Gradius ReBirth Platform: Nintendo Wii via WiiWare Released September 2, 2009 Directed by Masato Misaki Developed by M2 Published by Konami NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This screenshot might look like a widescreen Gradius III remake. Is it? (shrug) A little bit. It’s not much more ambitious than that, really.
Gradius ReBirth feels much smaller than its Castlevania counterpart (which was a pretty f*cking small game, all things considered). Much smaller, in size and scope. You can unlock a couple extra load outs by beating the game, a score attack mode that I swear to God I couldn’t figure out what purpose it served, and there’s a pair of “bonus levels” (more like bonus rounds/areas) that can be found on second loops, but otherwise, the game is just five stages long. Really, it’s only called “Gradius ReBirth” because “Gradius Cliff Notes” or “Gradius Abridged” didn’t focus test well. I’ve heard it compared to the MSX Gradius/Nemesis games that were, arguably, the big winners of Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review. I kind of got the MSX vibe. I mean, look at Hans Naughty (yes, that’s really its name) from Nemesis 3 and the Crawler X from Gradius Rebirth:
Hans Naughty
Crawler X
So yeah, there’s shared DNA there, except it’s literally a franchise so shared DNA is the entire point. The Game Boy titles were small, high-quality games too, and technically the Crawler X is meant to be a remake of this iconic Game Boy boss, which is literally called “Crawler.”
Crawler (
Man, Gradius has the coolest boss designs, doesn’t it? But the important thing: all three of the above boss fights are fun, because Gradius is a consistently fun franchise. So the pitch with Rebirth in 2009 was “five new Gradius stages for $10.” Whether or not that’s worth it depends on how big a fan you are of the series, because there’s nothing new here except the mildest of twists in the established Gradius levels, enemies, and set pieces. I could seriously post any screenshot of ReBirth and coyly say “look familiar?!” in the caption. Let’s try that.
Look familiar?!
Or how about:
Look familiar?!
I’m just getting started.
Look familiar?!
You get the idea. In terms of level themes, there’s no surprises, making ReBirth feel like an abbreviated tour of the Gradius franchise. BUT, all the “look familiar?!” screenshots above had a little twist to them. Take the iconic Gradius volcano sequence in the first level. You can actually change it depending on what you do earlier in the level, when you encounter this:
It’s like a scanner.
Don’t shoot either of them and the game will play out as expected with the typical Gradius “let’s park right over the volcanoes” which never made any sense. Like, just keep going, Vic! What the f*ck are you parking for? But, if you blow up the top scanner, the stage will turn white and the famous volcano eruption sequence doesn’t happen, replaced instead with an enemy attack wave. Blow up the bottom one and the stage will turn red, causing additional volcanoes to blow. It’s not exactly “alternate paths” like in Castlevania ReBirth, but it’s the same principle and it’s not really enough to make this stand out as a must-play Gradius game. Much like with Castlevania, I thought Gradius ReBirth was just okay.
Level One – White
Level One – Red
Since Gradius ReBirth is a $10 early-era digital exclusive from the original Nintendo eShop, it absolutely does come across like a half-assed checking of the water level by Konami. So did Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth, by the way, but that game felt a lot more ambitious than this one. Gradius ReBirth is missing a lot of franchise staples and set pieces, including, unforgivably, the iconic boss rush. As much fun as I had with ReBirth, I swear to God there’s not a single stand-out moment in the entire game. Not one. It’s consistently fine and offers the expected white knuckle thrills, but when you realize the game is over, it does ultimately feel like a let down.
Oh how I hated the last (proper) boss. I didn’t mind the wall of Big Cores, but when it presses up against the wall, I thought that was dirty pool.
Gradius ReBirth gave me the exact same “let’s not waste A-material on a $10 Wii eShop release” vibe that I got from Castlevania ReBirth. So I don’t like the MSX or Game Boy comparisons for ReBirth. I played and cherished all those and walked away believing that each of the MSX games, whether I gave them a YES! or not, gave it their f*cking all. The Game Boy games too. With the limited resources the platforms offered, I still walked away thinking that the games were an earnest attempt to make the best possible game the technology allowed. ReBirth feels like it has just exactly enough gameplay and content that it can be sold as a Gradius game in 2009, and how can you not be frustrated by that? It’s so cynical.
Jeez, way to phone in the design of the helpless thing we’re blowing up at the end, M2. Okay, so the Option Hunters coming out in droves was a nice touch, but this is the literal end of the game, so who cares?
ReBirth is so arbitrary and safe and heartless that I’m kind of mad that I have to give it a YES! ReBirth’s biggest accomplishment is that it proves how bulletproof the Gradius formula is. When I first started it, I was convinced I was playing one of the best eShop games ever. But it just never strives to be better than it absolutely has to be to count as a Gradius game. It controls exactly like Gradius, and it plays and even sounds like an arcade Gradius. It IS Gradius. ReBirth is heartless, half-assed Gradius that does the bare minimum to be fun and could NEVER be released as a stand alone today, but Gradius nonetheless. Verdict: YES!
If this had been part of Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review, I would have added $2 in value to the hypothetical Konami Shoot ‘Em Up Collection.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Platform: PlayStation Released March 20, 1997 Directed by Toru Hagihara Developed by Konami Sold Separately on Xbox platforms Included with Castlevania Requiem: Symphony of the Night & Rondo of Blood for $19.99 on PlayStation 4 & 5
Sorry Switch fans. For now, at least. Steam fans, you’re just hosed, ain’t you?
Dracula: Edgelord of Darkness.
When I announced that I was going to finally knock out the review for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I was a little surprised by some of the feedback. Nobody argues it’s a bad game. Its status as a hall of famer is beyond dispute. But, there’s certainly some resentment towards it for fundamentally changing what it means to be a Castlevania game. Before Symphony, Castlevania was the cheesy but tough as nails series of games where you knocked out a grab bag of gothic horror and mythological monsters in linear fashion. After Symphony, Castlevania was “Vania” in “Metroidvania.” Some people really don’t like that.
Thank God the combat is so satisfying. Grinding has never been less of a…..some word…. that escapes me at the moment.
A few others felt the game was overrated all along, maybe because the designers were still getting their sea legs with the XP system or the nonlinear, interconnected map. I’m kind of with them on the XP system but the map one I firmly disagree with. I think Symphony’s map is MUCH stronger than the first direct sequel to it, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. Maybe the settings themselves aren’t always as interesting, but the pacing is god-tier. Well, at least until the whole upside-down castle thing happens, and I’ll get to that. Otherwise, I really have no major complaints. Sh*t, I might have to get to the upside-down castle sooner than I expected in this review. (checks notes) Crap.
