The Pinball Thread

For people who want to talk about pinball.

So I was inspired by Aladain'smention of Bride of Pinbotand played it again. I feel like what I mentioned about it earlier might have sounded overly negative, so I wanted to talk about what I loved about it too.

One of the things that sets apart one pinball machine from another is how well it makes you feel like you're making progress, and Bride of Pinball does that really well. Even though your main goal is to trigger the billion point shot as often as possible, it's a demanding and unforgiving process do to so. You have to activate Bride's mouth ("I can speak." "Oh, no." "Ha ha ha ha"), then activate both of her eyes ("I can see." "How do I look?" "You lookgood."), then trigger a transformation process in which she (spoiler alert) becomes human andstarts to sing. Keep in mind, you can only trigger these transformations by going up the same ramp again and again, so the best strategy is to get that left ramp as often and steadily as you can. One of the best ways you can set yourself up for a ramp shot from the right flipper is by going through the middle aisle with the left flipper, setting you up for ? combos if you're steady enough.

Anyway, after she becomes human, if you can get both balls up the left rampagain, you trigger the Big Wheel. One of the possible rewards you receive is the "Billionaire's Club", which gives you a billion pointsifyou can get through the middle aisleright now(a shot you've been repeatedly practicing, incidentally). It's a really well designed game in that even after you get good at accumulating a few billion point shots in a game, you're still trying to maximize your skill shot (whose multiplier goes up every time you trigger a transformation), and you still appreciate when you manage to activate the "extra ball" channel lights which balance out your inevitable left/right gutter death with a free life (and a skill shot multiplier upgrade). It's still cheap as hell (as all pinball machines generally are) in that you can awkwardly bounce yourself into an insta-death at any given moment, but you still somehow always feel like you're in control of your progress, and you always feel like you're being rewarded for your efforts.

It even gets away with the retro-sexist humor in the back-and-forth between Bride and PinBot. It probably wouldn't if it didn't have rock-solid gameplay to back it up, but it does. It's tremendously fun and super-engaging and it's a joy to play. I'm no pro by any means (today I got my second-highest score of 2,078,314,890, and my top score is a mere 4,262,598,290), but at the same time I almost feel more proud of the difference between my 262,598,290 score and my 78,314,890 than I do about the difference in billions. All-around excellent pinball machine.

OK, I guess I should mention that playing on a virtual representation of a pinball machine isnowhere nearthe same experience as playing a physically existent machine. It's very possible (outright probable) that it is significantly easier to consistently get the billion point shot with an XBox 360 controller on a simulation than it is IRL, thereby making my initial criticism of the machine largely irrelevant. I mean, it wouldn't change my criticismthatmuch since the game would basically devolve into "CANyou get the billion point shot?" as opposed to "How often?", but then it got me thinking about how much I've been enjoying digital versions of pinball for quite a few years now.

I remember really enjoying Epic Pinball on PC, with it's simplistic yet polished graphics and punchy sound effects. But there were also several technically inferior but thoroughly enjoyable console pinball games I dug the shit out of:

Kirby's Pinball Land (original GameBoy), with its recognizable characters and soundtrack, was a ton of fun to play. You had 3 multiple-tier levels with boss battles and a timing-based recovery challenge that could keep you in the game even if you fell down the gutter. You also had a reasonably deep bonus system where you could try to spam minigames to boost your bonus score and multiplier. Heck, because it was a portable game and you couldn't necessarily commit to a full game in one sitting, they let you save your gameat any pointand pick up from there later. Pinball Arcade won't even let me do that. Yes, it's monochrome and technically very simplistic, but it was a joy to play. This is possibly the only pinball game I've ever gotten a high enough score to loop the counter into starting over at 0 in.






Virtual Pinball on the Genesis wasn't great by any means. It wasn't pretty, it didn't sound great, and the physics were far from perfect. Bit itdidlet you construct your own pinball machines, and that was pretty awesome. You had a fairly large playfield in which you could place flippers, bumpers, walls and a host of other elements however you saw fit. I would compare this to the sensation the original ExciteBike gave me, in that I was honored to be given the responsibility to create worlds, but the end result just never really felt that polished. Still, I enjoyed the shit out of it and it holds a special place in my heart.






Pinball Quest on the NES blew my little 11 or 12 year old mind. It took the expectations I had of a pinball game and added adventure elements that changed the experience significantly. You had to battle and destroy enemies, collect keys, progress through level after level, interact with shopkeepers and do all kinds of stuff I didn't expect from a pinball game... It was enthralling. I would fault it for sometimes being brutally difficult to make progress in, except I always found the best way to make significant progress in the game was to try steal from the shopkeeper every chance you got. If you succeeded, you got a random item he was offering for free. If you failed, you got beat up (which only hurt your pride) and got sent backwards to the previous table. Once in a while, if you succeeded you would get the devil flippers (IIRC) which were the most powerful flippers in the game. They made the game much easier but were also super-expensive, so the meta-game kind of became spamming theft to get the best flippers and hope for that to take significantly less time than grinding for money would have taken (which it usually did). Good times.