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The Right and Wrong of Handheld Pinball
Written by TheDCD on Sunday, November 6, 2005
Back in the old days, the only way to really savor a Game Boy game at its finest wasn't to adjust any sort of contrast or even what kind of screen to have for it (after all, it only existed in spinach green upon its introduction in 1989), but to rather get some good light on the screen. Be it indoor, hanging off the back of the system like some kind of magnetic desk lamp, or outdoors, playing in the middle of a summer afternoon while I awaited my junior year in high school, light was important. And it was important for two primary reasons for the time- Tetris, a game I played rather addictively, and a little known game called Revenge of the Gator.
Revenge of the Gator was a three-level pinball game themed around alligators (the cute kind) and made by the folks at HAL Laboratories, the makers of the earlier NES pinball game Rollerball and Kirby's Adventure. The game was simple in design, and didn't even have any sort of complicated table ala High Speed or Pinbot. But, man, did it give me hours of fun. I kept trying to rack up a high score with each new round, only to watch my ball eventually land at the bottom and get swallowed by his ridiculous one-eyed gator, hanging around like a puppy dog waiting for scraps from the dinner table. It really was a good time, and it kind of made me think.
Think, that is, about what makes a handheld pinball game good and what makes it absolutely suck. It can't really be in the perspective, because I know that Revenge of the Gator uses a top-down view just like Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies, two utterly useless pinball games from GameTek. Perhaps it's just in the fun that such a game delivers. Neither of GameTek's Pinball games were that fulfilling to me. Sure, they had themes, but the designs seemed rather weak and they really came across without a desire to be played, you know? A good game designer knows that they need to have something to not only attract someone at first, but keep them hooked for the long haul, maybe even years down the road. Pinball Dreams kept me hooked for exactly 43 minutes on the Game Boy and the Game Gear COMBINED. Pinball Fantasies took even less than that.
But Gator I stuck with, and still own to this very day. It was stuck in a cluttered drawer with a bunch of other stuff from yesteryear, including such games as Flipull and, of course, Tetris. I had myself a little festival of Game Boy playing the other day on my GBA, just for the hell of it, and loved playing them again. But it's Gator that really had me going for a little over an hour, and now it's out of the drawer and sitting back in an active collection. Now that's a good pinball game.
Hopefully, the new pinball games on the rise, including one for N-Gage (Mile High Pinball) and Pinball Hall of Fame for the PSP, I'm sure, will manage to addict like Gator did and not fall in the same rut as GameTek's faulted offerings. I guess we'll just have to wait it out and see if it's something to flip out to, or if we have to resort to the good ol' days of just tracking down a pinball machine and popping a quarter in.