I haven’t played this in at least twenty years (probably closer to twenty-five years) and honestly I don’t think I ever got the “real ending” to SOTN. I’m pretty sure I just killed Richter. To my credit, he’s an asshole. Hell, I still wanted to kill him even knowing it would cost me the good ending. I wanted a best ending where I got the satisfaction of killing Dracula AND him.
Okay, so Symphony of the Night is famous for having the entire map be doubled, only the second half of it features a full copy of the entire first map turned upside-down. It sounds like a post-game bonus feature, right? A tongue-in-cheek gag thrown in by the developers to add replay value after the credits roll. Except, no, the post game content is getting to slog through the game with Richter Belmont. The upside-down castle is part of the first playthrough and what you have to do to earn the “true ending” of the game. And when I say “upside-down” I don’t mean the map layout is the same. I mean literally the furniture is on the ceiling.
I really hated this. One area of the game like this would be fine. Silly, but fine. An entire goddamned Metroidvania’s map worth of it was overindulgent. The problem is once the shock value wears off and the gag stops being cute or clever, you still have 99% of the map to fill out and nothing new to see except bosses. The map was clearly optimized for the first time you play it, and the second, topsy-turvy time feels like it barely works at all. It’s a pretty big map to have the same joke play out room after room. See this:
THAT is the nearly-completed upside-down castle map. It’s literally half the real estate of the game (though in terms of raw playtime it should take you much less than half since there’s nothing to trap you and you should have the ability to fully navigate it). The only part that I haven’t filled out yet in that particular map is the section where you fight Dracula. THAT’S INSANE! Again, I have no objection to this idea as a bonus feature. Now, you could argue that getting the “true ending” is a bonus, but I wouldn’t. This is clearly part of the main quest, and it didn’t work for me at all. I thought it was something that should have been killed on the drawing board. I would have preferred a slightly bigger main game map with more set pieces than just the same set-pieces, only flipped.
When I realized that I was fighting all the original Castlevania 1 bosses to collect the Castlevania 2 relics of Dracula, I had a good laugh. Now THAT is a gag that works. “What about Castlevania 3?” Oh, you just straight up kill Dracula’s Curse in a boss fight. Seriously, if they could have gotten away with having you do battle with an NES cart, they would have done that too. By the way, that’s the damn silliest model of “the Creature” in the franchise and I love it.
I don’t know why they overdid the upside-down stuff. Honestly, by the time I reached the point where the second map was unlocked, I was kind of ready for the game to be over anyway. The only highlights in the upside-down castle were the bosses, which could easily be transferred to various spots of the original map. If not for them, the highlights would have stopped entirely and Symphony of the Night might have cratered. I might disagree with the people who think it’s overrated, but I can also see their point with that entire second map. It’s too much. Thankfully, the combat is typical Castlevania satisfying perfection, so it never became outright boring to navigate. If you ever wanted to know how much Castlevania’s combat does the heavy lifting, the second half of Symphony of the Night lets you know.
I actually f*cking died against this boss. Why wasn’t THIS the last boss? It kicked my ass.
My unofficial motto for 2026 has been “set your expectations accordingly” though admittedly that’s pretty f*cking hard to do when you’re talking about one of the most famous and important video games ever. While it does mostly live up to its reputation, Symphony of the Night was never supposed to be THAT game, so it’s nothing short of bonkers that it has the reputation of being one of the best games ever. Released at a time when 2D games were considered quaint, it didn’t get a particularly strong amount of marketing muscle thrown behind it. It wasn’t the “evolution” that Final Fantasy VII or Super Mario 64 were. In a world where 3-D gaming hadn’t happened by 1997, SOTN probably would have been a multi-million seller. Alas.
Much like the game structure, the bosses MOSTLY land. When they do, they’re kind of unforgettable. The Granfaloon (sometimes called Legion) is a giant mass of flesh made up of soulless bodies. It’s disgusting and awesome.
Now, I don’t think the game is perfect even if you ignore that 50% of the game world is kind of redundant. There’s a massive variety of throwing weapons, but I was pretty stingy with them. Except, I wasn’t saving them for later. I just couldn’t be bothered to use them. I finished the game with two iron balls, a boomerang, a flaming boomerang, a javelin, a few throwing stars, and about a thousand other things, including food items and temporary boosts. Why didn’t I use them? Let’s say I wanted to use that high-damage shuriken I picked up. They are fun to use, after all.
“OH COME ON! WE’RE SKELETONS AND HE’S HALF VAMPIRE AND YOU’RE GIVING HIM NINJA STARS NOW TOO? DO YOU JUST HATE BONES, KONAMI?”
Except, I’d have to pause the game, equip it to one of my hands, unpause the game, then throw it once, because that’s all you get. One throw. Enemy dead. Item used. Hand now empty. Did you have fun with it? Good, because now you have to pause the game to equip something else. That’s a hell of a lot of effort and a hell of a lot of downtime for a one-use item, and who can be bothered? And let’s not forget, all that happens in a game that is still using the traditional Castlevania sub-weapon system with all the classics here except the boomerang. In the time I do all the above, I could throw three or four axes and maybe close to the same amount of holy water. They could have fixed this by having you pick up, oh, twenty javelins or ten ninja stars. Something that makes the actual time investment of equipping them worth it.
Actually I spent nearly the entire upside down castle holding onto this cross, which costs 100 hearts to use but was so overpowered that it was basically an instant-win item for (most) bosses. The Grim Reaper has two forms. I one-shotted both with this. Normally I would feel guilty about this, but Patrick Stewart died this week and, seriously, f*ck Death this week. You deserve being one-shotted. I thought we all agreed that Patrick Stewart got to live forever. Not that symbolic live forever sh*t, either. You already pulled that crap with David Bowie.
But seriously, that and the upside-down stuff are my only complaints. I can’t complain about the action. Symphony of the Night has probably the best roster of enemies, well, maybe ever. There’s distinct personalities with even the basic baddies all over the game. Like, yeah, there’s skeletons that shamble back and forth and they’re nice and crunchy and damn satisfying to kill. But then, later in the game, a skeleton shows up and you think it’s more cannon fodder. It looks like cannon fodder. And then you discover it has the ability to do the Care Bear Stare from Hell.
“Nova Skeleton” presumably named as such because it’s a fan of PBS.
Or how about the knight with a trained owl, and if you kill the owl, the knight f*cking mourns the owl and makes you feel like the most cold-hearted sh*t heel who ever went into a centuries-long sleep in order to murder his father. Seriously Dracula, if you want to take over the world, populating your army with guilt trippers might be the way to go. It was so awkward that I was THIS CLOSE to saying “is that knight crying over its pet owl? You know what? F*ck it. If you want to take over the world THAT badly, have at it. Yeesh.”
