable, as the ball was constantly clipping through enemies or walls or just plain stopping on the flippers. At least two balls were lost through the drain when I had a drain shield. Even though I was flipping trying to get the ball to shoot, the ball just sort of slid right off the flipper and through the shield. Worst of all is it never really feels like the area where you’re hitting the ball with the flipper actually matches up with what you see on screen. It’s always a little left or right of where you think you need to hit. It’s not intuitive at all. Thankfully, after about forty minutes, the game ends with a completely different engine that has nothing to do with pinball where you just search a crypt for the ghost of a king and queen and escort them to a bed in the center of the room.
Seriously. There’s like eight coffins in this room. One has the ghost of a king, one has the ghost of a queen, there’s a bed in the center. Get the king and queen to the bed and the game is over with the promise of a sequel. I’ll settle for a remake with Screaming Mad George getting a better crew to work with.
I really would love to see someone try this again in the 2020s because there’s SOMETHING here that could be awesome. I think, at least. Like PaTaank, this was an attempt at a new, experimental video game format that could never have worked with the available hardware. Except, I don’t think it was JUST the hardware. Part of the problem is Screaming Mad George had never done a video game before, but I’m also not (completely) blaming him., because he didn’t exactly have an elite programming team to lean on. The main programmer of ParanoiaScape’s most famous game? Probably the NES version Hydlide. You know, that game that’s often listed as one of the worst video games ever made? He also did Alien vs. Predator. No, not the coin-op. No, not the Jaguar game. The SNES Alien vs. Predator. The one that sucks.
This is the finale of the pinball aspect of the game, only all the play mechanics that came before it are gone. You just sit still and use a cursor to select which tube you’re aiming at. The tube will cycle through three symbols and you have to match the symbol to the one on the ground in front of the tube. And then you do the 3D “find the King and Queen ghosts” non-pinball stuff to end the game. ParanoiaScape goes out with a whimper.
So I don’t think this is a case of ParanoiaScape being an intriguing concept that was just too far ahead of its time. The idea of replacing first person shooter guns with pinball stuff is so bonkers that I think even elite programmers in 2026 would struggle to get the idea off the ground as a functional video game. And I literally mean JUST a functional one, never mind a good game. I honestly don’t know if this idea is any good or not. ParanoiaScape is so far removed from a fully working example of its own concept that it’s impossible for me to evaluate the concept itself. All I can safely say is that in 1998, on the PS1, with THIS programming team? Yeah, it wasn’t going to work. Period.
This is an example of why the game doesn’t work. Only one of these doors is the correct door that lets you pass, but try as I might, I couldn’t actually direct the ball into a specific one to speed the game along. I spent basically the entire play session just focused on keeping the ball alive and hoping it would eventually bounce into the targets. There’s no time limit. ParanoiaScape is really more of an experience than a functional game. But it’s an unforgettable experience. I’ve got to give it that.
ParanoiaScape has devoted fans and it’s easy to understand why. There’s never been anything like it and the visuals are haunting and brilliant. Plus it was a Japanese exclusive that had a relatively small print run that fetches hundreds of dollars on the open market today, and since it never got a re-release it has what I call a “forbidden fruit” quality about. Even I get excited for those types of games. But I really think, deep down, most of its fans are more fans of the visuals and the core concept instead of any raw gameplay. I know that’s where I am.
This is what golfers see when they go to hell for all the golf tees they murdered.
I get no pleasure saying this, but I really thought the gameplay was so horrible and so broken that I found ParanoiaScape to be just kind of boring to play. Especially the second time around, after I’d seen and experienced all the creature designs. It looks great, but ParanoiaScape plays exactly like I would expect a completely new style of game to play if it was directed by a Hollywood visual effects specialist who had never made a video game before and programmed by the guy who did Hydlide and SNES Alien vs. Predator. Exactly like that. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #92 of 125
Percentile: 26%
Power Pinball aka Golden Logres (Japan) Platform: PlayStation Released July 22, 1999 Designed by Yoshikatsu Fujita Developed by Little Wing Published by Success Never Released in North America NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Awesome layout. Really wish the physics weren’t sh*tty.
This was one of the very last additions to this feature. Originally it was supposed to be a bonus review if I had time while the “enhanced” Dreamcast remake Neo Golden Logres was going to be the sole representative of this game AND the career of prolific video pin designer Yoshikatsu Fujita that got a full review and ranking in this feature. And then I found out that the PS1 game was a lot better than the Dreamcast game, which is an unimaginable sh*t show of sadness and gloom with some of the worst physics in this feature. It’s so different from Power Pinball’s original build that, JOY TO WORLD, I have to review both! So I’m going to go a little out of order and lump in the Dreamcast game’s review here.
Neo Golden Logres Platform: Sega Dreamcast Released October 26, 2000
Designed by Designed by Yoshikatsu Fujita Developed by Littlewing Published by Success Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
You can’t do this on the PS1 build, which is the only advantage the Dreamcast game has.
Full disclosure: I didn’t put anywhere near as much time into the Dreamcast build as I did the PS1 build, and not just because it plays worse. The Dreamcast game has the same three tables as the PS1 game, but you can play the three in any order. The PS1 game is a linear game where you have to complete twelve modes. You start on the Camelot table, then eventually transfer to the Land’s End table until you complete all its modes, then BACK to Camelot for more modes, then Fisher King, then back again to Camelot for the world’s most annoying version of Lost in the Zone, then the game ends. No post-credit gameplay, and your score is your score. It felt like it took forever to get to the finale, but it wasn’t even two hours. That’s never a good sign. Also, both Sasha the Kid and Dave separately asked why Mickey Mouse was making call-outs during this God awful sounding grand finale:
All that story mode stuff doesn’t seem to apply to the Dreamcast build. The quests from the PS1 game, the RPG facade, and seemingly the whole point of playing the game are apparently missing from the Dreamcast game. If they aren’t, it’s not obvious from playing it. For all its problems, the PS1 game makes your progress clear. That’s not the case with the Dreamcast version, which replaces the status screen with the laziest, blandest DMD scoreboard from this era of video pinball. So while the three tables look great, the trade-off is, you know, the whole f*cking point of the game.
Camelot (Neo Golden Logres for Dreamcast)
Land’s End (Neo Golden Logres for Dreamcast)
Fisher King (Neo Golden Logres for Dreamcast)
All three of the tables are actually very strong in their layouts, and had they played with Pro Pinball’s physics, we might be talking about maybe the best video pinball game just from the shots. There’s no bash toys or gimmicks. Just basic old school sharpshooting, and really, it’s hard to imagine three strongest layouts. That’s why Golden Logres and especially the Dreamcast remake are such heart breakers. Ugh, those physics. On the PlayStation, they’re bad. This is yet another sandpaper flippers game where the ball slows down on the flippers. Maybe everyone who has done this thinks they’re making pinball better by slowing down the ball so you have more time to aim. But it just comes across as janky. That alone threw my timing off really badly, but it gets worse: it’s NEVER consistent whether the ball will slow down or just carry on at the same speed.
So this is yet another fifth generation video pinball game that got the friction all wrong. And I do mean all wrong, as the ball sometimes has trouble interacting with solid surfaces. There were a few times where full-force shots that hit a target right in the sweet spot just went totally limp anyway. A game where you can hit a drop target dead center and not have it register is going to get a NO! every f*cking time. So I’m angry because even adequate physics would have been good enough to get these three tables a YES! So you would think that a remake would seek to just improve the physics. But the Dreamcast build had all the same issues AND it had much, much heavier gravity, making it significantly less fun to play. Thus a game that was practically straddling the YES!/NO! line on PlayStation is buried in the NO! pile on the technologically superior game console. Sad, that.
You can continue seemingly as much as you want, even keeping your score, in the Dreamcast game. So why even have lives? What a f*cking disaster.
Replacing the scoreboard on the Dreamcast are these two swords that encourage you to shoot combos. Except, these tables (especially Fisher King) don’t lend themselves at all to combo shooting. I’m not even sure what the point of Neo Golden Logres is at all. Really, the only notable aspect of it is that it’s the second smallest full-release Dreamcast game in terms of how much space it uses in the disc. The only smaller game? Namco Museum. So it’s not like they took advantage of the additional horsepower. The resolution is better. That’s it. What a lazy, pathetic effort.
This was NOT my first ball, but Golden Logres might be the most generous ball dispenser this side of a bowling alley.
While the PS1 game has interesting ideas, the game is actually too easy even with the pathetic physics. Such mundane tasks as the inlane lights, the rollovers, or a bank of drop targets can light extra balls. In the session where I beat the game, I finished on my “first ball” with a stockpile of five extra balls AND balls two and three still to burn. In reality, I lost plenty of balls, especially on Fisher King, which is the only of the three tables that’s got multiple lethal angles. The other two tables heavily rely on their slingshots for challenge, but for every ball I lost I usually got an extra ball almost immediately. Had the flippers not given me the timing issues of not knowing when the ball would slow down or when it would keep going, I wouldn’t have needed hours. I’d like to see this remade with better physics. It could have been #1, and it didn’t even get a YES! I’m positively depressed over that. Verdicts: NO! and NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #48 (PS1) #73 (Dreamcast)
Percentile: 62% (PS1) 42% (Dreamcast)
The Pinball aka Simple 1500 Series Vol. 11: The Pinball Platform: PlayStation Released July 22, 1999 Developed by Nekogumi Published by Culture Publishers Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Is this based on Amelia Earhart? But the game didn’t even crash!
The Simple franchise was a series of budget-release PlayStation games, some of which will be VERY familiar to US audiences. Did you ever go into a gas station or drug store that, for whatever reason, had an assortment of PlayStation games mixed in along with music CDs? Probably games published by a company called Agetec? I can tell you this: in the Bay Area, these were EVERYWHERE, especially Billiards and Tennis. The gas station closest to our house had a spinning CD kiosk, and that kiosk had multiple copies of PlayStation Billiards and at least one copy of bowling FOR YEARS. Drug stores tended to have Snowboarding and Tennis. There were more but those four specifically had distribution like I’ve legitimately never seen from any other budget games.
All four of those games seen above are part of the same franchise as “The Pinball.” Tennis? It was Volume 26. Billiards was Volume 10, while Snowboarding was 27 and Bowling was 18. There were even more too, including PlayStation 2 games, one of which is still to come in this feature (oh joy for me, especially after THIS piece of sh*t). The “1500” part of “Simple 1500” referred to how much yen they cost. At the time, 1500 yen was about $11 in US money. These days, $11 can buy you a LOT of quality video games. But during my childhood, whether anyone admits it or not, there absolutely was a stigma that “budget label” meant “bad.” It wasn’t true. I actually DID buy a budget-priced gas station PS1 game that I loved very much called Starsweep (it wasn’t part of the Simple 1500 franchise). But I think most people assumed these games were no good. I can’t speak to the quality of the rest of the Simple 1500 franchise, but The Pinball sure lives down to that. Good call not grabbing distribution rights for this one, Agetec.
