weston.dev

Pinball was one of the original 17 games released for the NES, and uh…yeah I’d believe that. To be fair to this game, it was made back when this

was considered the pinnacle of home gaming. But considering it cost over $100 in 2022 money (I can’t find a firm source on how much it originally retailed for, but it seems likely to have been somewhere between $40 and $60), I think they could’ve done just a little bit better than this.

The game has 4 different modes, and by that I mean it has 1 mode. The 4 modes are

• 1 Player Game A
• 1 Player Game B
• 2 Player Game A
• 2 Player Game B

Let’s get the 2 player modes out of the way: they’re 1984 multiplayer, which means one person gets to play, and then when they lose the other person gets to play, and then you compare scores to see who won.

Game A and B are nearly identical, and I had to look online to figure out what the difference was since, as far as I could tell, the pinball board was the exact same for both. Apparently, the ball used in Game B is a bit heavier than in Game A, and replaying the modes again I think I could tell the difference. But as far as I know that is the only difference.

For the game itself, it’s pretty unremarkable. The board is a completely random mishmash of normal pinball components with no real theme. If there is a theme to the board, it’s “random assets the developers had lying around” themed. There’s a penguin slot machine…looking thing, some seals that light up if you get the ball all the way through the top left ramp, and chickens that hatch out of eggs to give you a kickback.

The ball physics are really weird as well, which isn’t surprising given when this game was made. The ball bounces really unpredictably at times, in some cases bouncing so fast that the player has no real chance to react to it. This is especially apparent in the one mini-game you can activate by getting the ball into the hole on the bottom half of the board.

It’s a Breakout style game, with the player controlling Mario trying to break Pauline (I think) out of some kind of cage. It’s a nice break from the original game, but the major issue with it is that the play area is really small, which combined with the erractic bouncing of the ball leads to an extremely difficult game. Every time I played this mini-game, it seemed like I would lose to the ball bouncing so unpredictably fast that I couldn’t react. Maybe I just suck.

Anyway, this game does the bare minimum required to make a mildly fun pinball game, which is honestly not that much.