To my credit, owls are just the abstract concept of murder given corporeal form and anyone in their right mind who saw an owl in Castlevania of all places would kill it on the spot. I didn’t realize that the servants of the embodiment of all evil had, you know, feelings. By the way, if you do it the other way, the owls mourn the knights. Keep it up, Symphony of the Night! You’re only strengthening my resolve!
Symphony of the Night does hold-up better than most all-time legends, too. Short of completely dropping the upside-down stuff in favor of more one-off set pieces, I don’t know what else the game could have possibly done. Maybe more environmental hazards? Maybe more set-pieces? A boss rush mode? The ability to use health refills or stat boosters from the menu? Oh, that’s not realistic? I thought we gave up on realism when we agreed it makes perfect sense for the corporeal form of death to work for Dracula?
The game does a pretty good job of not overly relying on straight-line corridors where you kill one type of enemy, walk forward twenty paces and then kill the same enemy. That’s why, when it happens (and it does a few times) it’s so jarring. EVEN THEN, I’ll give them credit for populating this straight-line corridor with these enemies that ONLY appear in that corridor. If you’re going to have a lazy straight line level design, make the things in that straight line unforgettable.
Originally, I was going to not touch the post-game content. But since I went so hard on the upside-down castle and how it feels like a gag bonus mode, I did go through with playing some of the actual post-game bonus content. After beating the game, you can replay the game with Richter Belmont, and when I did, I played exactly this far:
That’s all I could take.
I normally love Castlevania and think the traditional Castlevania whip is one of the greatest weapons in gaming history, but THIS game was not made for it. It takes maybe a minute to realize that. When you play SOTN this way, there’s no upgrades. Heart-upgrades just fill your hearts. Life upgrades just fill up your life but don’t make your life bar bigger. The only items are the subweapons (though you can do the Rondo of Blood-like item crashes), but there is no armor or equipment to be found. It’s the same nonlinear game, only with traditional linear gameplay mechanics. SOTN is clearly not made to be played this way. It’s not fun. Like, at all.
You can do special moves, including a dragon punch (done with the same inputs as Street Fighter), though I’m not sure it counts as a “special move” since I think you might actually need it to navigate. I found the pacing to be horrible and the progress to be unrewarding. It’s a stiffer, jankier game with Richter. The combat is fine, I guess, but the game is clearly meant to be played with Alucard and all this Richter stuff (and probably Maria in the Saturn build) were afterthoughts. That’s fine, by the way, because the Alucard game is, you know, one of the best games ever.
I *briefly* threw on the Sega Saturn build to test out Maria’s quest but, again, it’s just so obviously a side-dish and not the main course. (shrug) It’s nothing personal, Saturn fans. It’s Alucard’s game that I completed and walked away satisfied.
And yeah, certain aspects were going to age badly. The XP system isn’t particularly well-balanced. The game starts with a self-evident grinding area with the fishmen, then ends with a self-evident grinding area in the final hallway before the Dracula fight. It’s populated with these things called Guardians that are just re-colored axe knights, only these ones are insanely tough to kill. Well, at least until you’re ready to win the Dracula fight, at which point they’re total pushovers who pay off so much XP that I went from level 40-something to Level 60 in about twenty minutes.
They were tedious to fight thanks to their shields, but I was gaining life from their attacks so it was just a matter of waiting them out and getting thousands of XP points, gaining a new level for every two or three that I killed.
And then the final battle with Shaft (why the f*ck did they call him that?! It’s a terrible name for a villain!) and Dracula were kind of letdowns. Seriously, when the dullest bosses in the game are the final two bosses, something has gone seriously wrong. Dracula especially, who cuts straight to his final form, which is an incomprehensible half-man, half-bat that I spent far too much time wondering if this “true form” could possibly have impregnated a human woman. I mean, if it’s his true form then surely this would be the form that would be required for the procreation, right? Except, Dracula’s true form doesn’t even appear to have a crotch!
Does have three testicles though. At least I think those are testicles. That or the xenomorph invaded Transylvania.
Did Dracula use a surrogate? Is that why his handler is called Shaft? Oh, don’t roll your eyes. YOU try to review one of the greatest video games of all-time. One where the only thing it does wrong is flip the map for half the f*cking game because the producer thinks EVERY idea is brilliant. It’s kinda hard to review, you know? Small miracle Castlevania: Symphony of the Night turned out as good as it did. Verdict: YES!
Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth Platform: Nintendo Wii via WiiWare Released October 27, 2009 (JPN) December 28, 2009 (US) Designed by Keisuke Koga Directed by Toshiyasu Kamiko, Akihiro Minakata and Keisuke Koga Developed by M2 Published by Konami NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
You didn’t really think I was going to let the Halloween season go by without reviewing some Castlevania games, did you?
Originally, this review was going to be Castlevania 64, which I did start and played for almost ten whole minutes before I needed a break. A big break. Like, one the size of two or three full playthroughs of an entirely different game. Also, by “break” I mean the type of break like when a squabbling couple says “I think we need a break” because “I never want to see you again” is too blunt a thing to say while emotions are high. BUT, for this…..break….. I chose a different Castlevania game that was exclusive to a Nintendo platform and is awaiting its first re-release. So, like…. would it be cool if I decide to not restart Castlevania 64 and just move on after this? Thanks. I feel much better now 🙂
But it doesn’t matter if you remember it or not because Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth has almost nothing in common with it. Just like how Castlevania Chronicles isn’t really a remake of the original Castlevania or Dracula X isn’t really a remake of Rondo of Blood. Gosh, this series has a lot of non-remake remakes, doesn’t it? It’s an especially baffling choice because Adventure’s reputation isn’t exactly on the same level as Dracula’s Curse. I have no idea what would possess someone to shackle a decent, fast-paced game like this to the name and legacy of a game famous for being slow, sluggish, and overall horrible.
I’m actually taking an alternate route in this picture. The game offers a lot of those. I walked away believing that’s a bad thing.
So what does Castlevania: The Adventure and Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth have in common besides the name “The Castlevania Adventure?” Well, the top upgrade for your whip is a fireball. Even that’s completely different in how it works. In the Game Boy original, you have the fireball until you get damaged. While you also lose the fireball off a single hit in the remake, now the fireball will eventually wear off no matter what. So the one thing the two games share is actually the one downgrade in this version. Go figure, right? Or maybe unlimited fireball would make the game too easy or eliminate the need for the knife, aka the sub-weapon nobody likes anyway. And, uh, that’s the list of similarities in its entirety.