These physics are straight out of the Apple II era from 1981, but this is 1999 now, and on the PlayStation! How the hell are we back to hoppy, wobbling ball physics and flippers that have the gripping power of a fly strip (thank you Sasha for that one)? Seriously, this game has some WEIRD issues with friction, especially off the flippers. The ball sometimes just loses all momentum just by touching a dead flipper. Now the above clip was taken before I tinkered with the options, so that’s the game set to 3 in speed. I mostly played with the speed set to 5. There’s two tables, both of which can be played in what is basically a tutorial mode and a normal mode. For those who don’t read Japanese:
The two arrows point to the tables outside the tutorial modes. The top arrow is for the pilot-themed table and the bottom for the war-themed table.
Technically the two tables are called “Speeder” and “Exciting.” This table is the one called “Exciting.” I promise, it’s not. And yeah, they totally phoned-in the themes too. There’s a lot of generic themes in this feature, but this is like a new standard of generic.
Setting the speed to 5 didn’t improve the game. Really, it just makes the ball reach the flippers in less hops before resuming the tiny hopping on the flippers. This will be one of the final “living ball” games of this feature, at least for consoles (still quite a few Game Boy Color/Game Boy Advance games to go), and it’s one of the more energetic living balls yet. But then the ball slams the brakes when it rolls against any surface, be it an orbit, the inlane, or the flippers. I really expected to be past this type of sh*t by now. The Pinball features physics that would rank among the worst of any game in this feature, and that’s truly shameful when you factor in the advantage they had of being able to model their physics after twenty years of video pinball evolution. Surely they could study the difference between good games and bad ones. It becomes even more damning when you remember The Pinball is on a 32-bit console that was considered easy to program for.
What’s even worse is that they didn’t build tables to the strengths of these physics. Really, they just built normal 90s pins that you play with 1981 Apple II physics. When I say you can’t aim in this game, I mean LITERALLY YOU CAN’T AIM! So the second table having two sets of three drop targets might sound like a nice, traditional pinball on paper, but in practice, you can’t shoot them. The only way to hit them is by a lucky bounce. The ball hops too much on the flippers and takes trajectories that don’t match the shooting angles. It’s like playing pinball with a rubber ball that leans a little to the side. The first table gives you too easy of a multiball too. All you have to do is light the rollovers at the top. Anyone who loves pinball instinctively wouldn’t design a table that does that.
There’s a lot of bad games in this feature that clearly weren’t cynical and did the best they could with the talent, hardware, and resources they had to work with. None of that is true of The Pinball. It’s obviously just a +1 for the Simple 1500 series that was rushed out without a care in the world. I don’t give a squirt if it was cheap, because there’s other things that aren’t completely phoned-in that you can buy that cost around ten bucks. Comics. Toys. Used video games. So this one actually makes me mad because some poor kid who loved pinball took a chance on this, maybe skipping over the manga they had their eye on or a movie ticket that would have been a better use of their money. Or hell, just getting $10 worth of coins and playing a pinball table at a local arcade would have provided them more joy than they would ever find in The Pinball. It has no redeeming qualities at all. A genuinely loathsome cash grab and one of the worst video games ever made. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #105 of 125
Percentile: 16%
Worms Pinball aka Addiction Pinball (Windows) Platform: PlayStation Released November 12, 1999 Tables Designed by Tony Senghore Directed by Stefan Boberg Developed by Team17 Published by Infogrames Sold Separately on Steam*
*The version currently sold does NOThave the second table, World Rally Fever. For this reason, Worms Pinball’s ranking in this feature applies ONLY to the PlayStation release. This review is invalid for all other versions. For the current build sold on Steam, check the bonus section.
God DAMN, Angela! That was only her fourth game!
If Worms Pinball had more than one camera angle, I’d almost certainly be crowning it the new champion of this feature. Two excellent tables played with very modern video pinball physics, shooting angles, and ball handling. I guess I just owned the wrong video pinball games as a kid because this is pretty sick. As my father said “how come we never had these games?” Well, that’s easy to answer for Worms Pinball: I didn’t play PC games until my teens and Worms Pinball never came out in America. There were going to be North American ports for the PS1 and even Dreamcast but they both got canned. Crying shame that is, because the two tables, Worms and World Rally Fever, are fantastic.
Worms is of course based on the famous turn-based action games that I adored. While it absolutely does an admirable job of feeling like a pinball adaption of the game franchise, as a pinball machine, it clearly takes inspiration from the works of Pat Lawlor. For the unwashed masses, for a five year period from 1989 to 1994, Pat Lawlor was the hottest pinball designer in the world. His winning streak? Earthshaker, Whirlwind, Funhouse, Addams Family, and Twilight Zone. Wow. The final hit of Lawlor’s streak was a table called Red & Ted’s Roadshow that’s a favorite of mine and especially Angela. A member of the SuperPin line of complex widebody tables, Red & Ted was like an all-star game of Lawlor’s tables, and Worms clearly took inspiration from it. Hell, it outright copies one of Red & Ted’s signature shots, the Blast Zone. They didn’t even bother to rename it, either. It’s the Blast Zone, and LITERALLY THE SAME SHOT!
The flipper for the blast shot is on the left and the target is on the right. That flipper also adds a TON of defensive presence to the table. You have to be mindful of the left side of the playfield because balls seem attracted to that outlane. BUT, the left flipper can defend EVERY angle of the left outlane. That makes Worms the most defensive table so far.
It actually caught me by surprise. From my experience, a copied signature shot only works if you copy the whole shebang. Usually famous shots only work in relation to other shots. Again, both Zen Studios and Magic Pixel have been known to copy whole real tables, either mirroring them or slightly changing the angles while retaining the entire flow. But Worms’ upper playfield is much more of a Japanese fan like you’d see from a Brian Eddy design (Attack From Mars/Medieval Madness) mixed with more shots from Red & Ted. Roadshow’s cellar is roughly the same, only pushed back a bit. The shot that would normally target Red in Red & Ted now shoots a very nice Ritchie loop. This weird hodgepodge of key shots should be incompatible. Instead, Worms is one of the best tables in this feature. Go figure, right? Hell, we liked the Blast Shot in Worms better than Red & Ted, and that flipper also keeps you honest as it defends the outlane. This is a seriously inspired design, but believe it or not, it wasn’t even the best part of Worms Pinball.
It’s criminal that they didn’t release World Rally Fever with the Steam Worms re-release. I know that a couple Team 17 people have read IGC in the past. If they find this review, friends, do the right thing. This is a pretty dang good table!
World Rally Fever is likewise a mashup of popular pins, especially sharing DNA with tables Indianapolis 500 and Terminator 2. But what’s really surprising is that it was unanimously voted as the better of the two tables. For me, the decision wasn’t even close. This sucker flows like a dream. UNQUESTIONABLY the best combo-shooter of this feature so far. I can’t stress enough that stringing together transition shots is intuitive and fast-paced. All shots connect smoothly to each-other, but the game doesn’t make the mistake of having blind combo-shooting be overvalued, either. The scoring balance is a little better for WRF.
What’s remarkable is that the two tables couldn’t be any more different. Worms does have transition shots, but it’s more of a slower pick ‘n flick type of table built around big shots. There’s no real signature shot or mode for World Rally Fever and instead it’s built around keeping a fast pace. Maybe that’s why World Rally Fever comes dangerously close to being generic or “flavorless” as Angela put it. Actually, when we first started, she used her phrase for generic pins that everyone gets a kick out of: “Pinball: The Pinball.” She didn’t know that this was based on a video game. Neither did I, really. The personality is lacking. It does have more multiball modes, or at least it feels like it. Within seconds of my first ever game, I was already shooting multiball. I usually don’t end up loving pins that are like that. Here? It felt logical.
What World Rally Fever lacks in personality it makes up for in being a nearly flawlessly laid-out table that’s SO fun. So is the Worms table too. How the hell did this not get a global console release? And how come Team 17 has done more pinball games? They really have a talent for it. Okay, maybe their tables aren’t exactly bringing anything new to the table, figuratively or literally. But designer Tony Senghore showed an incredible aptitude for assembling the best parts of famous tables in ways that are optimized for a (relative to real life) limited video game physics engine. It’s a damn shame that they walked away after this one, and a bigger shame this didn’t get a full multi-console rollout. It’s an even bigger shame that the modern release is missing the best part of this original 1999 build. Let’s do the right thing here, Team 17, and restore your masterpiece. Verdict: YES!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #3 of 125
Percentile: 98%
Pro Pinball: Big Race USA Platform: PlayStation Released July 31, 2000 Designed by Adrian Barritt Developed by Cunning Developments Published by Empire Interactive NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This came out in July of 2000. The Pixar movie Cars came out in June of 2006. Now I’m not saying Pixar owes them a check, but I’m not NOT saying it, either.
Back-to-back games inspired by Red & Ted’s Roadshow. Who knew it was so influential? Certainly not me. But it’s really only the modes and theme of traveling across the country that carry over from the famous Pat Lawlor-designed SuperPin. Now, after Timeshock, my entire family was hyped. Clearly the team at Cunning Developments knew what they were doing. But, before our second game was over, the excitement had plummeted. Not that Big Race USA is bad. It’s really not. It’s nowhere near as good as Timeshock, either.
I strongly, STRONGLY recommend you set the DMD so it’s not transparent. You can barely see things like the video mode (pictured above) on the default setting.
Big Race USA is in the same situation as Timeshock. The above camera angle plays too slowly to complete many of the timed modes. While it doesn’t have the full table view like Timeshock (what’s up with that?), the game plays a lot faster in the third view. The physics are perfectly fine when you set it to look like this:
(points Angela) HAHAHAHAHAHA! FYI, the players above are as follows: Sasha (Player One), me (Player Two), Angela (Player Three) and Dad (Player Four). Usually if a screenshot I post is a four player game, that’s the order. Dad almost never wins duels against us anymore but if we talk too much sh*t on him, stuff like the above game happens. My 516M was almost an insane comeback.
But, even though the physics are fine and fairly modern, the actual table layout is a jumbled mess of disconnected shots and hard rebounding angles that makes transition shooting too difficult. I won’t go so far as to call Big Race USA a bricklayer, but it’s not exactly overflowing with satisfying shots. Some of the decisions made were positively head scratching. Take a look at the upper right flipper.
Even with the arrows, it doesn’t even look like a target.
The grill of the taxi is one of the key shots of the game, and on its own, it’s not a terrible idea as far as bash toys go. BUT, when you factor-in its location, how close it is to the targeting flipper, and the fact that there’s no risk factors, the taxi shot not only lacks satisfaction but it becomes a downright clunky element. A bash toy absolutely needs to have SOME risk associated with it. Even though the table opens up next to it, the shot is totally safe even if shot from the lower left flipper, and thus a major shot in the table has no excitement. That is, unless the shot opens up for something like an extra ball hurry-up, but I’d argue the mode is the exciting part and not the shot itself. “Would be pin
Cunning Developments can take their royalty check from Pixar and cut a royalty check to Last Guardian for stealing their idea of a McDonald’s Ramp,
So what’s the best shot in the game? Well, there isn’t one. That’s another problem is that, besides the taxi (which stands out for the wrong reasons), there’s no real signature shot that Big Race USA builds around. “This really needed an electric chair” Angela said, and she’s totally right. The gameplay incentivizes touring the table, but tour-the-table layouts that try to be greater than the sum of their parts need that one key shot that ties it all together. For Big Race USA, arguably the left most orbit is that. But that’s part of a fan layout and not really strong enough to base the game flow around.
I do appreciate the slideshow in the options, which allows me to focus on specific elements.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that Big Race USA is a bad game. As a stand alone classic video pinball game, it’s good enough to crack the top 15. But if this same table came out in Pinball FX today, it’d be forgotten about after the next update. This wasn’t totally unanimous. Sasha the Kid REALLY liked Big Race USA, saying that she found it to be defensively better than Timeshock. “It might not have memorable shots, but you can’t say they didn’t make a great rebounder!” And she’s not wrong.
I’d argue the defense and the remarkable scoring balance are actually even better than Timeshock. But the rules with the items and the purposes of the different cars are confusing and the instruction book wasn’t much help. Timeshock was remarkably intuitive. Big Race USA feels like a game that plies on complicated rules just for the sake of justifying a single table disc release. So while Big Race USA is fine, it’s no Timeshock. Not even close. And by the way, I originally published this without noting how stunned I was that this finished #14 in the rankings. My desert island scenario made me realize what I value, and one of those things is variety of shots, which leaves open the potential to grow on me. Big Race finishing #14 surprised me, but it shouldn’t. Verdict: YES!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #14 of 125
Percentile: 89%
Pro Pinball: Fantastic Journey Platform: PlayStation Released October 17, 2000 Designed & Directed by Adrian Barritt Developed by Cunning Developments Published by Empire Interactive NO MODERN RELEASE
It’s what Dave calls a “WINO” or “Widebody in Name Only.” It looks fine, and I ultimately decided it was fine. My family didn’t universally agree with me.
I needed a few cracks at writing the Little Mermaid II review (and it still ain’t that great so imagine how bad it was before🤪) so I was late joining my family for Fantastic Journey and we had to postpone a day. I asked them “how was it?” and Angela looked at me and gave a thumbs down like Caesar. Dad didn’t really care for the two flipper layout or gimmicky nature of it either. Like with Big Race USA, only Sasha The Kid thought it was really good. “I thought everyone was into shot selection and making your own strategies? What more do you want?” Well, good flow for one. This thing flows like a stream post-beaver invasion.
The arrows are SO confusing because they catch your eye every time even though they’re unnecessary to gameplay. Even after you adjust to the table and its rules, pinball players are wired to look for lights, and lights that are specifically shaped like arrows will call attention to your eyeballs, especially when key shots are marked by a different kind of lit arrow. Yes, really! It’s tacky and lowbrow and I can totally get why a lot of people forgot about this one.
One thing is very, very obvious: the team at Cunning Developments really enjoyed the defensive, rebounding-centric vibes of Big Race USA, because they leaned even harder into it with Fantastic Journey. Despite possibly the biggest variety of shots in a two-flipper layout of any 90’s tables, real or digital, Fantastic Journey is a defense-first table. It’s PUNISHING with its long drop rebounds and bouncy physics. Myself and the other girls all ate TILTs at least once with poor Angela tilting twice in a single game. It’s dangerously close to feeling like a bricklayer. It got so bad that we did something we haven’t really messed around with too much in the Pro Pinball series: the operator’s menu.
Yes, you can even mess with the condition of the table, though I don’t recommend it. Even if you’re familiar with the idea that tables get their own “personality” from the wear and tear of usage, you can’t really accurately simulate that, because the thing is, each table is unique in that regard. Their idea of a table not well maintained is to just make the shots wobble more. Stick with slope adjustment.
The default slope is 6. We found 5 worked a little better and probably should have been the default setting. The rejections were a little more lifelike with it. On the default setting, too many conversion shots that should have easily had enough speed and momentum to clear any orbit or ramp rejected. That went away when we set the slope to “5.” But set your expectations accordingly, because it’s not going to transform Fantastic Journey into a Timeshock-like experience. The table just isn’t that good. It has one truly memorable aspect in the ships that come out the playfield:
Hey, awesome shot. No notes.
There’s more than one ship, too. The ships change to match the mode. Despite that, they didn’t attempt to make it a video game-like thing. They basically created a shot that would be awesome in real life but too cost-prohibitive and likely prone to breaking down to actually ever be placed in a real table (if you don’t believe me, look at all the problems Cirqus Voltaire with a similar element has).
Sadly, the rest of Fantastic Journey is just sort of middling. There’s a spinner with a magnet attached to it that catches the ball and launches it through its orbit. That’s precious. Well, except for the fact that it takes a moment to actually do that and murders the pace of the table in cold blood.
Fun With Bonus’ head Steven didn’t love the video mode, but honestly I didn’t mind it. I wasn’t good at it. It’s a little too fast.
And that’s really the problem. The high, long rebounds do everything they can to prevent ball control. BUT, the table doesn’t maintain a fast pace that tough rebounders really need to feel frantic and tense. Now, with that said, the scoring balance is great, the multiballs are crazy easy to unlock but not so easy to play that it throws the balance off, the game is generous with extra balls, and there’s just enough nice modes to make the YES! not really that close. Angela disagrees firmly, believing this is the first truly bad table in a game with good physics in this feature.
Of the four Pro Pinball games, this is the first one where the main camera works well enough that you don’t need to change it. The physics don’t feel as floaty. On the other hand, Angela (and only Angela in this case) thinks the shooting angles aren’t as good as the other three. “It’s clearly more limited with its flippers than Time Shock or Race, even though it’s the only two flipper layout” she said. It’s not sour grapes for losing, either. She absolutely stomped us in the duel 3 to 0 to 0 to 0 and even laid down a game even though she technically hadn’t won yet because her lead was so big, which pissed my father off because he still had his turn to take. “Too many extra balls. It’s too easy!” Again, she is the ONLY ONE who thinks it was too easy.
Were this to be a normal Pinball Chick review where I didn’t have to give props to the physics and the options and I was stacking this against a library of hundreds of other pins, I might feel different. Angela said she would be close to giving it the lowest rating we do (though ultimately admitting she’d give it a 2 out of 5). Fantastic Journey is a table with no identity that stands out as a solo video pinball game, but would not stand tall in a set like Pinball FX or Zaccaria. Fantastic Journey can be fun, but it’s too vicious while also never maintaining a consistent tempo. It feels kind of directionless. Ironic given all the f*cking arrows. Verdict: YES!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #33 of 125
Percentile: 74%
KISS Pinball Platform: PlayStation Released March 23, 2001 Tables Designed by Stephen Atkinson and Joel Finch Developed by Tarantula Studios Published by Take-Two Interactive NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Well, yeah. They’re senior citizens. It happens.
KISS Pinball is widely regarded as one of the worst video games ever made. Not just video pinball games, but worst overall games. I used to read EGM religiously around this time, and KISS Pinball was one of the games that only had one person rate it instead of three or four, but it was the first game I remember getting a 1 out of 10 in EGM. Now that I’m all grown-up, part of me always wondered if it was really as bad as its reputation suggested or if the low scores were critics virtue signaling to their readers that they too know KISS the band is safe, sanitized and deeply lame. Going into this feature, I went back and read some of those reviews and they felt just a little too “f*ck KISS, amirite?” I was still cautiously optimistic until it became apparent that Spidersoft/Tarantula Studios have absolutely no talent for pinball, or really anything at all, and are one of the worst studios in gaming history. A perennial developer of “worst game of the year” nominees, and not just for pinball. I came to dread each game by them.
Tarantula is now Rockstar Lincoln. Given their tendency to assassinate pinball, they should be called Rockstar Booth.
Then I found out Tarantula didn’t actually design KISS. It was originally a Windows game developed by Australian studio Wildfire Studios Pty. Ltd. They were the company behind the famous Windows pinball game Balls of Steel, with layouts by designers Stephen Atkinson and Joel Finch (fun fact: I was actually going to include the recent re-release of Balls of Steel in this but I’ll check it out as a full Pinball Chick review some other time). At this point, Wildfire wasn’t doing their own console ports, so they sold the PlayStation rights to KISS Pinball to Tarantula Studios. Partnering with Tarantula for the PS1 port of KISS Pinball was a very, very stupid decision by the Wildfire. They probably just assumed Spidersh*t must be good at video pinball since they made so many of them. Having Tarantula port your carefully crafted pinball game is like hiring Michael Myers to be your babysitter. “Look, I did a Google search and his name kept popping up with babysitters so I figured this guy must be the right one to watch our kids! So anyway, the funeral is Friday.” So is KISS Pinball really as bad as everyone says or was it just dog-piling for the sake of sh*tting on an uncool band?
The answer is, yes, it’s really as bad as everyone says. Warning: this could make you motion sick. I got a little dizzy at one point playing this piece of sh*t.
That’s two full games……5 ball games, mind you…… of KISS Pinball for the PlayStation, completed in seven minutes. Now, I really wanted to review the Windows version because I found a gameplay clip of it and it seems like a typical Pinball Dreams-like. Not amazing by any means. Pretty f*cking generic, actually, but playable at least. Tarantula’s PlayStation build of KISS Pinball, however, is un-f*cking-playable. That’s not an exaggeration. They completely half-assed this port and butchered the physics and ball speed. I want you to see what happens every single time you trap the ball on Last Stop Oblivion, aka the first table, with the right flipper:
I have never seen that before. I am not doing anything there but releasing the flipper. Somehow, the act of releasing the flipper transfers enough energy to the ball to make it jump over the drain. That’s how lifelike the ball physics are. That only happens with the right flipper on that table. The other table it’s a normal (badly programmed) trap. What you’re seeing in the above clip is a glitch, and a glitch I found about ten seconds into my first game. It doesn’t go away. It happens every single time. Unbelievable. Oh, and if that’s intentional, it’s a f*cking dumb idea worthy of ridicule anyway. But it gets so much worse. As you might have noticed, KISS moves far too fast for even a pinball veteran to be expected to follow the action. Again, the only word that works is “unplayable.” I didn’t shoot particularly well in the two games above, or in these two full games on the first table:
But in my defense, I just can’t react that fast because I wasn’t born on Krypton or a member of Flash family. I’ve set Pinball FX and Zaccaria world records, but I couldn’t keep a ball alive at all in KISS. Multiple times I went from the top screen to dead and the game counting-up the post ball bonus before I even realized the ball was in danger, let alone already drained and over with. On top of all that, the ball is too bouncy, which makes rebounding and completing orbits too difficult, assuming you even see the ball at all. ALL the shooting angles are rough and since the ball is so heavy and fast, it makes the upper flippers feel kind of dead. The ball doesn’t roll smoothly like the Windows game appears to do, giving the whole thing an 8-bit vibe. Also, this is really ugly for a PS1 game. This really is one of the most half-assed, lazy port jobs I’ve ever seen.