And they both star Christopher Belmont and I assume have the same story. I mean, if you actually care about the story of Castlevania. Since the original game didn’t have a cutscene or anything and presumably the entire “story” came from the instruction book, who cares what the name of the guy with the whip is? While I love the gameplay of the series, friends, I honestly don’t care one bit about the story. It’s just too ridiculous for me to take seriously.
Literally everything else is different. The original Adventure had four completely linear levels. ReBirth has five levels. Ignore everyone who says “six” because there is no sixth level. Just a staircase and a hallway that leads to Dracula. That’s not a level. I’ve seen title screens that take longer to get through.
This Castlevania leans a little into slapstick by allowing you to kill enemies by dropping chandeliers on them. I tried to beat the Grim Reaper by eye gouging him but my fingers got stuck.
Every non-Drac level also has alternative paths that fundamentally change the game’s flow with different set pieces and vibes. Those paths, besides the bosses, were the weakest aspect of the game for me. Oh, not the content of those paths. Actually, I thought the strongest level design usually was contained within those alternate paths. But, that means you only experience some of what I felt was an overall well designed but unspectacular Castlevania game each time you play it. That’s just the first of many problems related to those paths. Like this:
I didn’t want to use a guide. I wanted to see if I could find the keys that open the doors on my own. Some of them were pretty damn well hidden, yet the game actively discourages exploration. I literally forgot I was being timed, so when this happened, I sat frozen in shock for a few seconds AND THEN I threw a tantrum and launched my controller through a window.
I honest to God don’t think I ever previously timed-out in a Castlevania game, but I was killed by the timer in the third AND fifth levels of Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth. Hell, the third level’s timer got me in both the first and second playthrough. GOD FORBID in a game with hidden keys and branching paths all over that a person has enough time to look around. My favorite version of Dracula’s Curse is a ROM hack that eliminates that game’s branching paths, so you have to play all fifteen stages. What I wouldn’t have given for that type of experience in ReBirth. I played through it three times for this review, and each time it felt like I was missing something. I was.
Sometimes the art style is inspired, and then there’s moments like this level where the platforms you stand on look like they’re in the background.
Another reason is that you can’t just pick the path. Oh no, it takes an item to do it. While I found one path by breaking through a wall, most required keys. The key takes the spot of the sub-weapon, which means you have to play the game without access to all the fun parts of the game to activate the paths. F*ck that! F*ck that in its undead ear! In a game that’s only five levels long, I think the branching path idea, well, f*cking sucks.
As unbelievable as this sounds, the famous Castlevania drawbridge moment is, in this game, a branching path that requires a key to activate.
Even if you’re a fan of those, seriously, wouldn’t the game have been better if they cut the split paths out and turned them into separate levels? There’s enough content in this game to stretch the five levels out to seven or eight. This is a back-to-basics Castlevania game. I don’t want to f*ck around with alternative paths. I want to just beat levels. What the f*ck is wrong with that? And it’s not like one branching path leads to an entire different level, like with Rondo of Blood. It’s just a series of forks that lead to the same bosses. BUT, those forks play completely differently. The themes change. The vibe changes. I don’t like how ReBirth was structured at all. Not one bit.
While the eyeballs are probably in this game because the Game Boy original had eyeballs, these ones don’t explode. In fact, they only seem to be in this game because people remember that the Game Boy games had giant eyeballs.
And, while I’m complaining, I might as well just say that this has the dullest bosses of any Castlevania game not named “Simon’s Quest” or “Haunted Castle.” They’re just generally unmemorable in design. Like I kind of figured this….. thing in the picture below was meant to be Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and according to the Castlevania wiki, I was right.
Way to get in under a deadline, M2.
But it’s so generic in appearance that it didn’t work as a big, climatic moment at all. Maybe you can get away with that type of design if you’re making a Gumby Halloween special and you have a REALLY low budget, but for the purposes of a Castlevania game, that doesn’t work. Earnest cheese works. There were a couple winners, like the over-the-top golem where you can’t even see its head until you kill it and have to whip its tummy.
Okay, so they could have come up with something more sinister looking for the furnace that makes up its stomach.
I know that bitching about the looks of bosses is shallow, but I mean, there really isn’t all that much to whine about with ReBirth and this is a review site. Overall, this is a pretty damn decent Castlevania game. A very short one that feels like it was slightly half-assed, but decent. I think it could have been better than decent if they had dropped the branching path crap and maybe just leaned into the cheese. But, when ReBirth wants to go for white knuckle action and nail-biting close calls, it doesn’t f*ck around. There’s some inspired stretches in this game. Like this:
Oof, that was close.
Angela walked in the room while I was playing this and said “you’re literally on the edge of your seat.” It’s true, too. Too bad there’s only five f*cking levels, none of which maintain a consistent pace thanks to those branching paths. Given the fact that ReBirth had THREE directors, part of me wonders if they got into a fight over direction and the large forks in the level design are some form of compromise. That would explain the inconsistent tone. Just make a slightly longer game and promote one of the mini-bosses to a level big boss.
Hell, I thought this generic vampire (which, it turns out, is NOT Carmilla) WAS the level 4 boss.
I think fans have slightly overrated ReBirth, as a lot of people talk this up like it’s one of the better Castlevanias, but I’m not even close to that. I’d actually put this third-to-last among the ones I’ve reviewed that I’ve awarded a YES! to, with only Game Boy nothingburger Castlevania Legends and MSX oddball Vampire Killer ranking lower. I think a lot of the fandom for it is probably based on the low expectations one would have for a remake of Adventure. The idea of remaking that game is so dumb that I can’t believe it wasn’t dismissed out of hand, but then again, Haunted Castle got remade as well. I think I’ll save that one for next year’s Halloween.
That’s Dracula’s final form in this game, which again, doesn’t match what you’d expect from a Castlevania game. That looks more like Loki’s final form.
So yeah, I had fun with Castlevania ReBirth, but probably not as much as some people expected. It controls well, has some very good level design, and yet it’s one of the weaker Castlevania games for sure. It’s too short and I doubt I’ll remember anything about it in a year, as it’s lacking in memorable moments or stand-out bosses. But will it get a re-release? I think it might be thrown in as a +1 to an unrelated Castlevania collection. There’s still some “classic” Castlevania games that haven’t been re-released, namely the 3-D games and the Lords of Shadow trilogy. If I had to guess, I would guess a set that contains Castlevania 64, Legacy of Darkness, Lament of Innocence, and Curse of Darkness will happen, and this would be a really good +1 for that set.
It’s kind of bland looking too, isn’t it? The sets just aren’t well dressed. They’er not ugly either. They’re just sort of there, you know? ReBirth feels like a quick, cheap, budget-priced Castlevania dumped onto Nintendo’s first international digital distribution platform as an experiment that Konami had no faith in and told M2 to not waste any amazing ideas on. Seriously, that’s the vibe I got from it.