I have to say that I really don’t think the layouts look inspired in general. I can’t evaluate the shots themselves because the game is just too frustrating to play. It feels like a plug-a-play theme, and very, very generic.
My family and I gave KISS a little over an hour-and-a-half before I literally went to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and threw it across the living room to thunderous applause. Even after 90 minutes of both playing this and watching it, I really can’t describe what the workload for these tables are like because the action moved so fast that I couldn’t tell what was going on besides the act of keeping the ball alive. But at least it has KISS music though, right? Hah, wrong. There’s no songs from the band in this at all. In fact, you’re supposed to bring your own music. Apparently they included the option to, once the table loads, swap the KISS Pinball disc for your favorite KISS™ Officially Licensed Music-Themed Compact Disc Product (Sold Separately). My sister Angela proved she might be an actual saint by saying “in fairness, a fan of the band would likely have their own favorite songs and not want to have someone else select the tracks for them, so I don’t mind this choice.” Fair enough. Like I said, a saint. BTW, I have no dog in this hunt. I don’t listen to the band. I didn’t even know the song “God Gave Rock and Roll to You” from the ending of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was KISS’ song until recently.
I think I was thinking this would be like Funhouse, only with Rudy replaced with Gene Simmons. Nope. I don’t know what tables to compare this to, but it’s never Williams-like. It’s a mess. The infuriating thing is, KISS actually has an astonishing legacy in pinball. I’ve not put quality time into the 1979 Jim Patla classic KISS by Bally, but everyone else has. Angela isn’t a huge fan but Dad, Dave, and Sasha the Kid consider it a top five 1970s pin. That table is the 7th highest selling table of all-time.
My instincts on those scathing reviews were about as bad as the game itself. KISS Pinball really is one of the very worst video games ever made, for any genre. KISS Pinball was a $9.99 budget release so maybe Tarantula’s attitude was “who gives a sh*t? It’s not like we’re making real money on this.” Wouldn’t surprise me. Even if that were the case, how the hell did they butcher the physics and ball speed this badly? It’s almost beyond belief. Either they did it on purpose because they were pissy about working on a $10 budget release or with the KISS license, or they didn’t care and phoned it in without a care of how it came out. Or they just plain have no talent at all. Thank God this is the final game from Spidersoft/Tarantula. If they’re reading this, I want to take this moment to say to everyone who worked on KISS Pinball for PS1 and other Spidersoft/Tarantula games in this feature that you really were the absolute f*cking worst. (nods) Seriously, you were the worst thing to happen to pinball since Fiorello La Guardia. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #110 of 125
Percentile: 12%
Elemental Pinball
aka Nice Price Series Vol. 8: Elemental Pinball Platform: PlayStation Released February 21, 2002 Developed by DigiCube Never Released in the United States NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Disco Theme
Sea Theme
Jester Theme
Yep, all three of those tables are identical. It’s a budget release. Following the success of the Simple series of budget titles, there were tons of copycats. One short lived series was called the “Nice Price” series, and Elemental Pinball is a member of it. It’s a boring, bland, utterly generic 8-bit-like pinball game with bouncy physics that left me staring at my keyboard wondering what the f*ck I do with it. I had to remind myself that we’re now well into the 2000s while playing this, because Elemental Pinball feels like a video pinball concept from over ten years earlier that got frozen in a block of ice. In terms of layout, it was obvious to everyone that they were going for a Space Cadet-like target shooting layout. There’s no ball handling at all, and really no objective either besides scoring points and keeping the ball in play. But, there is a twist: the whole elemental thing.
Halfway through the above clip, you can see me activate the water ball mode, which makes the balls ricochet around. For the duration of the mode, they don’t really behave like pinballs and instead just continuously deflect off any and all surfaces while you rack-up extra balls. It would be a neat idea if it didn’t last so long and if the balls didn’t act like a slow motion replay. What the hell were they thinking with this? You don’t have to worry about flipping. The balls will clear every orbit. Again, they’re temporarily brick breaker-type balls. It turns an already uninteresting game into an outright slog. The fireball you can also unlock doesn’t do that. It behaves like a normal pinball and the only thing it does is score triple points and rack up even more extra balls. Seriously, at one pint I had eleven EBs and said “where the f*ck did all these come from?” The other mode is a centipede. I wish the game had more of this:
That centipede is literally the only exciting aspect of an otherwise dead-on-arrival video pinball game, and it rarely shows up. Would it have REALLY killed them to create a few extra layouts or more enemies like that? Mind you, the layout isn’t so bad, especially given the physics. You can aim and the upper left orbit is a genuinely satisfying shot. But the table is so low key and short on pomp that just looking at it is exhausting. I get it’s a budget release, but Elemental Pinball seriously feels like they just rushed the most efficient layout they could muster out the door without any polishing. With slightly better physics and presentation, this could have at least been a bottom-feeding YES! game. Instead, it might be the most nothing game in this entire feature. It offers so little to even talk about that I almost cut this from the feature. Yet another “budget game means no effort” and I’m getting so sick of those. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #74 of 125
Percentile: 41%
Austin Powers Pinball Platform: PlayStation Released October 25, 2002 Designed by Joel Finch and Adrian Cook Developed by Wildfire Studios Published by Gotham Games NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Ball is rolling.
Ball hops completely unprovoked.
What you’re seeing in the above two pictures is a rolling ball that, before reaching the flippers, suddenly lifts off with enough speed and momentum to clear the drain and hit the right flippers. And yes, this is a repeat from other games in this feature. What can I say? There’s so many Pinball Dreams-like games in this feature that made the exact same mistake that I assume they all just come from the same toolkit. “MAKE YOUR PINBALL VIDEO GAME! SELL IT AT DRUG STORES! ACT NOW!” But that hop completely ruins Austin Powers because it just blocks your ability to aim at key shots. (shrug)
Austin Powers, like those Pool and Bowling PS1 budget games I mentioned above, was a regular at gas stations and drug stores. Rite Aids and Walgreens always seemed to have a copy. It’s yet another $9.99 budget release from the same team that designed KISS, using basically the same engine as KISS, with the same ball-hops-over-flippers issue as KISS. The only advantage is Austin Powers has better layouts and moves slightly less fast so as not to be impossible to play. It’s still horrible. Nearly a quarter-century after video pinball was properly invented with Atari’s Video Pinball and we still have a game that has no handling, a bouncy ball that resists being aimed, limited shooting angles, and absolutely no flow at all.
The “video mode” in the International Man of Mystery table is six trivia questions. The pool must be pretty small because I played four or five rounds of this (six questions to a round) and by the end every question was a repeat. This was the only question I didn’t outright know the answer to, but I got it anyway because there’s only two multiple choice answers and so I had a 50/50 chance. The answer is “Smith” by the way.
While there’s audio clips from characters in the movie and some DMD movie clips (when you lose the ball it’s the scene when Austin Powers gets a stick shift pushed into his crotch. Nice touch), you never shake the vibe that this could be any theme. To anyone who says “isn’t that true of most pinball?” I swear to you it’s not true. You can tailor shots to have a cinematic link to a movie. I found one such thing in either Austin Powers table:
That’s it.
The fem bots, which shoot bullets from their boobs, are represented by the pop bumpers. That’s it. That feels thematically linked directly to the movie without having to use imagination. And that is it. +1 for the fem bots. -1 for this:
Mini-Me isn’t in the first movie. Why must I be surrounded by frickin’ idiots?
For what it’s worth, the second table based on The Spy Who Shagged Me shoots much better than the first one, although both tables feel like they were built to incorporate that hop on the flippers to make the game more challenging. So many key shots are outright prevented by them. I was originally going to say “it only happens on the left flipper” but it actually does happen frequently enough on the right flipper to be a thing. Why not, I don’t know, FIX THE DAMN HOP?! So really, the most interesting thing about the game is that it outright stole Twilight Zone’s Battle the Power magnetic pulse mini-game, only it’s not exciting and about 1% as rewarding. I say that as someone who is in total agreement that Battle the Power throws the balance of Twilight Zone wildly off, but I love that mode. Don’t do this. No.
“Guys, I have an idea. Austin POWERs…… Battle the POWER. Huh? HUH?! Alright, let’s call it a day.”
The second table did a lot of annoying things. It has a wavy orbit (is it literally supposed to be groovy?) that bends a couple times, which might be fun if the ball didn’t have bouncy physics that does things like go from rolling to airborne unprompted. So that groovy ramp constantly got halfway through and rejected off full-force shots just based on the luck of where the ball’s bouncy cycle was. It also made me repeat a couple modes that I already finished. I beat the Mini-Me mode where you have to shoot the orbit Mini-Me is at, and then I hit the mode start and it was immediately a repeat of it. What the f*ck? I completed the mode the first time! Why wasn’t it checked off?
Christ, I can’t believe I still have more games like this to go.
Whatever. Ten years after Pinball Fantasies released and Austin Powers feels like yet another slightly reworked knock-off of it with outdated physics. While I don’t think it’s entirely fair to be lumped-in with KISS because that truly is putrid all around, I really can’t blame any critic who did just do a two-for-one review of both since they both represent the same problem: an early 90s physics engine, with NOTHING done to improve it, for a 2003 movie license game. It really wouldn’t have killed Wildfire to improve the physics engine of Austin Powers. There is an effective nudge that can stop that leap before it happens, but it throws your timing up AND burns through tilt warnings. Yet another “it’s a budget release, so who cares?” I care. Pinball fans care. I imagine Austin Powers fans cared. I’m not scoring against how fuddy-duddy a game like this was in 2003 because it’s not 2003 anymore so who cares? But it IS shameful. And no, it’s not okay because Austin Powers the character is a literal relic of the past. Yeah, like that was intentional. Come on, they ain’t THAT clever. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #79 of 125
Percentile: 37%
Patriotic Pinball Platform: PlayStation Released April 22, 2003 Designed by Stephen Atkinson and Adrian Cook Developed by Wildfire Studios Published by Gotham Games NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
American on Duty
I had a “sigh, let’s get this over with” attitude with Patriotic Pinball when I first booted it up. As another Wildfire production and the final $9.99 PlayStation budget release, I expected another Pinball Dreams-like game. It even had the same menu as KISS and Austin Powers. Then the first table loaded, and to my surprise, its engine was an original 3D pinball engine. “Let’s get this over with” was out the window, at least for a little while. It features two tables, though, both tables are so similar that they come across more like remixes of each-other.
American on Duty
Road Trip: Coast to Coast
Okay, so there are a couple key differences in the two, most notably the placement of the bumpers and the addition of an upper flipper in the second table, Road Trip. But that upper flipper is one of the most useless flippers in terms of the actual targets it’s capable of shooting. Really, the flipper is there completely for defense against the bumpers, which are capable of launching the ball like a rocket towards the drain much faster than a human can reasonably act. Instead of dialing back the punching power of the bumpers, it feels like the designers added a flipper that has no real target to shoot as a band aid. Finally, some shots are tightened or loosened depending on the table. Despite these changes, it really does sincerely feel like two versions of one table, each with their own ROMs. Whether or not that’s the case, America on Duty is the best of the two tables.
It’s fine. At least the theme is consistent.
But “let’s get this over with” quickly returned when I realized that Patriotic Pinball’s engine was just plain no good. It’s too limited in its shooting angles and some of the angles they did include don’t feel realistic at all. Even though both tables have a Japanese fan layout, none of us could find angles for multiple orbits off the flippers. Only conversion shots or shots that use the insanely overpowered nudge worked. My family, who enjoyed playing the Pro Pinball series but lost interest in lending me a hand as I’ve had twelve out of the last thirteen games have not been good, sat down to play this, then quickly sat back up and said “have fun with that, Cathy!” Thanks fam.
The themes themselves are pretty boring, and some of the modes are too punishing. American on Duty, like Austin Powers, has Twilight Zone’s “Battle the Power” mode in the guise of using pulses to launch aircraft carriers. Clearly Wildfire LOVED Twilight Zone. But the physics feel different in this mode than they do in the normal table. The ball moves too fast and is too heavy, causing games to end too quickly. I never got credit for finishing the mode, which I’m guessing takes five completions. I never did better than four.
When Austin Powers does something better than this, you’re in trouble.
And there’s a “gather food” mode in Road Trip that can end in a single shot if you shoot the bumpers. Which, like, 50% of the right flipper’s surface area will shoot the bumpers whether you aim for them or not. The bumper orbit is by far the widest orbit on the table, so it’s too easy to hit them, which ends the mode immediately. This is such a recklessly designed mode that’s so easy to fail that it’s not even exciting. It becomes annoying when it activates, because you know it’s not going to end well, especially since the problem with some orbits not having direct shooting angles means you can’t even access them via a trapped shot. You have to shoot them off rebounds, and where do most of those shooting angles come from? Oh right, the bumpers. The same ones you can’t touch, at least from the front.
The game tells you the pops have salmonella. I agree too. They ARE toxic! Now, in fairness, when the ball entered the bumpers from behind via an orbit, it didn’t seem to ever end the mode. It doesn’t make it better though because so many angles feed the bumpers directly.
Patriotic Pinball was the final ever original PlayStation pinball game, and when I saw they dumped the 2D engine, I had high hopes. Video pinball had come so far during the PlayStation era before regressing like Pro Pinball had never happened. Unfortunately, Patriotic Pinball is a further regression. Simply put, the game just isn’t fun, and not just because of the bad engine. Even if it had just a couple more shooting angles to rise to the level of average, I question whether it could have gotten a YES! The theming and presentation is bland to the point of exhaustion. We’ve already seen both the military and US road trip themes in this feature. Why does “budget release” have to also mean generic? You really couldn’t come up with something more creative than the same tired themes that have been done to death? I enjoyed the PS1’s offerings. I’m also glad to be done with them. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #52 of 125
Percentile: 48%
FINAL RANKINGS
Pro Pinball: Timeshock (1998 – PlayStation)
Akira Psycho Ball (2002 – PlayStation 2)
Worms Pinball (1999 – PlayStation)
True Pinball (1996 – PlayStation/Sega Saturn)
Digital Pinball: Necronomicon (1996 – Sega Saturn)
This review is a repost from Classic Pinball Video Games from 1979 to 2009: The Definitive Review. Because that feature contains full reviews for 130 games, it was causing loading issues for many readers, so this one time, I’m breaking a Definitive Review into smaller pieces. If you get a chance, be sure to check out the full feature as I worked really hard on it.
Akira Psycho Ball Platform: PlayStation 2 Released February 21, 2002 Directed by Norio Nakagata Developed by KAZe Published by Bandai Never Released in North America NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This is kind of like the board game “Crossfire” with pinball.
I’m not a huge fan of the anime movie Akira. I don’t hate it or anything. It’s fine. My father really likes it a lot, but it’s not something I would throw on when I’m bored. So it really speaks volumes how much I f*cking loved Akira Psycho Ball. It’s the final console pinball game from KAZe and a final evolution of their Digital Pinball engine over Last Gladiators and Necronomicon. The physics are similar to those, but with even better passing and ball handling that’s probably the best video pinball had ever seen up to this point. Now, the single player quest starts with a round of what you see above. In this head-to-head pinball, you rebound and shoot for the targets, holding the balls to charge up their potency. I was really worried about Psycho Ball during this sequence. It’s not fun. Not at all. It’s chaos and a bore.
This is more like it.
Thank god you only have to win one match of it before the real pinball begins. As you can see in the above picture, the design mentality is more akin to KAZe’s Sega Saturn games. Not that I’m complaining. In fact, this first table would likely have taken the top spot in either game. A nice variety of shooting angles, a fun three-slot toy in the center, and……. Wait, what’s happening?
Round Cleared
(Transformers noises)
WHA?!
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! Yep, each of the three levels “transforms” by having the lower half the playfield swap-out for a new half. “Doesn’t that mean the shooting angles are the same?” Angela asked. Pssh, party pooper. Also, she’s not entirely wrong, though the new configurations usually add second flippers and a few extra shots via a balcony. More importantly, the defense and rebounding angles do completely change. Sure, it feels slightly gimmicky, but it does successfully keep the game fresh.
The central targets STILL have poor shooting angles. If they re-release this, that’s the one thing they absolutely have to fix. KAZe never fully embraced proper off-the-trap shooting. Their flippers were always just a little under-powered.
Okay, so they doubled-down on putting hard-to-reach straight-up-the-middle targets. But the layouts they chose for the three tables AND nearly every configuration of those layouts makes for some fun, very fast-paced, very frisky pinball. I was SO CLOSE to making this the new #1 in the rankings, but there’s bigger problems besides those center shooting angles. For one thing, Psycho Ball’s slingshots are just insanely sensitive. If a f*cking gnat landed on them, it’d be curtains for the gnat. The ball just barely, BARELY grazes them and triggers yet another hot-potato sequence between the two slings. Akira might actually have the most hot potato-heavy slingshots in this entire feature. The second table especially:
I should say “third table” but I don’t count the horrible Vs. CPU opening level.
The first and third tables are well suited for the wide variety of multiballs, while the second table seems obsessed with forcing clear-outs. The second table has such aggressive slingshots and shooting angles that feed them that it begins to feel trollish more than challenging. You’ll also note that the middle ramp in the center of the table might be the longest and steepest ramp I’ve ever seen in any real or digital pinball table. Remind me again, what shooting angle is the toughest to get a full force shot up? That’s right, it’s the center angle. Did KAZe just have a thing against centrists and this is where they draw the line? Also, the third configuration of the second table was a massive letdown.
The inlane targets in this are damn satisfying. I love inlane targets. About time KAZe did something good with them.
Oh it still shoots pretty good, but I was expecting something a little more meaty. Akira has one other big problem in that, if you play the single player linear game (you can play the tables solo as well), the scaling is just not very good at all. The third level is by far the easiest, even when you factor in the boss. The second level is by far the hardest in every possible way. The first level is right between them, though I will say the first table is by far the best in the game and KAZe’s best pinball table ever, regardless of which configuration it has. Not that it’s a hard game by any means, as I beat the linear quest in my first every attempt thanks to tons of mundane shots and tasks lighting the extra ball target, which is always a single drop target that’s placed at an easy-to-hit angle. And seemingly every time I lost a ball, the game lit the extra ball target. Here are two:
Extra Ball (Level One)
Extra Ball (Level Two)
Finally, and then I swear I’m done complaining: the third level has two lame special modes: a janky third-person mini-table where you shoot a wall and then smash the cryogenic tubes. I don’t mind the camera angle but the layout is just bad, with a bumper placed at the rear that makes the whole thing feel half-assed. Meanwhile, the “boss fight” against SOL is boring too. The physics change for it and become so slow that it was one of those “look up videos and make sure the emulator isn’t sh*tting the bed* situations. It wasn’t. I think they were aiming for “it’s space so it should be slower and more epic” but it just feels like the game is suffering from hardware failure.
AKIRA Dome
SOL
Despite a laundry list of problems, Akira Psycho Ball is easily the best video pinball game that never came out in the United States. With the exception of versus mode and the two glorified side-quests seen above, even the worst aspects of the tables are still among the elite video pinball tables ever made. KAZe got off to a pretty rocky start in this genre, as I really don’t think Super Pinball, its sequel, or Power Rangers were even good at all. But unlike Spidersoft/Tarantula Studios, KAZe got better and better as they went along.
I really do think this table should have gone on first. With its simple angles, this is by far the easiest of the three.
Eventually, KAZe became one of the all-time great video pinball studios. Akira Psycho Ball and the two Saturn pins came with BIG reputations, but they’re well deserved. I almost didn’t do Akira Psycho Ball or ANY Sixth Generation games. I’m happy I caved-in. And sad, because this is unlikely to get a wide release. I know that the licensing issues with Akira will make that difficult. Psycho Ball is loaded with clips from the movie and even has bits of the movie’s ending after you beat the final stage. But someone, somewhere has to figure this sh*t out, because Akira is genuinely one of THE great licensed games of the sixth generation, for any genre. Thanks for pestering me to add this to the feature, everyone. You were right. You usually are with these things.
I didn’t know about the transforming fields going into this. I knew it was a linear game, that’s all.
I also think this is probably pinball that doesn’t require you to be a hardcore pinhead. Yeah, that second table is a little on the punishing side, but it also still practically rains extra balls. With the news that Last Gladiators is making a comeback, I hope the studio doing that reads this feature. If you are reading this, please make some calls and work out a deal to get the license and do a digital distribution release of it for all modern platforms so that everyone can get a chance to play this. The best video pinball game ever? I didn’t go that far, but I really had to think about it. It’s in the discussion for the GOAT of video pinball for sure. Verdict: YES!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #2 of 125
Percentile: 98%
FINAL RANKINGS
Pro Pinball: Timeshock (1998 – PlayStation)
Akira Psycho Ball (2002 – PlayStation 2)
Worms Pinball (1999 – PlayStation)
True Pinball (1996 – PlayStation/Sega Saturn)
Digital Pinball: Necronomicon (1996 – Sega Saturn)
This review is a repost from Classic Pinball Video Games from 1979 to 2009: The Definitive Review. Because that feature contains full reviews for 130 games, it was causing loading issues for many readers, so this one time, I’m breaking a Definitive Review into smaller pieces. If you get a chance, be sure to check out the full feature as I worked really hard on it.