BUT, I also wouldn’t be shocked if Nintendo has talked with Konami about adding Castlevania 64 to Switch Online. If that happens, I still think the two PS2 games are probably going to get their own set, and ReBirth has a big enough cult following to probably get included anyway. Outside of a collection? Eh, probably not a good idea. This was 1000 Wii Points when it came out. I just had flashbacks about Wii Points and Microsoft Points and had to make sure that 1000 Wii Points equaled $10 USD. It did, and I think Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth is worth maybe half that today. This is a $5 game at best.
This is Castlevania Resurrection for the Sega Dreamcast, or rather the alpha-build 1999 E3 demo or something like that. I messed around with it for about fifteen minutes. It’s not even remotely close to finished. I’d say this build is BARELY playable and probably should have never been shown off to press. The game was cancelled and, going off this build, yeah, I can tell why. But it’d make a neat bonus feature for a 3-D Castlevania collection. What does this have to do with the game I just reviewed? Well, Sonia Belmont might be the mother of Christopher Belmont. Or possibly Trevor Belmont. Or she might not exist at all since the Game Boy title was declared non-canon.
Castlevania ReBirth feels like it was tailor-made to be a +1 to a collection instead of a stand alone game. Today, it feels like a relic of the era where companies thought digital exclusives should be half-games. I wonder if that’s why it’s only five levels long and full of branching paths. Maybe Konami was putting the screws to M2’s plans and thought a lowly digital exclusive shouldn’t give players full value. “Why would anyone buy our full priced games if you’re putting out ten level games for under $20 on Wii?” I could imagine such a boardroom conversation in 2009. Now it’s only seventeen years later next Grand Theft Auto will only exist digitally and the first new mainline Castlevania game in over a decade is a mid-priced release that I bought digitally. Times change, for better and for worse. Verdict: YES!
Wario Land: Shake It! aka Wario Land: The Shake Dimension (Europe) or Wario Land Shake (Japan) Platform: Nintendo Wii Released July 24, 2008 Directed by Madoka Yamauchi Developed by Good-Feel Published by Nintendo NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
You would be surprised how tough it was to get interesting screenshots despite how beautiful the graphics are capable of being.
It’s almost hard to believe it’s been over eighteen years since Wario starred in a non-WarioWare game, but it’s true! Shake It! for Wii could very well be the finale of the Wario Land franchise. And, it’s kind of easy to see why. While I’m a huge fan of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Virtual Boy Wario Land, the series had seen better days in the 2000s. A Nintendo DS game, Wario: Master of Disguise is among the least popular Nintendo mascot titles. Wario World got a “mixed response” and personally, I hated it. Wario Land: Shake It got a lot of 7 out of 10s when it released, which might not sound too bad until you remember that the scale for first party Nintendo games bottoms out at 7 and goes (10) excellent (9) good (8) okay (7) the driver of the car that ran over your dog.
It’s the tired and true “invisible platform” sequence. Only, there’s no falling deaths in Wario Land: Shake It, a fact that’s very well established by the time you reach this point. So there’s no stakes at all here AND it’s kind of obvious that a treasure is probably at the bottom of the screen. While they did come up with the occasional clever puzzle, the overall design logic is baffling.
Wario Land: Shake It! is one of the rare games where the main gimmick is “look how damn pretty this is!” I’d say Shake It is all style and no substance, except the style might actually be part of the problem. With character design and animation from the famous anime studio Production I.G, it seems good looking, but by the time I finished the game, I no longer believed even that. The first reason is that Wario Land: Shake It is kind of barren. The variety of enemies, set pieces, and hazards leaves a lot to be desired, which I guess is the price you pay when you have a non-gaming studio hand animate everything. The weird thing is, Shake It! has a fairly large assortment of unused enemies, some of which were the typical “early versions of existing enemies” but some of which looked pretty ambitious. Since the levels often feel empty and lifeless, more things to smack around or dodge probably would have helped. Alas.
Step one: find a money bag. Step two: find a spot like this where the coins don’t go flying for miles when you actually try to use the f*cking thing.
The other main gimmick is the variety of motion controls, back when those were still new and annoying, as opposed to now where they’re tired and annoying. Like the name suggests, most of the motion controls are just shaking the controller. When you use Wario’s normal dash attack on a money bag, you get a single coin out of it. But if you pick up the bag and shake it, coins literally spray out it for a second or two. That really sucked as an idea, by the way, since the coins vanish into thin air after too short a span. You can also shake the hell out of enemies, which for the normal baddies usually results in them dropping life refills. A few other enemies need to be shaken to solve puzzles, though “solve puzzles” requires quote marks that are suing me for working overtime.
“Solve puzzles” (we settled out of court) in this context means there’s bricks that you can’t break because they require bending over or aiming downward and that triggers Wario’s crippling arthritis, so instead you perform this wanton act of animal cruelty on a chicken. After shaking the ever loving sh*t out of it, it’ll take off running and somehow break through all the blocks. I almost feel bad about it, but the chicken did try to kill me. I keep saying: never trust the chicken.
In addition to several other reasons to shake the controller, shaking is also how you cause little earthquakes. That’s what the -W- meter at the top of the screen is, and it’s basically the game’s main move. If you’re not shaking the controller, you’re probably tilting it left or right. That’s how you aim where you throw, which is the f*cking worst. Even late in the game, with plenty of experience, I still found this to be clunky and unreliable. Like seriously, I regret using Wii controllers for this review. After beating the game, I tried a few levels and bosses with a normal controller and motion controls mapped to analog sticks (and “shaking” mapped to a button) and it played so much better. I mean, it didn’t exactly save the game or even close, but it didn’t suck to play it anymore.
For this, the second-to-last boss, you might only have a small window to grab a bomb, aim, and throw. Having to fumble with a Wii Remote for aiming is not ideal, but back in the Wii days, motion control was required, or else.
And there’s also a handful of gimmicky vehicles that use the tilt controls, the main one of which is a submarine that has three out of the twenty main levels devoted to it. Those levels play like shmups crossed with the dam level from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES IF that was played with tilt controls and they’re just the absolute pits. One of these would have been barely tolerable, as the combat is lackluster and the level design is repetitive. Having three of them, none of which are locked as bonus stages, is f*cking unhinged. I can’t stress enough that all three submarine levels are lowlights in a game that already doesn’t have very many highlights. There’s a couple rarer contraptions like a mine cart or a jetpack that aren’t so bad, but they also don’t have full stages dedicated to them. Well, actually the Jetpack does (apparently it’s actually a bucket) but it’s locked as a bonus stage.
Mine Cart
Submarine
Jet Pack
Which actually brings me to both the best and the worst part of Wario Land: Shake It: a whopping twelve levels are “bonus levels” that you have to find items to unlock. There’s only twenty non-bonus levels in the game not counting the tutorial level and the six boss fights. It reminded me of Super Princess Peach, which has roughly the same percentage of bonus levels (a little over one-third of the total levels in game) AND, like with Super Princess Peach, the level design is mostly a boring, overly-simple slog until you get to those bonus levels, where the developers finally pulled the stick out of their ass. It’s too bad they hid the maps that unlock the bonus levels in utterly arbitrary locations, like so:
Yeah, there’s actually an item that unlocks a whole extra level in the above screenshot. After you give the ground a good fisting, it just appears out of thin air.
I’m sorry, but that’s lame as f*ck. There’s absolutely no way to logic-out the locations of the twelve bonus stage maps. In fact, you have to wait until after you beat the game to even know which levels have the bonus stage maps. Also, after beating the game, the maps will suddenly be marked by having the ground sparkle where they’re at.
It looks better in motion.
And yeah, the best levels in the game, by far, are the bonus levels. That’s not a virtue, by the way. I, for one, think it’s f*cking annoying that any game makes you have to work to get to the good stuff. There was also a better unlock method. Each level has three hidden treasure chests. Like I said with Wario World, I preferred how Super Mario Land 3 and VB Wario Land handled treasures: NOT EVERY LEVEL HAD THEM! It actually gave the game a treasure hunt vibe and made collecting a treasure piece feel like a big moment. If they insisted on having three for every level, make that one of the unlock conditions for the bonus stages.
This is the first Wario game I remember playing where I lost interest in 100%ing the game. Even Wario World didn’t do that to me, though to my credit that game was crazy easy to ace.
There’s also “missions” in Wario Land: Shake It that are often there for the sake of forcing replays of levels that I, frankly, would never want to play again. I mean, they bored me the first time with their complete lack of challenge and emptiness. I did make a good faith effort at first to play along and complete all the goals. Things like “finish a level with X amount of coins” or “beat the stage without taking damage.” But then there’s things like this:
I’ll call your attention to the goal of beating the stage without falling into the water. Because, if you also want to nab all three treasures in that stage, you actually cannot beat the stage without falling into the water. I don’t mean “it makes it harder.” I mean it’s physically impossible. This is one of many stages that you can’t gloriously 100% on your first try, so I just quit caring. (shrug) Don’t take it personal, missions. I also quit trying to get every treasure too.
The pipe on the right leads to a treasure, and there’s no way to nab it AND not go into the water to get back to the stage. They literally built it specifically to prevent that and force multiple replays of the level. If only they had spent the same amount of effort on making a fun game as they did on making a trollish one.
I might have gone back and at least grabbed all 99 treasures, but this game blocks you from quitting the stage once you’ve gotten the things you missed. You actually have to finish the stages for it to count. If Wario World had been the same way, I wouldn’t have aced it, either. There doesn’t seem to be an alternative ending for this Wario game and thus there’s no real incentive to get all the treasures or missions besides the satisfaction of a checkmark for a level that probably bored me in a game that I didn’t really like at all. When the levels are bland, you have to give me a better reason than a checkmark to replay them.
My favorite “puzzles” usually involved the launchers, but if I hadn’t had access to save states to make my f*ck-ups go faster, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed what little I did find well designed about Wario Land: Shake It.
Shake It needed peppier combat, a LOT more enemies and better level themes. Honestly, I don’t know what the point was in hiring a movie studio to do the graphics. None of the facades are convincing because they’re all so generic and bland. Like, yeah, the character sprites are great. But look at level themes.
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They’re not all that bland or generic, but most of them are. It reminded me of Road Runner cartoons, where apparently the only creatures that exist are the ones on the screen. I don’t buy for one moment that these levels are part of a populated ecosystem. And it has nothing to do with the decision to have an anime look. Plenty of games have the same style and do a better job creating atmosphere with it. The problem is the art direction, instead of coming from a place of inspiration, feels like a sales gimmick to make up for an uninspired game. Compare it to how Wario games looked when the series started.
The two YES! games seen above were made with vastly inferior technology and VERY limited color palettes.
Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (Game Boy, 1994)
Virtual Boy Wario Land (Virtual Boy, 1995)
And yet, they both feel more real and more alive than a game with artwork made by one of the most critically acclaimed animation production companies in the world. They might as well have saved money and just made the game with sprites. At least that way, they could have done a better job of fine-tuning the gameplay. Then again, Wario Land: Shake It needed a personality transplant in general. There’s no power-ups and only two “transformations” in Shake It, which is really odd for the 2D Wario franchise. The previous three Wario Land games were heavily based around “transforming” Wario into different forms to solve puzzles. That really only happens in this game by dumping snow on him or setting his ass on fire. I mean that literally, and eventually he’ll become engulfed in flames and be able to burn through fire blocks.
Admittedly, this is one of the few puzzles that I actually enjoyed. The fire stuff is easily the best gameplay elements of the game.
But the fire moments are quite limited, and the ice ones are even more so (that’s fine, as those were no good). The other main gameplay hook is the “exciting” escape sequence that caps off every level. Once you reach the end goal, an alarm sounds and you have to get to the door, usually with the aid of pipes that launch you. The idea isn’t really that fresh, as they copied from Rare’s Saber Wulf. I don’t know if the original PC version did that, but the Game Boy title I had as a teenager did it, and did it much better Shake It. The best usage of the escape in this game is when two of the levels are based entirely around the escape. But the problem is, you guessed it: both those are bonus levels that have to be unlocked.
This is the first stage designed like that, and the best, and the only stage where I had a close call with the timer. I reached the exit with only about ten seconds left. Usually I had well over a minute.
So yeah, I think Wario Land: Shake It! is pretty bad. Hell, I said “it looks good” while playing it but I’m not even sure I agree with that. Who cares how good the backgrounds or enemies look when they have no personality and the levels are so samey and wrong for the franchise? Again, when the Virtual Boy is curb stomping you in the looks department AND turning in a superior game, something is badly wrong. But look at this:
Virtual Boy Wario Land my give you sore eyes, but at least it’s not an eyesore.
I honestly think that one screenshot has more personality and charm than the entire game of Wario Land: Shake It. It feels more finely crafted. It’s almost paradoxical, isn’t it? Wario Land: Shake It was almost certainly the most expensive production in the Wario franchise, but it doesn’t feel expensive or hi-tech. It feels cheap. It feels rushed. It feels completely uninspired. It feels generic. It’s lacking in charm. So the already weak gameplay and flat, dull level design is made even worse by the art style.