The Pinball of the Dead Platform: Game Boy Advance Released June 18, 2002 Directed by Yuichi Toyama Developed by Wow Entertainment Published by Sega NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Crush of the Dead?
The Pinball of the Dead so desperately wants to be like Devil’s Crush that it just straight-up copies attack patterns and almost whole layouts. But hey, I liked Devil’s Crush. Everyone did! What could go wrong? Deep breath, okay Cathy. This is the one. The one where I get taken out on a boat and shot like Fredo. Mmmhmm. My body is ready. So, why do I *hate* Pinball of the Dead? Hopefully the clip here’s complete lack of action makes it obvious:
You know, I thought this was Ed O’Neil for the longest time, and so did my entire family. Hell, the first time I saw History of the World: Part I my dad even chuckled and said “Al Bundy.” I just found out, he’s not. It’s a guy named Hunter von Leer. No way! Oh my God, he’s a DEAD RINGER for young Ed O’Neil.
Mind you, THAT’S ON “FAST” SPEED! You mean to tell me the game is capable of playing even slower? GOOD LORD!! How did they do that? Did they set the ball to move at the speed of black hole evaporation? I didn’t even bother to check. I was too scared that I would slip into a coma from which I might never wake. Now, this is one of the rare video pinball games I had as a kid. Played it for a few minutes, stuck it into a drawer and never played again. I didn’t pick it out. I think my Dad got it for me from a two pack at Costco. If I wasn’t doing this feature, I would never have played it again. But I’ve been wrong about games I previously sampled so I really did go into this review cautiously optimistic that my memories of Pinball of the Dead were completely wrong. They were completely right.
The “last boss” isn’t that hard. You’ll notice it has the same Devil’s Crush sinkholes, and they have the same problem as the Crush games: they suck up the ball, pause for dramatic effect, and then after you’re already bored, spit the ball back out. If these had been kickers that immediately launched the ball back into the playfield, it might be exciting. Instead, they do the opposite of making excitement and just murder the pace of the game.
And I thought Muppet Pinball Mayhem could use some caffeine. Muppet was low-energy. This has no energy at all. None. It doesn’t bode well for the Game Boy Advance that the first two video pins are among the least energetic games in the genre, but this really is a new low because the ball speed is really the only thing that drove me to not like the game. This might have been a fun, timeless Devil’s Crush wannabe. Oh, it brings nothing new to the table besides splashes of blood (that you have to turn on in the menu). But there was exactly one exciting shot in the entire first table. It was this:
When in doubt, have a nearly screen-sized giant zombie head. Impossible to be boring (or so I thought). By the way, this entirely stationary bash toy was more fun than any of the bosses.
And that is it. The one fun shot in the entire game. The rest of it is a repetitive chore with some of the most lightweight combat in video pinball. Like the Crush series, Pinball of the Dead leans heavily into live targets. But, the ball has to have momentum to score a kill. What the game considers momentum varies. Like for example:
By the way, awesome job making the flippers blend in with the background. I’m guessing the colors were chosen because of the impossibly dark Game Boy Advance screen. Come to think of it, that’s probably why the game plays slowly too. They wanted players to have plenty of time to locate the ball on the near pitch black screen before it reached the teeny tiny nubby little flippers.
That’s me hitting a zombie from point blank range with the ball. It survived and the ball was harmlessly shooed off to the left flipper. Okay, question: how does it kill them at all then? Because there was a gap between the flipper and the zombie. It’s not like the flippers and the ball both hit the zombie. The ball flipped and launched the ball directly into it. If that doesn’t kill it, shouldn’t the zombies just be immune to the ball? Now, in fairness, had I done it off the tip of the flipper, it would have died.
Weirdly, any contact with the balls seems to damage bosses.
I think they were aiming for realism in this parody of their House of the Dead series set on a giant pinball table. In practice, it just makes the combat feel inconsistent and lacking in weight. When there’s a cluster of enemies and the ball falls onto them, it should be exciting to see the ball cut through them. Instead it usually bounces lifelessly between them like Zombie Plinko. The hits with the ball NEVER feel violent or impactful, even against the bosses.
After saying it’s impossible for a giant zombie head, the third table also has a giant zombie head pop up and I have no f*cking clue what it actually did when I beat it. (shrug) This one just took up space and looked like a last second, low-resolution addition because play testers liked the first one. They make giant zombie heads boring.
Despite the fact that critics have championed Pinball of the Dead as one of the best video pins of all-time and even one of the best Game Boy Advance games, I really thought it was f*cking boring. Pinball Chick team member Matt said that I have a high tolerance for bad games. Maybe. But what I can’t deal with is slow games. After just a few minutes of The Pinball of the Dead, a sense of dread overcame me. I really didn’t want to play it anymore. I literally heard myself think “oh God, I’m committed to this. I’m actually stuck with this for a while.” I think it has to mostly be non-pinball fans singing its praises because it’s yet another wacky House of the Dead satire from Sega. But, like this:
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You get those letters from a sinkhole that stops the game, then takes a few more seconds to spit the ball back out. Look how many letters you need to get. LOOK AT IT! What the hell were they thinking? That is so many times you need to shoot the same sinkhole, in a game where sinkholes take forever. By the time you actually get all the letters, the excitement is gone because you’ve invested so much time into the waiting process that the payoff isn’t worth it. And there’s so many of those letter-collecting shots in each table. TONS of them. The sheer amount of downtime and waiting is mind numbing. Hell, just watching the ball slowly roll up to the flippers is agony. It takes forever!
Really, only the first table has the potential to be decent, and it’s such a shameless ripoff of Devil’s Crush that I’m not even sure about that. More of the same “circling around” crap that has already been done and done better over a decade before.
It really looks like it’s going to be fun and there are potentially some damn good shooting angles that could have been sick with a better engine. Despite being the first of these Crush-likes to offer multiple tables, the second table is a legitimate contender for the worst video pinball table ever made just on its glacial pace alone and the third table feels like a stripped down rehash of the first one. Look at this boss battle where it takes 20 seconds for the ball to reach the flippers. After thirty seconds, I’ve only flipped twice. When a f*cking turn based, menu-driven game would have a faster pace and more excitement than your pinball, it’s time to rethink things.
The one and only thing I’ll give Pinball of the Dead over Devil’s Crush is that I would take Dead’s bosses over Devil’s mini-games because at least they can end in seconds if you have multiball. But they’re not fun either, so what does that really matter? Pinball of the Dead is like playing Devil’s Crush at half the speed and none of the tension. Replaying it all these years later reaffirmed to me it’s one of the most overrated video games ever made and possibly THE most overrated video pinball game. I will NEVER understand how anyone could consider this one of the best GBA games. Compared to what? Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #89 of 125
Percentile: 29%
FINAL RANKINGS
Pro Pinball: Timeshock (1998 – PlayStation)
Akira Psycho Ball (2002 – PlayStation 2)
Worms Pinball (1999 – PlayStation)
True Pinball (1996 – PlayStation/Sega Saturn)
Digital Pinball: Necronomicon (1996 – Sega Saturn)
These reviews are a repost from Classic Pinball Video Games from 1979 to 2009: The Definitive Review. Because that feature contains full reviews for 130 games, it was causing loading issues for many readers, so this one time, I’m breaking a Definitive Review into smaller pieces. If you get a chance, be sure to check out the full feature as I worked really hard on it.
Video Pinball
aka Arcade Pinball (Sears Label) Platform: Atari 2600 Released April, 1981 Designed by Bob Smith Developed by Atari
Included in Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration
The two extra gaps are added when you play on the B Difficulty.
I know the original Atari 2600 game that wore the name Video Pinball has fans who love its chaotic “gameplay.” I’m not one of them. I’m someone who really hates the whole “pinball is controlled chaos” stereotype. Pinball is a ball sport and anything but chaos. Video Pinball is all about the chaos. Not that I expected a complex physics simulation, but the “ball” is far too energetic, bouncing at a high speed and ricocheting all over the playfield in a way that turns the game into one of luck.
It took me quite a few games just to get a screenshot that had a relatively juiced playfield.
The only real way a player “plays” Video Pinball is with the nudge. When the ball zooms around the screen, if you wait for the right time, you can use nudging to make the ball bounce up and down though one of the two rollover lanes a few times. In the above picture, I took the rollover from 3 to 9 using just the nudge in one single streak of bounces. Was it satisfying? I guess, and so was the one time I nudged the ball away from the outlane. But I can’t stress enough that it took several games just to find myself in the perfect position to manipulate the ball that way.
It’s not like you can reasonably aim with the flippers. The flippers are just elements that kick a super bouncy ball back into play. Video Pinball is little more than a slightly interactive screensaver, and while I could see how it would have fans because it’s so crazy that it’s practically anarchy, I’ve never personally understood the appeal in it. This not only has fans, but BIG fans. I assume they grew up with it and I do admit there’s a charming sense of outright insanity to it. But it’s one of those games that your contribution to is practically nonexistent. Thankfully, the 2600 has a couple pretty decent video pins coming up. By the way, if you want to really know how bad video pinball is as a genre, get this: I played twenty-eight video pins that are worse than this. F*cking yipes. Verdict: NO!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #97 of 125
Percentile: 22%
Bumper Bash Platform: Atari 2600 Released in 1983 Designed by David Lubar Developed by Spectravideo
Utilizes Paddle Controls (Not Optional) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
I’m frustrated that there’s no nudging in this because it could have climbed several spots on the rankings with it.
If there’s one lesson I should have learned a long time ago and still apparently haven’t, it’s “you never know.” I would have bet all the money in my pocket against all the money in yours that it was impossible for any Atari 2600 pinball game to get a YES! And yet, here I am, awarding the first console game YES! of the feature to this insanely ambitious-for-the-era VCS release. You’ve probably never even heard of Bumper Bash. I certainly hadn’t. But I’m guessing hardcore Atari collectors might know the name. You see, Bumper Bash is rated a 9 out of 10 in rarity by Atari Age. “Extremely rare” and, while I have some Atari collecting friends who think that rating is likely wrong or outdated (copies regularly sell for under $100 on eBay), it’s certainly a very rare, very obscure game that didn’t get wide distribution. I’m heartbroken over that, because Bumper Bash MURDERS Atari’s own Video Pinball.
This was the final score of my best game. To plunge the ball, you press both action buttons at the same time. It really did everything it could…… Except nudging. Dammit.
Bumper Bash is trying, and often succeeding, to simulate the SPORT of pinball. Instead of playing with a single joystick, the game uses the paddle controllers, which for the unwashed are really two controllers that plug into a single port. David Lubar did it this way so that the player could hold a paddle in each hand and press one button for each flipper, just like they would at a real table. The problem with that is, as I noted in the captions, there’s no nudge. That’s the only commonplace element missing. Bumper Bash features an Italian bottom, drop targets, scoring multipliers, kickbacks that are activated via the top rollovers, bumpers, and even an animated spinner that’s pretty convincing. The scoring is well balanced too, which I appreciate. The physics? Well, they’re probably as good as you could hope for from 1983 on the Atari 2600, which is a wishy-washy way of saying “not great.”
The ball is very bouncy and the speed doesn’t make sense. The flippers are too small and some of the angles the balls take off them feel completely detached from reality. I especially couldn’t directly shoot the ball high enough to get up to the rollovers, which are what activates your kickbacks. Since the outlanes are pretty hungry, a kickback is very valuable on this table. But, there’s moments that made me sit up in my chair. As you can see in the above clip, you can reliably, predictably perform inlane passes in this game, a first for video pinball. Eventually, I was also able to shoot the three lower drop targets somewhat reliably. Not so much the three upper ones. The easiest target to shoot is the spinner, but putting the spinner in the center, where it can sometimes funnel the ball straight down the drain, was probably not the best design choice. As the first pinball sim on a console that feels like a true simulation of the sport, Bumper Bash is a remarkable achievement. But I’m not cutting it a break because it was a good effort. For all its problems, I did have fun, and that’s all I care about. I’d have had a lot more fun if it used two joysticks that allowed for nudging. Verdict: YES!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #43 of 125
Percentile: 64%
Midnight Magic Platform: Atari 2600 Released in 1986* Designed by Glenn Axworthy Developed by Atari NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED (?)
*Despite the copyright being 1984 on the title screen, Midnight Magic was not released until 1986.
Hold on. That doesn’t look like Black Knight. Dang it. Yeah, well, it wasn’t originally going to be part of the “Midnight Magic” franchise and instead was penciled in to be named “Pinball Wizard” before the name was changed to capitalize on the immense popularity of the Midnight Magic.
What the actual hell? Not only is Midnight Magic not part of Atari 50, but as far as I could tell, it has never been included in any Atari collection. That’s a travesty, because this is SO much better than Video Pinball and has a case that it’s more fun than Bumper Bash and the best pinball game on the 2600. While I think it’s a little cringy that the 2600 version of Midnight Magic is trading on a much better video pinball game’s name value and reputation, this VCS game is solid in its own right. It offers a four flipper layout, five simple drop targets, two stand-up targets, and the most satisfying-to-shoot spinner yet. That sucker SPINS, with some direct hits lasting quite a while before it stops, and with a convincing animation to boot. But that’s not a whole lot going for a table by this point. Hell, the most notable thing was Midnight Magic is the first table in this collection to allow you to thread the needle, a term the Vices apparently coined (though my father insists he’d heard it before).
At first, I thought Midnight Magic was a little too simple with its layout, and maybe too easy. You get extra balls just for knocking down all five drop targets and then hitting either of the two rollovers in the corners. That’s too generous when a single EB based on a scoring benchmark would have made more sense. It’s also the final game chronologically to use a ball that’s most suitable for Breakout with its speed and bounciness. But, I’ll be damned if I wasn’t so hooked on this f*cking thing that I couldn’t put it down. Hitting the top five targets is quite satisfying. It also feels like the game was fine tuned enough to have the difficulty be something that felt authentically pinball. The #1 thing that killed me? Lethal slingshots, which sent the ball directly between the flippers and down the poop chute. Zen Studios nods with approval.
If this had a nudge, I might have gone a little higher on it. Midnight Magic is proof that you can have a VERY fun video pin with very little actual targets to work with just by optimizing the addictive potential of those targets with some kind of visual reward. In the case of this game, it feels great when the colors change after clearing all the targets. Originally I gave the edge to Bumper Bash as the best 2600 video pinball game, but I’ll probably never play that game again. I might actually fire up Midnight Madness just for fun when I know I have ten minutes to kill. Huh. Three Atari 2600 pinball games. I was certain they would go three for three on NO! votes. Instead, two got a YES! and I’m eating crow. Delicious, nutritious crow. Breakfast of champions. Verdict: YES!
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #37 of 125
Percentile: 70%
FINAL RANKINGS
Pro Pinball: Timeshock (1998 – PlayStation)
Akira Psycho Ball (2002 – PlayStation 2)
Worms Pinball (1999 – PlayStation)
True Pinball (1996 – PlayStation/Sega Saturn)
Digital Pinball: Necronomicon (1996 – Sega Saturn)
These reviews are a repost from Classic Pinball Video Games from 1979 to 2009: The Definitive Review. Because that feature contains full reviews for 130 games, it was causing loading issues for many readers, so this one time, I’m breaking a Definitive Review into smaller pieces. If you get a chance, be sure to check out the full feature as I worked really hard on it.
Video Pinball Platform: Arcade Released February, 1979 Designed by Ed Logg, Dave Stubben, and Dan Pliskin Developed by Atari Requires Overlay to Play Properly NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
It took us quite a while to set up the overlay. I needed a friend to walk us through it, which was a process. Like actually, this screenshot is just plain wrong. You can see it in the bottom right flipper, which doesn’t go there. We had quite a lot of tinkering to do to get this as close to accurate as possible. Still, when this game first appeared on my monitor, I sincerely shed tears of joy. The original game would have a “floating image” similar to Asteroids or Space Invaders using the Pepper’s Ghost effect.
Behold the first* video pinball game ever made: Video Pinball! After playing it, I honestly think this is one of the biggest snubs from my friends at Digital Eclipse in the Atari 50 lineup. An especially insulting snub given that the atrocious Atari 2600 “port” of this game (really no relation at all) made the cut, along with the putrid Ruiner Pinball for the Atari Jaguar, a game so poorly made that I would actually take Video Pinball 2600 over it. Having finally played the coin-op Video Pinball, I’m very frustrated Digital Eclipse did snub it, because not only is it the first of its kind in a moderately famous genre of video games and thus should automatically be in a collection that champions the history of Atari and the game industry, but Video Pinball is actually a very good video game.
You can see the plunger in this. I love the logo. That is a logo that is dying to be brought back if, say, Atari were to buy Zen Studios and get them off Unreal Engine. FYI, we played this with 5 balls and replays set low. The winner of the Vice Family dual: me. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much: I didn’t lose to Angela or Sasha the Kid for a change. Speaking of STK, she liked Video Pinball so much she asked Dad to figure out how to plug it into her V-Pin in a way where the plunger and accelerometer would work. It still won’t risk TILTING probably. How it works is actually clever. I think how it works is if you press the panel down too hard, you hit a button that tilts. For MAME, you have to map TILT, which removes the risk unless you do something like map it to an analog stick, where nudge is 12 o’clock and TILT is all other directions with a tiny bit of wiggle room. We didn’t try that and I don’t even know if it’s possible. You know what? The shooting angles are deadly enough without TILT risk.
And I don’t mean “good for its time” though that’s obviously the case too. Maybe it was snubbed because they thought too much of the charm of the original cabinet was lost. A real Video Pinball had an actual plunger and even the ability to nudge built into the panel. Home versions won’t have that, and someone who isn’t necessarily passionate about the sport of pinball might look at that and say “well, what’s the point? The main gimmicks are gone.” But I’m not advocating for Video Pinball to be put in Atari 50 for historical reasons. My argument is on the gameplay merits, because guys, this is actually a f*cking phenomenal pinball video game that has to be seen to be believed. A fast-paced, era-appropriate shooter based around building up the bonus lights. Video Pinball’s score sheet, rules, and risk/reward factors are actually elite by the standards of real 1979 pinball. The high risk front-and-center targets are tied to an extra ball light in the left inlane while the satisfying orbital shots are all proportionately difficult rebounders.
Video Pinball was pretty much a bust for Atari at around 1,500 units sold. Part of that could certainly be chalked-up to bad timing. Video Pinball not only ran smack-dab into the start of the golden age of solid state pinball with Bally, Williams, and Gottlieb killing it, but it also launched during the golden age of arcades as well. Like, oh, a little game called Space Invaders had just arrived in North America four months earlier. If that isn’t a good enough reason why Video Pinball flopped, I have a second theory: that theme is just not good. Disco? Seriously? They could literally choose any theme and they chose a gaudy green, star-spangled disco theme? It’s not exactly something I could picture children in arcades lining up for. Dad’s theory is that Video Pinball was aimed more at adults as a novelty. “Hey Boomers, it’s pinball, that thing you love, only simulated by a computer! The future is NOW!” Even then, disco is a TERRIBLE theme and the whole table looks like it’s so radioactive that you might grow a tumor by standing too close to it. “Cheap looking” said Sasha. “Tacky” said Angela. Yep and yep.
While the scoring format is definitively 70’s-style “build up the bonus lights” it’s the physics that impressed me the most. At the time I’m typing this, I’ve completed thirty-five of the reviews in this feature. I’m just now into the 1990s and playing games that can actually make a case for taking the title of “best video pinball physics” from Video Pinball and its unreleased sequel (up next). Video Pinball 1979 had no peer for over a decade. Nothing even close. For the next few years, balls will be too bouncy. Even the best games have balls that do “bunny hops” totally detached from reality. Video Pinball is comparatively smooth. What the actual f*ck?! How did that happen? Well, I have a theory. First, why did I play Video Pinball out of order? Because I needed a crash course in how to get backdrops working MAME (it turns out in RetroArch you need to create an “artwork” folder in the MAME system folder, then I had to tinker with a few settings to get things to line up right). If you don’t have the backdrops, you cannot play Video Pinball. This is what the game will look like:
What the hell is that? I’ll tell you what is: a historically great video pinball game! Okay, so what’s happening is only the ball, flippers, drop targets, and the score are represented graphically. All surfaces, including the bumpers, orbits, and a satisfying U-Turn element are actually in the game code. The ball bounces off walls, gets banged by bumpers, and activates lights and rollovers. You just can’t see them, or the bonus lights which would normally be represented by LEDs. You need the backdrop and a file called a .lay file to make it work. You know how you can play Asteroids with or without the backgrounds in Atari 50? Video Pinball is like that, only the background is not optional.
While that sounds primitive, it’s also why Video Pinball’s physics engine had no peer for over a decade. Drawing resources on a screen takes computing power. Just saying they’re there and using an overlay for it takes a LOT less. So most of Video Pinball’s 1979 CPU muscle is spent on a physics system that would be the envy of pinball video games well into the 16-bit era. Seriously, I just played Dino Land and it wishes it had pinball mechanics this good. Even David’s Midnight Magic, the champion of home video pinball for the 1980s, would have killed for physics this good.
The right outlane is the most relentless eater of balls this side of Pat “Deep Dish” Bertoletti. Also notice how there’s no Italian Bottom.