This, the game’s fourth boss, was the other boss that gave me a hard time (the fifth boss was the other). Again, the window it’s actually vulnerable is too small. And actually, when I stop and study the enemy designs and especially the boss designs, jeez they’re pretty bland too, aren’t they? Okay, so only the Wario sprites are decent. That’s literally all the artwork did was make Wario look okay. They could have just saved the anime stuff for cut scenes.
In short: Wario Land: Shake It! is BORING. So boring it likely killed the franchise for good. Okay, so I do kind of have a hunch we might see a 4K remastering of Wario Land: Shake It! on Switch 2 in the near future. It’s exactly the type of Wii game they re-release these days as a schedule filler. But I’d honestly rather they just make a new game.
Nintendo hasn’t exactly done this with Wario lately.
I don’t know how Nintendo lost their way with Wario, but with games like this, Wario: Master of Disguise and Wario World, it’s easy to see why they moved completely onto the WarioWare franchise for this character. It really does seem like Wario Land is a dead franchise, but it doesn’t have to be. What do the three middling-at-best games I just listed have in common? None of them were made by Nintendo. Wario World was made by Treasure, this was made by Good-Feel, and the putrid Master of Disguise was made by Suzak Inc. Now, as a reminder, Wario Land as a concept was so good it usurped Mario Land as Nintendo’s premier 2D handheld franchise. I mean, holy crap! Do you realize what an accomplishment that is?!
I’m burned out on Wario for now, but I will return to this franchise next year. Cross my heart. But, I don’t really remember liking Wario Land 4 (pictured above) either. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed Wario Land 2 and 3, I think. It’s been a while.
Those first five Wario Land games (1 – 4 + the Virtual Boy game), aka the ones good enough to END the Mario Land franchise for multiple generations, were made by Nintendo R&D 1, which today would be Nintendo EPD. The series didn’t fall down the crapper until Nintendo started passing it off to other companies that didn’t seem to understand the character or the design mentality that made the series work. You know what I think? A treasure hunt like Super Mario Odyssey or Donkey Kong Bananza starring Wario could be sick. I don’t think the Wario Land franchise is dead. I think it’s homesick. Verdict: NO!
And, since Wario isn’t allowed to have a happy ending, the bottomless bag of coins is stolen from you post-credits. F*ck this game.
Super Mario Galaxy Platform: Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Switch Released November 1, 2007 (Wii) October 2, 2025 (Switch) Directed by Yoshiaki Koizumi Developed by Nintendo Included in Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 or Sold Separately $59.99 caught a falling star and put it in her locket in the making of this review.
“I’m going to be excited and nostalgic for this any second now. Annnnnnnnnnnny second now.”
Back in 2012, I said that Super Mario Galaxy was one of my ten favorite games ever and that, quote, “It will be special to me forever.” Of course, I answered the question “would I ever play it again” with a firm “no.” Well, wasn’t I just wrong in every way a person can be wrong? I did replay it again over the last couple weeks, and it wasn’t special at all. Oh, I wasn’t bored or anything, either. Mario Galaxy was a lot of fun. But the game I remembered as a milestone never showed up. There were no highlights and honestly I thought the level design was uniformly forgettable. I’ll never forget the gravity, but what they did with it? (shrug) So what happened?
I realized that my brain mostly remembered the gravity and not necessarily the layouts they built around the gravity.
The above screenshot sums up the primary gimmick of Mario Galaxy: gravity is your bitch. You’re not just hopping around platforms, but under them. Screwing with gravity is a time honored tradition in games, but the way Super Mario Galaxy did it felt fresh in 2007. It even still feels kind of fresh in 2026 because it’s tinkered with in pretty much every way it can be. I won’t deny that I experienced a childlike glee in the whole thing that made me overlook that this was basic level design with the twist being simply the angle you’re walking. Like, how many times can you run around a tiny round planet? A lot, apparently.
Even the big final battle against Bowser takes place on a series of tiny round planets and feels nearly identical to previous battles you’ve already done.
But while the levels are just basic platforming levels with a twist in the angle, it never comes across like a facade. Even if it kind of is. Hell, this is even taking into account that sometimes the gravity screws up and makes you run around in a circle. It happened to me a lot, and I died a few times from it (and I wasn’t alone). So it turns out my Wii controller wasn’t on the fritz in 2007.
“Walk across every button” has been done to death. “Walk across every button and, oh yes, the buttons appear to be a vertical wall you’ll bind to when logically you should fall” is the twist.
If the gravity works and aged (mostly) well, why didn’t the game I loved at the age of 18 ever come close to showing up at the age of 37? I just don’t think the level design is what I’m looking for in a platformer anymore. It starts with the fact that Galaxy has one of the worst hub worlds in the franchise. There’s minimal sense of exploration to it, and the layout is so unmemorable that it’s kind of easy to lose track of which main port has which level. There’s forty total levels, and since levels offer a lot less missions and overall content than both Mario 64 and Sunshine, a drop down list for those who don’t give a f*ck about the hub would have been appreciated.
By the way, calling levels “galaxies” is kind of insane given the fact that none of the levels in Mario Galaxy are very big and a few can even be beaten in a minute or two and then offer no other content. Seriously, if it took me two minutes to finish “Boo’s Boneyard” on my first attempt, I’d be surprised.
This isn’t Peach’s castle from Mario 64 or Delfino Plaza from Mario Sunshine, where there’s a joy in the exploration and discovery of new rooms or new nooks and crannies. Rosalina’s Comet Observatory f*cking sucks as a hub world. Nothing is really “hidden” except a couple extra lives. The sense of exploration that was so rewarding in the previous two 3D Mario games? That’s gone, and I mean GONE-gone. And that tracks with the rest of the game.
Whereas I feel Mario 64 and Sunshine were about exploration and triggering a sense of vertigo, Mario Galaxy is more like a series of quick, narrow-in-scope bite-sized linear, point-A to point-B segments that are glued together to create the missions, making it feel closer to the 2D games. Actual wide-open levels like you saw in the previous 3D Mario games? That doesn’t really happen here with only a couple small exceptions early in the game.
Most of the time, there’s only one path to take, so your enjoyment will be based on how exciting you find that path. Again, I had fun. Lots of fun. But I look for other things in 3D platform games now. I don’t want a 2D experience in three dimensions. I want to explore.
When the levels are more open, they’re still certainly nowhere near as big as the levels in previous games were. The overwhelming majority of the individual segments are pretty small and funnel you directly to the warp star that shoots you off to the next planet. It’s not like these segments are directly connected. Usually they’re separated in a way that makes them unreachable unless you do the linear activating sequence.
Even when levels look like they might be a little more “open” they’re typically walled-off in a way where there’s not much to explore and there’s strict transition spots between chunks.
As a result, I didn’t enjoy the sense of discovery as much even in limited instances where it was there. Take the first level where you can become Bee Mario. It LOOKS like it’s going to be a Mario 64/Sunshine like-map. It’s not. It’s segmented into three distinct areas that present only a few, if any, chances to go off the beaten path and f*ck around.
And one of the only times you can, what’s hidden? A star? A hidden level? Nope, just a pipe with a cube-maze that pays off star bits. Once you realize how many of these things they hid in the game, they start becoming kind of downer every time you find one.
The game just needed more stuff to collect, in my opinion.
So despite the crazy physics, there’s something about the levels that feels too limiting and rigid. You feel like you’re being queued through the experience in a way you never felt in Mario 64 or Sunshine. That probably makes it sound like I hated the experience. Just so I’m clear, I actually did have a lot of fun replaying Mario Galaxy. It’s seriously a very fun game with a few nice set pieces and bosses. But nothing about my 2026 experience made me wonder if I was playing one of the ten best games I’ll ever play.
While I can’t believe I’m saying this, the truth is I had a lot more fun replaying Sunshine. For all the problems of that game, I felt it offered a much bigger variety of stuff to do. I might even think Mario 64 is better just on variety alone. Mario Galaxy is like all the boilerplate Mario challenges, only wrapped around a cylinder or sphere. Once you get over the idea that you’ll do some areas upside-down and some areas vertically and some will require a full circumference of a sphere, the actual meat and potatoes of the game is old school 2D.
How basic are we talking? I thought the ice levels were the best in the game. THE ICE LEVELS! That never happens!
I guess the structure of the game didn’t excite me as much as it once did. Finding an alternate transport star off the path sometimes felt like a downer because I didn’t want to go through the process of playing the level again at all. Some levels, really glorified side-levels, only have one or maybe two stars total. Primary levels only have three main stars, aka the missions. That’s it. Three. There’s also “prankster comet” levels that add extra challenges, but they’re mega-sized pains in the ass since you can’t just activate them willy-nilly. The comet has to be orbiting that “galaxy.” A dumb idea in 2007 that aged badly. So did the life count. Every time you turn off the game, you lose your entire stockpile of lives.
Spring Mario is the worst power-up in the history of the franchise. In an already gimmicky game, it’s SO gimmicky. It feels like an alternate bonus challenge and not something that’s a primary mechanic for a level.
In fairness, I didn’t exactly just play Mario Galaxy in optimal conditions. I’ve been unwell for a couple weeks and played Mario Galaxy two or three stars at a time, then napped, then played some more. So maybe that’s why nothing really stood out. Except, how I played should have worked for the game. It didn’t, and I’m hard pressed to remember any non-boss fight that made me sit up and think “that was actually incredible.” The vibe is incredible. But what it does with the vibe? Not so much.
Okay, I didn’t really like the one-off or two-off gimmicky levels like “blow the bubbles through the maze” as seen here. I would have rather had a large platforming maze to find my way through.
The game is just always really, really good but without any true highlights. The power-ups kind of suck. Bee Mario is underwhelming. Spring Mario sucks. Fire Mario and Ice Mario wear out too quickly and are too limited in usage. Boo Mario sees even less usage than either flower does. This type of “nothing sticks around long enough to bore” rapid-fire style platformer works for 2D Mario games. Both Super Mario 3 and Super Mario Wonder utilized it to great success. Mario Galaxy’s levels are technically bigger, but despite the space setting, they never felt large to me. I just never really thought the level themes or set-pieces were all that amazing.
It doesn’t help that Rosalina looks almost identical to Peach in her character model AND she’s a bore. Like, the story is that she laughed all the stars into existence. So let me get this straight: this emotionally vacant, dead-behind-the-eyes husk of a woman allegedly went into a laughing seizure and created the cosmos. Bullsh*t. I don’t believe this person has ever laughed once in their entire existence. I assume it’s a coping mechanism to make up for being abandoned by her parents, who presumably left her for dead, or possibly mistook her for being actually dead. I mean, how would you tell with her?
If it isn’t the bite-sized chunks and lack of exploration, I think Mario Galaxy’s standing plummeted with me based on how generic so much of the design is. It’s not just that this game’s princess is a different character who looks nearly identical to the already established princess, but like, for whatever reason this Mario feels like it’s one of the least experimental or bold in the franchise. As if the designers burned through all their courage with the gravity and played it safe from there. Imagine if Mario 64 had that attitude with 3D. Who knows where we would be?
Meanwhile, the new characters besides Rosalina look like they could be from any platform game BUT a Mario game. Look at three of the new bosses pictured above. All three are really fun boss fights, don’t get me wrong, but something about their design makes them feel detached from the Mario franchise, and not in a good way. They don’t feel like new Mario characters. They feel like generic cartoony bosses. The one in the middle looks like what the last boss would look like in a video game based on the board game Fireball Island, for God’s sake, and the other two could be Spyro or Banjo bosses for all I know. Galaxy somehow feels like every Mario game, and yet the least Mario-like game in the series.
Even the tacked-on Wii pointer with the starbits I found to be not as fun or useful as I remembered it. I only really used it in top down sections, like the annoying race against the Boo, where I used the pointer to get rid of the bombs that I was just trying to plow through like a moron. This is probably the star that took me the most attempts to get.
I finished with 76 stars and I didn’t even come close to the 240 total in the game, and I’m fine with that, as honestly I’m ready to be done with Galaxy and jump to Mario 3D World or Super Mario Odyssey. The magic from my youth was gone, and I really only kept playing long enough to beat Bowser so I could do this review. Maybe Galaxy 2 will be where I find the more bold design. In 2012, I paired 2 with 1, and that’s how it’s sold now. But I need a break from weird gravity before doing that one. I guess the best thing I could say about Mario Galaxy is that, besides the comets or Spring Mario, there’s no low points. (checks notes) Christ, there’s a lot of comets though, isn’t there? Okay, so that’s not actually the complement I thought it was. What I’m trying to say is I had a LOT of fun, and yet, it was nowhere near as much as I thought I would. Now I know why they made Galaxy the sequel to the movie, because that’s what watching it was like. Verdict: YES!
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 and just happens in the overworld, and then the light arrow isn’t 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 it needed to, and it checks them well, but it only checks the boxes. It had no ambition beyond that. 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 experienced 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 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 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)
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)
Gradius ReBirth
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth
Wario Land: Shake It!
Super Mario Galaxy
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap 
Wario World
Super Mario Sunshine
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
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