Set your expectations accordingly, as this isn’t a “simulation” of the sport like Pinball FX or Zaccaria are. There’s no way to pass the ball consistently, though I did complete several inlane transfers (those will be quite the rarity over the next several dozen reviews). There’s also very clearly a set amount of fixed shooting and rebounding angles, but the variety of them is high enough that it’ll take a LOT of playtime to get a feel for them. The family members I work with at The Pinball Chick put about four hours total into Video Pinball and its unreleased sequel, Solar War. We hadn’t “clocked” it to the point that it was effortless. I came back for two more hours as I finished typing this and STILL hadn’t fully memorized every nuance. So there’s value in this in 2026.
God-tier logo for the first ever video pinball game.
I’m sure Video Pinball might not excite non-pinheads. It has a fairly conservative layout. I mean, the game is called “Video Pinball” so that’s a gimme. The best element is probably the delightful U-Turn in the upper-left corner, but otherwise you’re taking basic shooting angles. It’s not entirely basic, as the flippers aren’t parallel and there’s no Italian bottom. Also, the game can be quite punishing with its difficulty, as the outlanes especially led to plenty of house balls. Probably more than any game in this feature, and it’s obviously by design to make play times go quicker. Make no mistake: Video Pinball is a genuinely fun game weakened by an unambitious layout and a few (frankly realistic) house ball-creating elements. Really, it’s not hard to understand why it flopped. If you’re going to do Video Pinball as a coin-op in 1979, the height of video games AND pinball, you need that game to offer something real pinball doesn’t. Video Pinball doesn’t.
It’s just pinball in digital form, and not even perfect pinball since, state-of-the-art or not, the physics aren’t lifelike. They’re AMAZING by what will be the standards of digital pinball for a long while, but not by the standards of actual tables that are, presumably, just a few feet away from customers in 1979 arcades. Dad was right: Video Pinball exists only as an intended novelty. Atari did that a lot (see my review of Starship 1) and so it’s to be expected of them. But even if you only look at Video Pinball as a historic curio or (sigh) a novelty, PLEASE don’t forget that Video Pinball is also a damn good video pinball game in a vacuum. One that this pinhead thinks holds up to the test of time. Do the right thing, Digital Eclipse, and don’t forget about Solar War. Seriously, DO NOT FORGET ABOUT SOLAR WAR! In fact, let’s look at Solar War too! Verdict: YES!
Holds title of Greatest Pinball Video Game Ever Made from February 1979 to Circa 1980
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #16 of 125
Percentile: 87%
Solar War Platform: Arcade Unreleased Finished Prototype Designed by Mike Albaugh and Dave Theurer Developed by Atari Requires Overlay to Play Properly NEVER RELEASED*
*My policy with unreleased coin-ops is that route testing doesn’t count as a release because technically the game isn’t “gold” yet and locked-in for mass production. See my review of fellow Atari Cornfield occupant Cloud 9. HOWEVER, in the case of Solar War, I’m getting mixed signals on it, because the Killer List of Video Games specifically calls it a “prototype” but also says that three-hundred conversion cabinets were manufactured. Presumably as a conversion kit for Video Pinball. Hold on, wait. I’m confused. Is Solar War a prototype or is it a game that saw at least 305 units distributed? It’s one or the other, right? The story is even weirder, as allegedly it was a Greek distributor who bought all 300 conversion kits. Apparently you couldn’t walk twenty feet without bumping into Solar War in Greece. They must have been building homes out of the f*cking things. If any of my European readers saw this in the 70s and 80s, please leave a comment because, seriously, 300 is a lot of units and it just doesn’t sound right, does it?
I actually crossed this one off the list because I didn’t think the overlay was out there, but then the same friend who walked us through setting up Video Pinball found the overlay floating around the MAME community. So I figure now is as good a time as any to say THANK YOU to everyone who has ever developed for MAME. You have given so much joy to my life and the lives of so many people out there, and what you do is often a pretty thankless job. Well, I’ll say “thank you!”
Okay, let’s assume Solar War really is a canceled game. Maybe it’s not! Maybe there’s a bunch of Greeks reading this who are like “oh, this was EVERYWHERE in Greece! We used them as school desks and sometimes when the soccer ball was lopsided we just used Solar War instead! And in the event of a famine? Boiled Solar War with a pinch of nutmeg and some salt is good eat’n!” But even if all that’s true, the story of Solar War is nothing short of a gaming tragedy. As good as Video Pinball was, this slays it and would have held the title “best pinball video game” for a solid decade until Devil’s Crush came along.
The ball is the one in the upper left corner. We called this the “leap tall buildings in a single bound” shot. And it’s not hard to imagine the four rollover targets as the Daily Planet.
There’s not a ton of info out there on Solar War but what is known is that it was going to be both a stand-alone sequel and an optional conversion kit for Video Pinball with a change in themes, and not originally a space theme either. No, it was originally going to be Superman! Which means this is the second time I’ve reviewed a game that started life as a Superman game before being changed into another IP and ultimately never being released at all. It’s a cursed video game franchise, I keep telling you! In the case of Solar War, it doesn’t require a ton of imagination to FEEL like a Superman pinball table. Solar War’s main objective is to “tour the table” by hitting all the letters.
Lovely that I can just remove the background to highlight the letters.
Had it been a Superman game, the idea would be each letter represents a person Superman needs to rescue. The four rollovers right next to a curved wall even give a Daily Planet vibe while Angela coined the “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” shot. Not only does it genuinely feel like a table based on the Man of Steel, but it works brilliantly too. Solar War’s layout is light year better than Video Pinball’s or really almost any video pin that’ll release over the next two decades. The original Video Pinball’s unconventional flipper arrangement paired with a conservative layout has given way to a two flipper widebody design with an Italian Bottom and a HUGE variety of ambitious targets. In addition to the eight letter targets, there’s four rollover lanes (God how I wish it had lane switching), a locker with rewards, lights for the bumpers (confusingly done using the ball sprite), two satisfying orbits, and even an open plunger lane that the ball can return to. On top of all that, the bonus point system from the first game carried over here. This is a busy layout, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun too.
After Atari lost the Superman arcade license (or exchanged it for the real Superman pinball table), they had to rework the game using an eight character name because of the eight targets you’re seeking. “Orion XIV” was initially chosen before settling on the generic space theme and going with SOLAR WAR. Apparently the prototype for Superman was actually SUPER (space) MAN. That’s not his name. That’s an adjective and a noun.
But that’s not all. Solar War isn’t simply Video Pinball with a different layout. The physics engine has been subtly but noticeably tweaked. It might be the placebo effect but myself, Dave, and Angela could swear there’s sharper shooting angles. This wasn’t universally agreed upon as Dad and Sasha the Kid insist the angles are more or less the same which led to quite the argument over whether they would keep the same exact angles with only two flippers. What all five of us agreed on was that the ball is floatier, slowing down the action and making rebounding easier (ironically floaty physics would eventually become a common knock against modern pinball sims). The nudge is more jolty too, which makes sense since the machine’s physical nudge mechanism would have been upgraded as well, though I wasn’t exactly sure of the specifics. Either way, all gamers lost out when Solar War was canceled. It’s so good. Genuinely fun, and not just for 1979/80. It holds up.
What you’re seeing is Time 2000, which looks good, but our friend, professional designer Dave Sanders, considers it to be the single worst pinball table ever made from a logic point of view. Atari should NEVER have been in the pinball business, period. Atari’s pins were poorly designed and famous for design flaws that made shorting out the electrics easy. The bigger problem was they didn’t make money for arcade operators. All Atari pins were wide-bodies, and wide-bodies require more space, obviously. In essence, arcade operators would have to decide between using space for three normal pinball machines or two Atari ones (insanely, they made an even bigger table, Hercules, which was truly recklessly stupid. LOOK AT HOW BIG IT IS, and it’s a terrible game).
Now here’s where I have to be the devil’s advocate. From a business point of view, it makes sense to cancel Solar War. The tragedy is that this layout and theme wouldn’t have been much more successful than Video Pinball’s minimalist night at the disco. The whole coin-op Video Pinball project and its sequel were doomed to fail from the start. You have to understand that Video Pinball released against the hottest period the pinball industry (hell, the whole arcade industry) had ever seen up to that point with nothing to compare it to historically. The 1990s? No, actually. Addams Family was the biggest seller ever, but 7 of the 10 best selling pins of all-time and 13 out of the top 20 released between 1976 and 1980.
That means Video Pinball released against tables like Flash (19,505 units), KISS (17,000 units), Playboy (18,250 units), Star Trek (16,842) Mata Hari (16,260 units) and Eight Ball (20,230, only forty short of Addams Family’s record). Had Solar War come out, it would have run smack dab into Firepower (17,410 units) which became one of the highest earning pins in arcade history. Releasing Video Pinball in 1979 was tone deaf to what was happening in the industry at large. I enjoyed both these games so much that I literally sent a note to Digital Eclipse head Mike Mika *begging* for them to at least talk about putting Video Pinball and Solar War in the next Atari 50 update because they’re amazing, but they should also have never existed at all. Sadly, both can be true. Tragedy all around with these games.
Both Atari coin-op video pins are punishing, so even without the fear of tilt, I think they work. You’re not going to be able to just bend the ball to your will. These are OUTSTANDING, but Solar War especially is the nicest treat I’ve had in years at IGC. I didn’t expect to get to play it, and it’s phenomenal. A true mix of late 70s pinball design mentality and high-concept table touring. Again, huge thanks to the MAME community who rescues games like this from oblivion.
So it turns out, Atari’s two arcade video pins are really good. I want to believe time heals all wounds and it’s time for Video Pinball and Solar War to be celebrated. They’re fantastic games released at the worst time possible, or in the case of Solar War, (probably) not released at all. And if it does get that Atari 50 release, Solar War can finally get appreciated by a wider audience. It’s an absolute masterpiece, and I’m on my knees, Digital Eclipse. (shrug) It’s not like it’s the first time. Verdict: YES! – Creates Split in “Greatest Pinball Video Game Ever Made” Title
Solar War holds title of Greatest Pinball Video Game Ever Made from circa 1980 to July 20, 1990
Video Pinball holds title of Greatest Pinball Video Game Ever Released from February, 1979 to December, 1981
Classic Pinball Video Games Ranking: #10 of 125
Percentile: 92%
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap 
Wario World
Super Mario Sunshine
New Pokémon Snap
Kyūtenkai: Fantastic Pinball
Extreme Pinball
True Pinball
Pro Pinball: The Web
Power Rangers Zeo: Full Tilt Battle Pinball
Hyper 3-D Pinball
Dragon Beat: Legend of Pinball
Pro Pinball: Timeshock!
ParanoiaScape
Power Pinball
Neo Golden Logres
The Pinball
Worms Pinball
Pro Pinball: Big Race USA
Pro Pinball: Fantastic Journey
KISS Pinball
Elemental Pinball
Austin Powers Pinball
Patriotic Pinball
Akira Psycho Ball
The Pinball of the Dead
Video Pinball
Bumper Bash
Midnight Magic
Solar War
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